Conviction, Lightly Held

On a recent episode of The Pivot podcast, Olympic and world champion track athlete Athing Mu described her race-day routine this way:

“I am the most easygoing. I am the most basic. I just want to make sure that I have my time periods lined up for when I’m eating, when I’m going to head to the track, when I’m going to warm up, when I need to be in the call room, when I need to be stretching…”

In other words, on race days, she has a plan to set herself up for success. But Mu went on to describe how she holds that plan lightly. 

She said, “You can’t plan what’s going to happen the day of a big competition. I don’t like to overthink anything. I just want to get there, be in the zone, be in the environment, take it all in, just kind of go for it.”

This reminded me of what great strategic leaders do — they prepare a plan for success and act aggressively on it, while simultaneously listening to the environment and staying open to signals that they may be wrong and need to adjust. They have conviction about the strategy, but they hold the idea lightly.

So strategic leaders use words that leave room for maneuver. They’re more likely to think in terms like reasonable, plausible, and worth testing rather than terms that imply certainty like right, perfect, or answer. 

They also communicate the WHY of the strategy in addition to the WHAT—so that, when conditions change, the need to shift is clearer to everyone (i.e., it’s not arbitrary or just the whim of the leader).

Indeed, most of the best management systems formalize this sense. They’re designed to clarify logic, align on the best ideas today, orient activity around those ideas, and set the process to evaluate and update that understanding.  

And it’s that combination of communication and structure that makes a group of people more strategic.