Part 2: Navigating Cliffs and Fog

6. Cliffs

My compassion for people going through a cliff has increased and deepened by doing this study. To harshly judge people for “not getting their act together” quickly in the shadow of a cliff reflects a profound ignorance of the often long and arduous process of getting to the other side of a significant cliff. If your life is knocked sideways or torn asunder by a cliff, and especially if that cliff come with mourning a loss and/or feeling the deep pain of grief, you can find yourself lost in the thick, murky fog for a very long time.

However, I did offer one key lesson from the research: When you’re lost in the fog, avoid big irreversible decisions.

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.

Simplex stepping works in part because it allows you to take small steps, to get moving. And movement creates energy that fuels more movement, a feeling of momentum even if you don’t yet know where that momentum is taking you. If you just sit in the fog doing nothing and hoping the fog will clear on its own, you might never get to the other side. As Richard P. Carlton, former CEO of 3M, once put it: You so often get where you are going by stumbling, but you can only stumble if you’re moving.

This study shows that there are fog phases of life and there are clarity phases of life. In the fog phases, we see simplex stepping as a highly functional method of navigation. In the clarity phases, we continue to see simplex stepping at work, but we also see more big decisions and life commitments. In both phases, we have action and movement, not just sitting in a room and contemplating.