The Possiblities of Failure

Wisdom from the Field #28

On Thursday, April 28, 2011, President Barack Obama was deciding whether to proceed with a raid on a Pakistani compound that possibly housed Osama bin Ladin.

This was the most difficult decision of his first term. U.S. intelligence services only had 50% confidence on the likelihood that bin Ladin was at that location. If Obama proceeded with the raid and the target was not there, innocent lives might be lost plus his own chances at a second term as president would decrease.

The next day, he gave the order for the raid, leading to bin Ladin’s death three days later.

President Obama recalls the lead up to this decision in his memoir A Promised Land.

“Over the past two years, I’d made countless decisions - on the faltering banks, on Chrysler, pirates, Afghanistan, healthcare. They had left me familiar with, if never casual about, the possibilities of failure. Everything I did or had done involved working the odds, quietly and often late at night in the room where I now sat. I knew that I could not have come up with a better process to evaluate those odds or surrounded myself with a better mix of people to help me weight them. I realized that through all the mistakes I’d made and the jams I’d had to extract us from, I had in many ways been training for exactly this moment. And while I couldn’t guarantee the outcome of my decision, I was fully prepared and fully confident in making it.” (p. 688)

Leadership as a Practice

A lot of professionals (rightfully) describe their work as a “practice”.

• A physician’s practice

• An attorney’s practice

• A teacher’s practice

The term implies one is in a continuous state of improvement, never settling for the status quo.

What about a leader’s practice?

At the core of this practice is a leader’s ability to make decisions. Like President Obama, we make better decisions when we surround ourselves with smart people, examine reliable data, and reflect on how previous experiences can inform our present challenges. Even if “the possibilities of failure” become our reality, we can use that experience to make better decisions tomorrow.

Wisdom from the Field is also a feature in my book Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H.