Schrödinger’s Leader
How to develop the skill of being confidently unsure, being an expert and a beginner at the same time.
How often have you experienced the Coffee Productivity Paradox? “I drink coffee because I’m tired from working too much so I can work more.”
How about Schrödinger’s Email: “If I mark it unread, it still technically exists.”
Or does your team live the Meeting Productivity Paradox: “We scheduled a meeting to improve efficiency.”
While these examples might provide a little comic relief around the watercooler, paradoxes in leadership have the potential to trap you or free you. Let’s explore several paradoxes that are necessary for leaders to master in order to lead effectively.
The single most important leadership skill to develop is paradoxical thinking. As I reflect on my own leadership, many other areas of leadership often seem to be the most important: vision casting, strategy development, people management, or execution. Yet supporting each of those areas is the deeper skill of paradoxical thinking. Why? Because nearly every other leadership skill exists in or creates paradoxical scenarios. Therefore, navigating paradox and understanding how it affects both you and your teams is a key leadership skill.
When someone is great at paradoxical thinking, they exhibit a strong tolerance for ambiguity, cognitive flexibility, working memory, and wise or dialectical reasoning. Together, these skills enable a leader to hold paradoxes with calm curiosity and openness.
This isn’t natural for everyone, and our physiology often fights it. There is plenty of research to indicate our natural brain wiring responds to stress and conflict as a threat. Conflict and ambiguity heighten activity in your emotional circuits, which your brain interprets as danger, and danger must be resolved for your nervous system to return to equilibrium. At the physiological level, growing in paradoxical thinking is an exercise in rewriting your brain’s natural response to threat. Thanks to neuroplasticity, it’s entirely possible.
If you were attending a concert and during the intermission the conductor asked you to join the orchestra and sight-read the rest of the show, you might wish you had never come. Or at least you might wish you had worn yellow or brown pants. That’s exactly what happened to a student in Sydney last week. When the conductor made the unexpected request of the audience, the student was able to join the orchestra on stage and sight-read the remainder of the concert, and subsequently owned every news headline for the next few days. It’s not surprising that even the thought of being in a situation like this triggers anxiety for many people. Stage fright is deeply human; so is the magnificence of a performer fully owning the stage.
What made this possible? The student’s training had rewired his default response to stress and danger. A situation that seems impossible for many people seemed entirely plausible for him. Since he responded to the situation from a different place, he created a beautiful experience for the audience, and gave himself a cocktail story to tell for the rest of his life.
I think about developing paradoxical thinking the same way: you can train your brain’s default response to become what is needed in leadership. As a lifelong musician, I have experienced similar brain rewiring myself. Retraining my response to situations doesn’t eliminate the triggering event, but it lets me experience it fully and use it effectively.
Here are several paradoxes for leaders to study and practice.
Stockdale Paradox
In an interview with author and speaker Jim Collins, Jim Stockdale, a U.S. Navy vice admiral, aviator, stoic philosopher, and prisoner of war for over seven years in the Vietnam War, described his coping strategy for surviving. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” Pure optimism proved as costly as pure despair. Survivors integrated both and created moments of micro-purpose that sustained them over time.
Brené Brown and Adam Grant discussed this paradox on their podcast recently, and she believes in its power so strongly that she codified it in her company values: Gritty Faith and Gritty Facts. She wants leaders on her team who hold both faith and facts. Leaders should not constrain themselves to simply being a faith person or a facts person, as if either bent is superior. Effective leaders, then, must develop whichever area is weaker in order to embody the paradox and employ its value.
The power of this paradox lies in learning to hold both facts and faith together long enough until something new emerges. When a person who understands that they have agency approaches harsh reality (facts) with a powerful vision (faith), a new generative future is created, one different from what either facts or faith alone would produce.
Leadership takeaway: Develop the ability to take a rigorous inventory of reality and maintain unwavering hope about what can be changed or what could be different.
The Einstellung Effect
When researchers Merim Bilalić, Peter McLeod, and Fernand Gobet tracked the eye movements of expert chess players solving a problem that had both a familiar good solution and a hidden better move, the experts kept looking at the squares associated with the familiar move even while sincerely reporting that they were searching for something better.
