Leadership isn’t natural — but making intelligent decisions can be learned

Every day as a leader brings an endless flow of judgment calls, big and small. Even as you read this, you might be weighing where to focus your team’s efforts this quarter, who to hire for a role, or how to handle a slightly cheeky budget request from a colleague. You might be trying to decide whether to skip a meeting this afternoon, or how to tamp down a weird little disagreement so that it doesn’t turn into a bigger one. These choices are rarely like math problems with clean answers; you have to figure out the right approach when there isn’t really a single “right approach.” So a distinctive strength of a good leader is the ability to make choices wisely, day after day, in ways that maximize your team’s chances of success.

Where does that wisdom come from? Years of experience can certainly help guide you, if you’re lucky enough to have it. But whenever you’re faced with something new, familiarity may not be enough to make you wise. That’s why — whatever stage you’re at in your career — it’s worth distinguishing between experiential wisdom and what I call deliberate wisdom. Experiential wisdom comes from having seen situations before. Deliberate wisdom is the set of intentional mental habits that help leaders think clearly in any situation — even when encountering it for the first time. And the key to developing deliberate wisdom is to learn to work intelligently with the way your brain processes information.

That’s because our brains have tight constraints on how much they can handle at once. If we ignore these limits, our brain can underperform without us realizing: We miss important signals, think less clearly, and do things that cause a facepalm the next day. But if we understand and work within those limits, we help our brain function at its best — and we make smarter, better judgments as a result. The way to unlock that capacity for wisdom is to learn to widen our perspective where it matters, and lighten the cognitive load everywhere else. Here’s the core science behind that widen-and-lighten “double unlock.”

Widen your perspective where it matters

To make good choices, you need a clear and accurate picture of whatever situation you’re dealing with. And to bring that picture into focus, it helps to know three big things about how your brain makes sense of the world:

1. Believe it or not, you only ever notice part of what’s going on. Your brain is constantly receiving billions of bits of data — but it only has the bandwidth to consciously process a fraction of them. So it does the sensible thing: It filters incoming information and selects some of it for your awareness, while leaving the rest in the background. That means you’re always missing part of the story — and on top of that, you’re not even aware of what you’re missing. Scientists call this selective attention, and it affects us all (even though we all like to believe we’re immune to it).

2. What’s on your mind right now shapes what you notice next. Since you can’t notice everything, your brain guesses where to focus based largely on what you’re already thinking. For example, if you have a distinct goal in mind, your brain makes sure you see and hear anything related to that goal. When you have strong assumptions about something, your brain will zero in on information that supports your view, while missing much of what points the other way. Even your mood matters: When you’re in a bad mood, you see more negative things. Your mental starting point always filters the reality you experience.

3. When it’s time for you to take action, your brain automatically points you toward the easiest choice rather than the best one. Because your brain has limited processing power, it aims to be efficient by taking shortcuts that use less mental effort. Without you realizing, it follows simple rules of thumb like “let’s do what worked last time” or “let’s do what others are doing” to get to quick conclusions without having to think too hard. Scientists call these shortcuts cognitive biases, and using them can be fine if the stakes are low. But for things that matter — as they often do, when you’re the one in charge — you want to take deliberate steps to bring all your intelligence to the table.

Deliberate wisdom is the set of intentional mental habits that help leaders think clearly in any situation — even when encountering it for the first time.

So, wise leaders know how to come off autopilot and deliberately widen their perspective when doing something important. Ways to do that include:

• Recognize that your first impression probably isn’t the whole story. Develop the habit of asking: “What’s another way of seeing this?” “What could I be missing?” and “How could I test that?”
• Be aware of what’s top of mind for you, knowing that it will color what you notice next. When it counts, ask yourself, “What do I really need to look out for here?”
• With major decisions, take a structured approach that checks multiple angles, and guides you to the best option (rather than the easiest one).

This thoughtful approach might feel counterintuitive if you’ve absorbed the myth that great leaders always have immediate answers. But in a world full of unknowns, wise leaders know the best answers only come after you’ve taken the time to ask the right questions.

Lighten the cognitive load where you can

You might be thinking, “Okay, but deliberately widening your perspective requires some effort — so where on earth do you find that extra mental bandwidth when you’re already working hard?” The answer: by lightening the cognitive load wherever it’s unnecessary. Here’s your primer:

1. The brain’s central executive network (CEN) keeps you on track as a professional. Your CEN is like your brain’s conductor, orchestrating the mental tasks that enable you to focus on what matters, evaluate possible responses, make a plan — and switch gears when that plan needs to change. Anytime you’re trying to make an important choice, you can bet your central executive network is working hard.

2. Your CEN has limits on what it can do at any given moment, in part because its tasks rely a lot on the brain’s limited working memory. Working memory is the mental scratch pad you use to hold information in mind just long enough to think about it. Some researchers suggest it tends to max out when handling four chunks of information at a time; others say it can be closer to seven. Either way, its capacity isn’t huge, which is why it’s harder to think clearly when you’re juggling a lot of things. And once your working memory is overloaded, your brain is more likely to fall back on those simple mental shortcuts we just learned about, resulting in poorer choices all around.

3. Certain things make it more likely that your working memory will get overloaded — including fatigue and multitasking. When you’re tired or worn down, your working memory capacity declines — and your analytical skills decline with it. Then, if you ask your brain to divide its processing capacity across two activities that both require attention, you’ll generally reduce your performance, accuracy, and speed on both tasks. In other words: If you splinter your focus, nothing gets the full version of your intelligence.

So, the good news is that a wise leader can make the most of the brain’s capacity by lightening unnecessary cognitive load wherever possible. Tips include:

• Notice when your mind feels full of too many things at once. Take a moment to pause, focus, and simplify where you can.
• For important work, do one thing at a time (“singletask”) to ensure your brain is putting its attention and energy where it’s most needed.
• Respect your brain’s need for sleep and rest, to enable it to function at its best.

To recap: Even the best leaders perceive an incomplete version of reality, can only hold a certain amount in mind at once, and are likely to take automatic mental shortcuts when deciding what to do. But if you acknowledge and work with these limitations, by widening your perspective when it matters most and lightening the mental load where you can, you’ll make the best possible use of your brain’s capacity for wisdom — and you’ll be better equipped to handle the complexity and range of choices you make each day.

This article is featured on Big Think.