To foragers, change was immanent in the environment—it happened all the time, when the wind blew, the rain fell, or an elephant cleared a new path. But change was always constrained by a deeper sense of confidence in the continuity and predictability of the world around them. Every season was different from those that preceded it, yet these differences always fell within a range of predictable changes. Thus for the Ju/’hoansi, when they were still free to forage as their ancestors had, carrying the weight of history was as inconvenient as carrying a house around, and abandoning the deep past freed them to engage with the world around them unencumbered by ancient precedents or future ambitions.

I was fortunate to be assigned a seat next to Bill George, author of Discover Your True North and a professor at the Harvard Business School. During our dinner conversation, he told me something surprising about his experiences working closely with many Fortune 500 CEOs and high-level executives. He noticed that leaders needed to get in touch with their own deep sense of pain, vulnerability, and humility, and occasionally a deep sense of shame, in order to shift from being good leaders to becoming great leaders. At times, this was simply acknowledging the pain of being human, or the pain of feeling like they had let others down, which they had covered up, as many of us do. Other times it was the pain from difficult, imperfect childhoods, failed relationships, or traumatic events. Feeling this pain helped these executives glimpse how much more was possible by freeing up energy and

feelings that were being held close, which allowed them to be more authentic and caring leaders.

The elders in the community would share some insights, some wisdom,’ he continued. ‘There was one that a friend of mine, a mentor, gave that has stuck with me for a really, really long time.’ The mentor, Chris, was a skilled chess player and he’d drawn some analogies between chess and life. ‘He shared this concept of a strategic retreat.’ There are times both in chess and in life, when you’re going down a certain path, and you hit a roadblock. And then you realize that the moves you’re trying to make aren’t working out. ‘At those times, I have to abandon that game plan and re-strategize, and make a strategic retreat and take a different plan of attack.

One day, an e-mail arrives. ‘I was reading a blog post by Fred Wilson,’ wrote Khalid Halim. In the post, he’d written that I was the best CEO coach he knew. Khalid explained that he wanted to be a coach and wondered if I would be willing to help him. At that point, I was overwhelmed. ‘I don’t have time for another client,’ I said to myself petulantly. My old, old, old sense of too many people wanting too much from me rises. Yet the sincerity of his wish stops me, and I read his note again and again. He wants to help others, I see. I think I see his heart. I say yes to an early-Saturday-morning call, every few weeks. And yet today, he’s one of my partners in this heart-filled enterprise where we take closed, scared, and scarred leaders and help their hearts break open and for warriors to emerge.

As you’re wondering through the fog, you use the compass as you take a series of iterative steps toward having all three elements come together into One Big Thing.

And that is a key phrase: “iterative steps.”

The people in this study surprised me with the extent to which their lives were so often unplanned. Their lives were organic, unfolding, iterative, adaptive. They were like explorers adventuring into a vast unmapped territory, making discoveries and adapting a to whatever they hit along the way. Culling through tens of thousands of documents on the people in this study, I was continually struck by how their lives went down paths and ended up in places that they never expected. The path out of the fog lies in a series of small steps, a highly iterative, often unplanned approach that I think of as simplex stepping through life. And it is to this idea of simplex stepping that we now turn.