The first move that came to mind for them biased their attention away from the superior option, and the bias operated below their awareness. When the familiar solution was removed from the board, the same expert players found the better move easily, proving that the optimal answer was never beyond them, but was only obscured by what they already knew. This is the difference between not having an answer and having a good answer that crowds out a great one.
The impact of this for leaders is significant. Many leaders are experts in their field, whether justified through a proven track record, domain experience, or organizational cultures that conflate hierarchy with expertise. The blind spot for an expert turned leader is that your expertise may be obscuring the best solutions to the situations you are leading. In fact, I recently had lunch with a leader who had moved industries and was no longer an expert in that business model. She said she was experiencing a new freedom and increased leadership effectiveness by not having the answers and by drawing them out of her teams instead.
Leadership takeaway: Actively invite perspectives outside your area of expertise, and get comfortable holding your expertise with an open hand and mind. In business, you’ll see that an overcommitment to strategy calcifies an organization and pushes it from Predictable Success onto the Treadmill, according to Les McKeown’s book Predictable Success.
The Peter Principle
In 1969, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull published their book, The Peter Principle, which presented the management concept that “People rise until they reach their level of incompetence.” In a multi-level organization, this looks like a person getting promoted until they reach the level where their incompetence shows up and prevents future promotion.
Further research by Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue in 2019 found that when companies systematically promoted their best salespeople into management, those star performers became measurably worse managers. The data suggested that each doubling of their pre-promotion sales metrics corresponded to a ten percent decline in the sales of their new direct reports. That inverse relationship widens the gap between the most successful salespeople and the most effective managers.
This finding was not a fluke. Firms in the study were rewarding current-role excellence at the expense of observable signals that actually predicted managerial quality, such as collaboration. This paradox should motivate any leader to thoroughly evaluate the attributes that make each position successful, and then hire and promote specifically for those traits, not simply for advancement.
Leadership takeaway: The journey from subject-matter expertise into leadership roles is a transition that mastery alone does not prepare you for. The higher you lead, the more specialized development you should seek outside of your subject-matter expertise.
The Bias Against Creativity
Jennifer Mueller, Shimul Melwani, and Jack Goncalo ran a study in 2012 that identified an unexpected kind of hypocrisy in how we treat creativity: people who explicitly say they value creativity nonetheless harbor an implicit bias against it, and that bias is more pronounced under uncertainty when novel ideas are the most necessary. Simply put: We want new, we reject new.
Using research techniques designed to identify biases that people will not admit to, the researchers found participants associating creativity with words like “vomit” and “agony.” They also found that the bias was strong enough to impair their ability to even recognize a creative idea as creative. This caused them to reject objectively novel, high-quality proposals in favor of tried-and-true solutions. The irony is that the uncertainty which drives the search for new or creative ideas is the same uncertainty that makes us unable to accept them.
For the leader who must lead in an unproven direction, or for the visionary whose whole proposition is making the not-yet-real real, this explains why the resistance is fiercest precisely when the stakes are the highest, and it reframes “selling the vision” as managing other people’s uncertainty rather than proving the idea’s merit. This can be tough for leaders to accept since they are often the most passionate about their vision and pour their efforts into galvanizing others to believe in it. The most effective use of leadership effort is to manage the certainty and uncertainty of the process.
Leadership takeaway: Develop the ability to recognize uncertainty and actively welcome creative solutions especially in uncertain moments. In business, this paradox shows up as innovation stalling precisely in the volatile markets where it’s needed the most.
Preparation Produces Flexibility
In my experience as a musician, I’ve learned to embody the paradox: preparation and planning produce flexibility. For example, the nature of improvisation is that it’s unplanned. Yet the reality of being a musician is that you are constantly building a repertoire of interesting sounds, styles, techniques, patterns, themes, and motifs so that you can draw on them spontaneously. It’s the preparation that enables effective improvisation.
Then when I’m planning and producing for a live event, I will produce and rehearse several variations of intros, outros, transitions, or other progressions so that when a moment requires spontaneity, we can respond spontaneously and follow the moment wherever it needs to go creatively.
Many people new to creativity or peripheral to the production process often see preparation as a non-creative effort and consider a plan a limit on freedom and expression. I see it the opposite way: maximum spontaneity comes from deep experience, preparation, and thoughtful planning.
