Chapter 9 in Humanize is about organizations being courageous. At the beginning of the chapter, we talk about the idea of courage, and how it is over-romanticized in our culture. Courage is what we see from heroes in the movies who do amazing things that we would be scared to do. There’s nothing wrong with those movies, of course, but I don’t want them to leave us with the impression that courage is not accessible to ordinary people. Or that somehow we shouldn’t be afraid. So in the book, we try to break courage down a bit (p. 221):
Courage starts with admitting you don’t know.
You don’t know how it’s going to end. You don’t know if it is truly a best practice. You don’t know if she will say yes. You don’t know if the relationship will benefit their group more than yours. You don’t know if the strategy will be successful. You don’t know, because you can’t know. The future is not knowable in that sense. Yes, you can do your homework and you can make informed choices (moving froward randomly isn’t particularly courageous), but you cannot know the future, and because of that, there is going to be fear. So to be courageous, you have to actually embrace the not knowing part. You start by being comfortable that you don’t know exactly where you are going to end up. And then you take action anyway.
That is the second part of courage. Being courageous starts by admitting you don’t know and is completed by taking bold and confident action.