The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

by Adam Steltzner

Breaking the matter down, understanding your state of understanding, and keeping your mind free and purely focused on the matter at hand—not yourself—is the only way to strike the right balance between consideration and action. You have to understand the problem in terms of those Rumsfeldian logic boxes: the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. You have to get your arms around everything you understand about the task at hand, along with everything you know you don’t know. But you also need some sense of the magnitude of what you can’t even directly sense. You have to be personally invested, but you also have to be detached. You cannot be bound up in concerns about your own performance or what people might think of you. You cannot be waiting for some set of information that, like Godot, may never come, and you cannot be wedded to a position that will not change when the information does arrive.