Wracked with doubt? Good

I’m not sure about much of anything right now. The world is <waves arms around> a lot. How about you?

Here’s something that might help.

I recently caught up with Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and chair of the Leadership Initiative. We were together to record an episode for the upcoming season of the Design of Business | Business of Design podcast, talk about her wonderful new book, Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation (co-authored with Emily Tedards and Jason Wild), and in general try to make sense of the world.

We were talking about innovation — what it is, how to get good at it, how to make it rain down on command — which always turns into a conversation about just how hard it is to be human, especially alongside other humans.

“Innovation [is] not about an individual coming up with a new idea,” she says. “Instead, innovation is the result of the collaboration of people with diverse expertise and diverse perspectives coming together, being able to collaborate, being able to experiment together and learn.” And the kicker: “This is actually hard.”

The world feels especially hard lately.

I was reminded of my conversation with Hill when I first read this opinion piece from AKQA CEO Helder Santo. In it, he offers a unique perspective on the human impulse to cling to reassurance and certainty, currently manifesting in the now ubiquitous quest to have LLMs confidently dispatch all our problems and mine for unknown opportunities.

That impulse to remove all doubt, when indulged, all but guarantees a worse outcome.

“Given the choice, people take the easy path. Less friction, less effort, less discomfort,” he says. But the tech we build to remove barriers also removes the one thing that we need to build something great: Uncertainty.

“That uncertainty isn’t weakness. It’s the invitation,” he says. “Doubt is the moment you turn to the person next to you, because you can’t close the gap alone. It’s the single most reliable trigger for collaboration we have. And we are quietly engineering it out of existence.”

He makes the hard work of not (yet) knowing feel less lonely. Please click through, read, and share with the people you enjoy turning to the most.

Speaking of not yet knowing, the Observatory is going on hiatus until August 17. We’ll be working on some things, updating our vibe, and coming back to you with some new ideas.

Until then, stay doubtful, stay open, and keep waving your arms at the world. It helps us find each other.

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This edition of The Observatory was edited by Rachel Paese.