Leadership takeaway: Develop a rigorous preparation and planning process to enable maximum flexibility when you need it the most.
I’ve also experienced this in business. In a particularly large software implementation project where the business wanted significant flexibility in the end and hadn’t done the level of planning necessary, I embarked on nearly two years redefining both the business and technical requirements. The resulting development work was the shortest bar on the Gantt chart, proof that the most important work had already happened: in planning.
What These Paradoxes Mean for You
These paradoxes highlight one truth: context changes how expertise behaves and how you relate to the paradox. Facts and faith must coexist at all times. Expertise and competency become blinders when the situations are the most critical. Promotion can be catastrophic to results. Creativity is the most necessary when we are the most resistant to it, and preparation produces flexibility.
As a leader, your ability to identify and hold these paradoxes is critical to your success and your team’s results.
Here’s the thing: you might not be able to see these paradoxes yourself. Solomon’s Paradox, described in a 2014 Psychological Science paper by Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross, presents the idea that people reason more wisely about other people’s problems than their own. For the study, “wise reasoning” was measured as recognizing the limits of your own knowledge, holding multiple viewpoints, and accepting compromise, which is, functionally, a checklist for paradoxical thinking.
The study’s most important finding is that self-distancing neutralizes the blind spot and lets people reason about themselves as wisely as they did about others.
Distanced self-talk is a known emotion regulation technique in which you refer to yourself in the second or third person instead of using “I” or “me.” This framing technique creates psychological distance, making it easier to view challenges or issues objectively and allowing you to approach solutions the same way you’d think about them for other people.
Leadership takeaway: Good leadership integrates wise reasoning for others and yourself. In business, the cost of a leadership team that can’t see their own blind spots is lack of growth and an eroding bottom line.
This is why I advocate so strongly for coaching at every position and stage. Coaching creates the space to see your own blind spots and sharpen decision quality, and to explore your own growth with compassion, curiosity, and empathy. Many times, coaching is simply holding space for a client — space they cannot hold for themselves — and providing a pathway to clearer decisions.
I invite you to explore these paradoxes in your leadership and to develop your ability to hold paradoxes with curiosity and to invite resources into them with you. The certainty the world needs now is not the certainty that comes from expertise, effort, or answers. Leaders who hold paradoxes long enough and steadily enough until something new emerges create certainty through growth.
Let’s talk about the paradoxes you’re navigating right now →
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For Further Research
Stockdale Paradox
Collins, J. C. (2001). Good to great: Why some companies make the leap… and others don’t. HarperBusiness.
The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant. (2026, May 28). Why life’s biggest truths can contradict each other | The Curiosity Shop [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tVqjcbs3io
The Einstellung Effect
Bilalić, M., McLeod, P., & Gobet, F. (2008). Inflexibility of experts — Reality or myth? Quantifying the Einstellung effect in chess masters. Cognitive Psychology, 56(2), 73–102. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17418112/
Bilalić, M., McLeod, P., & Gobet, F. (2010). The mechanism of the Einstellung (set) effect: A pervasive source of cognitive bias. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(2), 111–115. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721410363571
McKeown, L. (2010). Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization on the Growth Track—and Keeping It There.
The Peter Principle
Peter, L. J., & Hull, R. (1969). The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong. William Morrow.
Benson, A., Li, D., & Shue, K. (2019). Promotions and the Peter Principle. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(4), 2085–2134. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjz022 (open access: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24343)
The Bias Against Creativity
Mueller, J. S., Melwani, S., & Goncalo, J. A. (2012). The bias against creativity: Why people desire but reject creative ideas. Psychological Science, 23(1), 13–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611421018 (open access: https://repository.upenn.edu/mgmt_papers/66/)
Solomon’s Paradox
Grossmann, I., & Kross, E. (2014). Exploring Solomon’s paradox: Self-distancing eliminates the self–other asymmetry in wise reasoning about close relationships in younger and older adults. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1571–1580. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535400
On the brain’s response to ambiguity and stress
Hsu, M., Bhatt, M., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., & Camerer, C. F. (2005). Neural systems responding to degrees of uncertainty in human decision-making. Science, 310(5754), 1680–1683. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1115327
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648
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 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. AI-created content variants may help publicize this piece.