Pat Murray, a legendary executive coach and CEO group chair, defined a “real issue” as...

“any issue that causes everyone in the group to experience high levels of anxiety even when thinking about the issue, much less talking about it.”

Martha and I were fortunate to meet Murray and learn from him on several occasions. Our work continues to be informed by his insights, and when we work with teams and groups, we get results partly because we refuse to step over the real issues that inevitably surface.

The real issues are both the threat and the opportunity. What Martha and I must do, as facilitators, is create a clearing in which they can be discussed safely and openly, and used to bind groups together in trust instead of tearing them apart in fear.

Tackling real issues is always daunting. Martha and I are tempted to avoid them just like everyone else, but given our commitment to this work, it feels out of integrity to write about anything this week other than what happened on Tuesday of last week.

Relax

Chances are your defenses went up instantly upon reading that last sentence. That’s to be expected. The 2024 presidential election is a real issue of the highest order, and like it or not, it is affecting your organization.

Merely thinking about it induces high levels of anxiety in most of us, including me.

That said, you can relax, because here is what I will not be doing in the paragraphs to follow:

• I will not offer opinions on who should or should not have won or why.
• I will not prognosticate on what will or won’t happen as a result.
• I will not delve into any of the radioactive topics that drove voter decisions.

Others are better equipped to address those topics, and I have no doubt they will do so ad nauseam.

Instead, I would like to focus on the larger context in which all this is happening.

The context strongly influences our ability to address the content. Our views on the content are sharply divided, but the context is something we all have in common.

It is a place to start.

Zooming Out

A personal story...

I have fond memories of my Grandma Tine. Her real name was Tina, rhymes with “China,” and she was actually my great-grandmother.

Before I started school, I stayed with her every day while my parents were at work. Grandma Tine let me do whatever I wanted, which probably accounts for the fond memories.

Born in 1903, Tina, in turn, knew her grandmother, Anna, who was born in 1828. As a point of reference, Englishman John Walker (no relation), had just invented the match a year earlier.

Therefore, in 2024, I am one-degree removed from someone for whom friction-strike matches were cutting-edge technology.

With just a bit of genealogy research, you can probably tell a similar story for yourself.

Consider the Implications:

A person I knew lived much of her life before there was commercial air travel.

And a person she knew was born decades before flight was even possible, long before light bulbs were in common use, more than thirty years before it was possible to send a telegraph from New York to LA.

Forward to the Future

A time traveler from 1624 leaping two centuries forward would find themselves in a very different world.

The factories and mechanization of the early 1800s would be overwhelming, but probably still comprehensible as logical extensions of the gears, levers, and pulleys with which they were familiar.

That same would not be true for a time traveler from 1824 arriving today, in 2024.

Our world would be surreal, impossible to make sense of, shocking, and completely alien. Most of what we take for granted would seem supernatural. It would be paralyzing, probably terrifying.

I knew someone who knew someone, Anna, who was alive almost two-hundred years ago.

I struggle to find adjectives to describe the pace of change humans have experienced (and survived) in that short interval.

Zooming WAY Out

Two centuries might seem like a long time, but contrast that with the timescale of evolution.

Evolution is, of course, a continuous process. It’s always happening, but change from one generation to the next is very, very small.

The evolution of our modern human brain from the brain of Australopithecus, e.g. “Lucy,” an early hominid ancestor with a brain about the size of a chimp’s, took several million years.

For modern humans, the anatomy of our brains hasn’t really changed much for at least fifty-thousand years.

So, our current challenge is to make sense of a world that would be incomprehensible to someone like Anna, born just two-hundred years ago, using the same hardware we had in the Stone Age.

Is it surprising that we are finding this challenging?

Runaway Complexity

Our incredible capacity for invention has outpaced our capacity to make sense of the resulting complexity.

We have created a world that is changing at a blinding rate, a world to which we are not yet well-adapted, a world that cannot be understood from our current level of social and emotional development.

It’s no one’s fault. It’s what humans do.

Imagine Just One Example:

Great-great-great Grandma Anna would have seldom heard news from anyone outside her immediate community. When she did, it would be after a delay of weeks or months, and it would come from a single source.

Today we are instantly informed, via dozens of channels, of every significant event that occurs anywhere on the planet (okay, not every significant event, mostly just the really bad ones).

How can we process that?

