There are two parts to any failure: There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is our reaction to it. It is this second part that we control. Do we become introspective, or do we bury our heads in the sand? Do we make it safe for others to acknowledge and learn from problems, or do we shut down discussion by looking for people to blame? We must remember that failure gives us chances to grow, and we ignore those chances at our own peril.

If your people don’t know what the direction is, they won’t know where to go. The result: Energy dissipates, momentum slows, morale plummets, and the company drifts. It’s not a pretty picture. Making sure everyone sees the same picture and then understands what that picture means, Parson says, requires “more contact with people, more opportunities to meet them, and more communication.

Another of Carl Jung’s admonitions reverberates: ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’ We look at our organizations and logically conclude that they are fated to be dysfunctional messes. That we, because of our lack of skill, are fated to fail as leaders. To never feel safe enough, warm enough, or happy enough.

But a map is a poor substitute for a life lived. The truest guide isn’t the mind of a guru but your broken, scared and scarred, lonely heart. I just wish broken-open hearts weren’t so damned painful.

The irony, of course, is that up and to the right, as appealing as it is when we’re down and to the left, is a place of separation. It’s a place where, were we to achieve it at all, we’d find ourselves utterly alone.

When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness.”