969 Stairs to the Acropolis
A handwritten list of landmarks, a wrong turn behind a souvenir shop, and what a foot tour through Athens taught me about why most leadership growth plans deliver 30% of what they promise.
Leaders often try to think their way into the next version of themselves. My experience says the contrary, and a foot tour through Athens is the best way I know to show you why.
After scrawling a few landmarks and directional turns on a scrap of paper, it was time. Up until now, we were simply following the plan. Our group consisted of five high-level operations, IT, military, and project leaders, so the plan’s level of detail was impeccable. This adventure, though, was guided only with a handwritten list of landmarks — if you can call them that — our water bottles, and a spirit of adventurous hubris.
We set out into the Plaka, the old district below the Acropolis, and quickly realized that “turn left mid-restaurant,” or “go right at the bottom of the stairs, and then immediately right to enter the hidden alley behind the souvenir shop” feel nothing like they read on paper. Nevertheless, we pressed on past mid-day diners in the open-air restaurants and a street musician who stopped performing the moment anyone pulled out a camera or phone. We backtracked, doubled back, reread our scant instructions, and tried the next whitewashed staircase.
The passageways progressed upward past doorsteps and vine-covered dwellings before narrowing to several single-file flights of stairs. Rounding yet another blind corner, we beheld several impressive street art installations. By what felt like the 969th stair, we turned to see all of Athens below us, and the towering Acropolis above us. What a view.
Why Reflection Alone Cannot Take You There
Both the journey and the destination were distinct experiences. Yet, the context of the journey amplified the destination’s reveal in a way that a precise plan wouldn’t.
I’m reminded of the idea: Explore your potential as going on vacation to a new thing. It’s one thing to imagine what it’s like or not like, but it’s different to experience it.
It’s true that thinking — namely reflection — produces insight. But diving headfirst into new experiences or trying on new actions or behaviors produces something different. Herminia Ibarra, who has spent two decades researching how leaders actually change, calls this outsight: the fresh, external perspective you can only get when you plunge into new projects, interact with different people, and experiment with unfamiliar ways of getting things done, and then watch what happens. Outsight is what you cannot get from self-reflection alone, because reflection trains your attention on your past, and your past is exactly what you are trying to outgrow.
The adventure through the Plaka was not just a pin at the final destination. It was the sum of every micro-adventure along the way, of every moment we drew on situational awareness to determine our next step, and of every unplanned thing we experienced on the path. It would have been impossible to take an Uber or ride a bike along a prescribed route and arrive at the destination. The journey only existed because we were willing to go on foot, with scant directions, and immerse ourselves in the thrill of discovery.
What if exploring your potential or becoming a better leader wasn’t about fixing problems or deficiencies in your leadership? What if it was about the outsight created by willingly going beyond your comfort zone?
Your Default Future Versus the One You Have to Become
Here’s what this looks like for a leader. Consider the default future you’re moving toward. Your default future is the accumulation of all your past decisions, like getting and holding a job, committing to this quarter’s team project or stretch goals, or having a kid and signing them up for after-school sports. Your default future requires no extra effort, and is likely to occur if you don’t take any new, radical steps toward something different. In your default future, your steps are planned and predictable.
Now picture your vision, the dream that you want to see someday. Maybe it’s the CxO title you’re anticipating a few promotion cycles from now; maybe it’s reaching a certain savings benchmark so you can take six months off and travel with your family.
Either way, there’s likely tension between your default future and your vision. Likewise, there is a difference between who you need to be to accomplish your default future and who you need to be to accomplish your vision.
One strategy would be to self-reflect on your past, creating valuable insight. This can be useful, but only to a point. I firmly support processing your past to the extent that you understand your unconscious motivations and how they affect you. But spending too much time there crosses the line into becoming an invisible ceiling on your potential. Insight alone tells you who you have been; it does not tell you who you could become.
The second strategy would be to immerse yourself in new experiences and situations beyond your comfort zone, creating valuable outsight on how you lead and how others experience you. The value created by outsight is novel, and when paired with insight, helps you expand and grow.
Experience the Plan While You Execute the Plan
No doubt you’ve seen the plan vs. reality illustrations, where the plan is a positive slope and reality is a meandering, squiggly line.
Henry Mintzberg’s research on how strategy actually unfolds found that only ten to thirty percent of any deliberately planned strategy is realized as intended. The rest emerges. If that’s true for the multi-billion-dollar plans of Fortune 500 companies, what makes you think your personal growth plan will fare any better?
As many leaders learned in the ‘unprecedented times’ of 2020, or in the rapid application of AI to long-held business conventions we’re seeing now, plotting the twists and turns of reality is impossible. But what is possible is developing flexibility and resilience by continuously interrogating yourself at every step along the way. Or as I often ask with clients, how are you getting in your own way toward growth or to the vision you care about?
You can’t plan your future. You can only develop a vision and plan your immediate next step in its direction.
You need to experience the plan while you execute the plan.
The Cost of Staying and the Cost of Going
You have a choice. You can keep building toward your default future — the one that runs on the predictable accumulation of decisions you’ve already made, that earns continued external validation, and that asks nothing new of you.
Your default future has a cost too: you will arrive in five years and see the same version of yourself in the mirror, because nothing about the journey required you to become someone different, someone new.
The other path costs differently. It exposes you to the experience of not knowing what comes next. It puts you in conversations and decisions where your expertise is not the asset it used to be. It may, at points, feel like you are wandering, because the squiggly line of reality cannot be planned. What it offers in return is the only thing that grows a leader who has already maxed out on what got them here: the experience of becoming someone they could not have planned themselves into being.
When we took our exploratory adventure, we moved past the popular views, ignored the perfect order of steps, and accepted the fact that it was useless to try to chart it on a maps app. We had to experience it and evaluate at every corner. And as we did, we grew our curiosity, sharpened our navigational abilities, and experienced more local culture than if we had stuck to a “proven plan” to get us to the destination marker.
What would you attempt this month if you accepted that you cannot think your way into the answer? The only way to find out is to take a step, watch what happens, and let the next step reveal itself.
It is one thing to imagine what you might be capable of. It is different to experience it.
Let’s talk about the step you have not yet taken →
References
Ibarra, Herminia. 2015. “Leading with Outsight.” Herminia Ibarra, May 29. https://herminiaibarra.com/leading-with-outsight/
Mintzberg, Henry, and James A. Waters. 1985. “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent.” Strategic Management Journal 6(3): 257–272. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2486186.
Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re capable of so much more than you could ever dream. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created, was written without a multi-step plan, and no squiggly lines were harmed in the making of this piece.