That is the context in which our very real, very anxiety-inducing issues are occurring. That is the context in which we choose our political leaders.

Our natural response is to grasp at simple solutions, and to retreat to the safety of a tribe who share our perspectives.

We conclude that half our fellow citizens are evil, immoral, stupid, naive, and otherwise not like us.

We label them MAGA lunatics or "libtard" snowflakes. And lest you experience me as righteous, let me immediately confess my own guilt. I catch myself doing this all the time, despite my sincere intentions otherwise.

We sling pejoratives and insults, and instead of hearing the others' legitimate, real issues, we make them our enemy.

From there it gets easy. The enemy is the problem; the solution is to defeat them, or at least brow-beat them into seeing the error of their ways. So simple. So normal.

But it’s not working.

What We Must Do Instead

The path forward isn't about finding simpler answers—it's about developing our capacity to hold the complexity.

It’s not about shouting ever-louder about how others need to change. It’s about taking personal responsibility for changing, growing, developing, and transforming ourselves.

This means growing beyond what developmental psychologist Robert Kegan calls the "socialized mind," where we unconsciously adopt the values and beliefs of our social groups, into what he terms the "self-authoring mind," where we can step back and examine those beliefs objectively.

The socialized mind sees through unchallenged group certainties. It worked beautifully in Anna's much simpler time, but it does not work now.

This response, while psychologically natural, actually reduces our ability to navigate complexity. It creates blind spots and makes us reject potentially valuable perspectives simply because they come from "the other side."

The self-authoring mind, in contrast, can hold multiple perspectives simultaneously. It can acknowledge that our political opponents might be neither evil nor stupid, but rather people grappling with different aspects of our shared overwhelming reality, our common context.

It can recognize that on issues of great complexity, no single viewpoint is likely to capture the whole truth.

This isn't about finding some mythical middle ground or suggesting that all positions are equally valid.

Rather, it's about developing the cognitive complexity required to engage with the real issues of our time—issues that resist simple solutions precisely because they arise from the intricate web of relationships, technologies, and systems we've created—issues that affect your company or organization just as much as they affect the country.

Beyond Biology

Grandma Tine and her grandmother Anna could understand most problems at a local, tangible level. Today, we're trying to make sense of systems of interconnected global systems that react to one another at the speed of light.

Fortunately, humans do not have to wait for evolution to catch up, because long ago we evolved the ability to change our behavior without changing our biology.

Humans are capable of insight. We have self-awareness. We have the capacity for social and emotional growth and development. We have the ability to transform how we make sense of the world throughout our lives.

These things are not easy, and they do not happen automatically, but they are possible.

This development isn't optional. The pace of change isn't slowing down. The issues we face—from climate change to artificial intelligence to political polarization—require us to grow beyond simple us-versus-them thinking.

Navigating these issues will require us to hold multiple truths simultaneously, to see systems rather than just symptoms, and to engage with complexity rather than flee from it.

This is as true for your business as it is for the whole of humanity.

Moving Forward

So what does this mean for us, right now, in the wake of another deeply divisive election? What does it mean when half your employees support your new business strategy and half do not?

It means that our task isn't to convince the "other side" that they're wrong. Our task is to grow our own capacity to make sense of complexity, to help others do the same, and to create spaces where real issues can be discussed with the nuance they deserve.

This is the opportunity for the business world to contribute to the whole world. This is the task of leaders.

It isn't easy work. It requires us to sit with discomfort, to question our own certainties, and to remain open to perspectives that challenge our existing worldview. But it is necessary if we hope to address the real issues that affect us all, whether at the scale of your organization, our nation, or human civilization.

The alternative—withdrawing into the false comfort of oversimplified narratives and demonizing those who disagree with us—may feel safer in the moment. But it leaves us ill-equipped to handle the complexity that isn't going away.

What Can You Do?

Your challenge: Find the truth and validity in a perspective with which you vehemently disagree. In doing so, you will get just a little bit bigger.

Then do it again. And again. This is how we grow. This is how we learn to make sense of the world we have created.

It's not the answer, because there is no one answer. But it is one concrete step that will serve you regardless of future election outcomes.

We’re doing it with you. We haven’t got this figured out. We get angry, we get frustrated, and we fail, but through that struggle we grow.

We’re in it together. We got this.

Until next time,
Greg