Recognize, localize, depolarize—these are the secrets to building an organization that can walk and chew gum at the same time.

So where do you start in helping your organization become a master of paradox? Here are some suggestions:

1. Be honest about the implicit biases in your organization that skew important trade-offs. Go out of your way to include individuals with countervailing views in important conversations.

1. Challenge yourself and others to get better data on the hidden costs of default trade-offs. Don’t assume that no data equals no downside.

1. If you’re a manager, resist the urge to standardize trade-offs across the organization. Be willing to sacrifice a bit of uniformity for more locally appropriate decisions.

1. Never accept an either/or. Think creatively about how you could achieve your goals without sacrificing other equally vital goals.

1. Work systematically to equip people with the information and skills they need to make smart trade-offs, and then push those trade-offs down.

1. Give frontline teams a genuine P&L, radically reduce the number of KPIs, and hold people accountable for results.

1. Even if you’re not the CEO, search for ways to “stop the train.” Question every click of the ratchet that moves power and decision making toward the center.

If snow melts from the edges, it behooves you to have mechanisms in place to see what is going on there. This is a prescription widely made by futurists, such as Amy Webb in her brilliant book The Signals Are Talking. And yet, when I consider how many executives I work with spend their time, getting to the edges is one of the last things on their agenda.

Having one person who is explicitly keeping an eye on a particular future event increases the likelihood that whatever knowledge is in the organization has somewhere to go and will be seen holistically. And remember to incorporate feedback from people who may not be sitting in the executive suite. Go back to the periphery for information and insights about these events.

As individuals, groups, and businesses, we’re often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we don’t even realize we’re in the wrong jungle. And the rapidly changing environment in which we live makes effective leadership more critical than it has ever been—in every aspect of independent and interdependent life. We are more in need of a vision or destination and a compass (a set of principles or directions) and less in need of a road map. We often don’t know what the terrain ahead will be like or what we will need to go through it; much will depend on our judgment at the time. But an inner compass will

always give us direction.

Many of us have a hard time learning from our decisions. One reason is that our thinking and decision-making process is often invisible to us. We inadvertently conceal from ourselves the steps we took to reach our final decision. Once that decision gets made, we don’t stop to reflect, but just move forward. And when we look back at our decision later, our ego manipulates our memories. We confuse what we know now with what we knew at the time we made the decision. And we see the outcomes and read them back into our intentions: “Oh, I meant to do that.”

If you don’t check your thinking at the time you made the decision— what you knew, what you thought was important, and how you reasoned about it— you’ll never know whether you made a good decision or just got lucky. If you want to learn from decisions, you need to make the invisible thought process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible. The following safeguard can help:

Safeguard: Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision.