Sam Gentle.com

Be prepared

Leadership is a strange concept. I'm not sure we'd have a word for it, or even consider it to be a single coherent idea, if not for our particular social hierarchical history. It's something to do with power, charisma, psychology and influence, ability, and using all of those to achieve particular goals in a group context. But there's no reason to think those ideas necessarily go together. Ants, for example, have a complex social hierarchy but nothing resembling leadership. It's possible that a group of intelligent and rational enough social animals would be the same: there's no need for leadership if everyone can just figure out what to do.

I like to think of leadership a way of approaching distributed decision-making. You see it pop up organically in distributed software systems a lot, where decisions can't be made completely independently (there has to be coordination), and they can't be made completely dependently by one dedicated decision agent (because that's not reliable or fast enough). In those systems, leadership is a way of balancing the two extremes: you have some coordination and some independence, and you mediate the two by choosing one agent to be the decisionmaker for some things some of the time.

Of course, we don't usually have anything so formal in human systems. There are formal elections for companies and governments and so on, but most leadership is done on an ad-hoc basis. Even when there is an official hierarchy, decisions are often made around, not through, that hierarchy. So how do we informally decide who makes what decisions? I believe in most cases it's on the basis of whoever has the most and best information. Much like in a distributed software system, when you want to promote one of a bunch of equal systems to be the master, the one that already has the most up-to-date information is the best choice.

It's been my experience that often the best way to get ahead, even in fairly complex political situations with lots of people and agendas, is just to know more than everyone else. If you have a clearer idea than everyone else of what's going on, or what everyone's goals are, or where to go, you're much more likely to get what you want. Partly this is because you'll be able to make propositions first and be better prepared to argue against propositions you don't like. However, a significant part is just that people are often happy to follow the lead of anyone who seems to have thought things through more than they have.

Beyond its implications for others, though, this can also be a useful technique for yourself. It is sometimes tempting, even after you've made a plan, to second-guess yourself in the moment. In a sense you are mistrusting your own prior decisions, not willing to delegate your present situation to your past self. But one way you can fight this is by vastly outmatching your future self in preparation when you make a plan. This shouldn't be too difficult, because your future self has only a limited amount of time and energy to spend second-guessing, whereas your past self can be more comprehensive.

That means projecting forward when you make the plan, imagining your future self and preparing responses to things that future-you might do. If you plan to go for a run in the morning, but then it starts raining and you didn't think of that, maybe you won't run. Better to have an answer ready, like "If it rains I'll just run in the rain and shower afterwards". In a sense it's just regular contingency planning, but the main goal is to be prepared enough that your future self can just go along with your plan.

It pays to be the most prepared person in a situation, and that's no less true when the other person is just you at a different point in time.