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Resilience 141

5Use a book to help you find a way through.
6 Use the internet to help you discover an answer.
7 Take some exercise and see if a solution comes to you.
8 Leave it. Go to bed. Tell yourself before you go to sleep that you will
find a way through the problem.
9 Try doing whatever you are doing in a completely different location.
10 Think of as many questions as you can which, if answered, might
help you to work things out.

HANDLING CONFUSION

It was American management guru Tom Peters who said, “If you’re
not confused, you’re not thinking clearly.” He may well have had
today’s rapidly changing society in mind. We are not living in an A
to B world. It is much more likely that we will go from D to H via
Z—and that we will be confused. The rules seem to change so
rapidly that where one style of marketing is acceptable one day, the
next week it is apparently not.
Perhaps it was always like this, as a statement by the
sixteenth-century Englishman Sir Francis Bacon suggests: “We rise
to great heights by a winding staircase.” I suspect that learning has
always involved messiness and confusion. In fact, my hunch is that
those who are most at ease with uncertainty or confusion are the
best learners.
If you have a set of rules, you need people who are good at
following rules. But, the game of learning has a number of wild
cards in its pack. Like Chance cards in Monopoly, they suddenly
change the rules. What do you do when all the computer systems
fail and you only have your presentation in electronic form? What
do you do when you suddenly find yourself without a piece of
equipment on which you normally rely? Can you cope when a
senior colleague becomes ill and you have to stand in for her? It is
in these situations that the ability to learn how to learn is essential.
These are the really important learning experiences.
British management guru Charles Handy reminds us that
when you ask most senior executives to remember their most