You’re not short on information. You’re short on the people who feel safe handing it to you.
Drive at night, and your headlights reach about two hundred feet. Past that, nothing. And yet you don’t sit in the driveway waiting for the whole route to light up, you pull out, you drive, and the road keeps revealing itself a little further with every foot you cover. The light moves because you do.
I’ve built most of a career on that idea: you can see a short distance ahead, you move anyway, and the next stretch appears. It’s the spine of the book I’m finishing. You can’t pre-plan your way through a changing world; you drive into it. I believed that completely, and I still do.
But there’s a part of the headlights I missed for years, and it’s the part that actually changes how you lead. How far you can see in the dark is not fixed. You can widen the beam. And the fastest way to do it has almost nothing to do with you. And almost everything to do with who’s further up the road than you are.
The general was never the one who could see
Before there were maps worth trusting, an army moving through unfamiliar country lived or died on a single role that almost no one remembers: the scout on the high ground. While the column marched the valley floor, the general included, banners and all, a rider was sent up the ridge. From the deck of the valley, you could see a few hundred yards of trail. From the ridge, you could see the river crossing, the dust of the enemy, the pass that didn’t go through, hours before any of it reached the column below.
The general had the authority. The scout had the sightline. And those are not the same thing, a fact every competent commander in history had to swallow, because the most important information on the worst days came from the lowest-ranking person on the highest ground. The general who insisted on trusting only what he could see from the valley floor didn’t look decisive. He marched his people into the ambush he’d been warned about.
Here’s why this should bother you. As you rise, the instinct is to assume more authority means more visibility, that the higher your title, the more you should be able to see. It’s exactly backwards. Rank pulls you down into the valley, into the meetings and the column and the deck, where your view is no better than anyone else’s and often worse. The corner office has a terrible line of sight to the customer, the frontline, and the dust on the horizon. The org chart is a topographical map of who’s standing where, and the people who can actually see are almost never at the top of it.
Authority is not sightline
Once you separate those two things, a lot of leadership behaviour you’ve tolerated starts to look like what it is:
- Weak leaders defend the view from the valley. Strong leaders send someone up the ridge.
- Weak leaders staff the room with people who confirm what they already see. Strong leaders post scouts exactly where they’re blind.
- Weak leaders ask, “What do I think?” Strong leaders ask, “Who can see what I can’t… and do they feel safe telling me?”
A scout is anyone whose vantage point reaches past yours: a mentor who has already walked the country you’re entering, a peer in another industry who sees the weather a season before it reaches you, a junior person close enough to the customer to spot the washed-out bridge while you’re still reading last quarter’s map. None of them outrank you. Every one of them can see further than you in the one direction that matters right now.
“The leader who refuses to send anyone up the ridge isn’t decisive. He’s blind on purpose.”
It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand my own job here. I thought I was paid to see further than the people around me; that’s what the title implied and what the stage seemed to demand. I was wrong. My job is to hold the direction and assemble the widest set of honest sightlines around it. The seeing was never meant to be a solo act. My headlights reach two hundred feet like everyone else’s. What changes the distance isn’t better eyes. It’s a ridge full of people I’ve actually given permission to tell me what they see.
What changes next week:
Three moves, in order of how much they’ll cost you.
- Find the decision you’re calling “my call to make” and admit it’s the one you’re most blind on. The decisions we guard most jealously are usually the ones where our valley-floor view is worst. That’s the one that needs a scout, and it’s the one your ego will fight hardest to keep to yourself.
- Ask the lowest-ranking person closest to it what they see and then shut up. Not the verdict, the view. The failure mode isn’t forgetting to ask; it’s asking and then talking over the answer because it complicates the plan. If the scout’s report only ever confirms what you already believed, you don’t have a scout. You have an echo.
- Notice who stopped reporting and why. Every leader has scouts who’ve gone quiet. They didn’t run out of things to see. They learned that the last time they rode down with bad news, it cost them. The ridge isn’t empty. You emptied it. Find one of those people this week and make it safe to climb back up.
And if you’re not leading anyone, if you’re just trying to navigate your own life, the same move applies, minus the org chart. Stop trying to see the whole road from the driver’s seat. Find the two or three people who’ve already driven the stretch you’re squinting at, borrow their view, and go. You still won’t see the whole route. You’ll see further than you did, and further is all you ever need to take the next stretch.
You can’t light the whole road. You can choose whose eyes you borrow.
GOING DEEPER
The research behind why this works and where it breaks
It feels like leadership should mean seeing the most and knowing the most. The evidence mostly says the opposite: power filters your information, the most valuable signal sits at the edges you can’t reach, and warnings only help if people feel safe enough to raise them. But the research also names a real limit, a point where adding sightlines stops helping, and someone simply has to decide. All four studies below, including the one that pushes back.
1. Power quietly narrows what you can see.
Across a series of experiments, psychologist Dacher Keltner and colleagues found that gaining power reliably degrades perspective-taking, the ability to accurately read what other people see, know, and feel. The more authority people are handed, the more they default to their own vantage point and the worse they get at registering anyone else’s. It’s a near-perfect description of the general who stops sending scouts: the position itself erodes the sightline the position depends on.
Adam D. Galinsky, Dacher Keltner, et al.: “Power and Perspectives Not Taken,” Psychological Science (2006); Keltner, The Power Paradox (2016).
2. The freshest information sits in the gaps, not at the top.
Sociologist Ron Burt spent decades mapping how information actually moves through organizations. His central finding: the people with the best, earliest, least-redundant information aren’t the ones highest on the chart, they’re the ones positioned across “structural holes,” the gaps between groups that otherwise don’t talk. A leader’s direct view is, almost by definition, redundant with everyone else near the top. The signal that matters, the dust, the washed-out bridge, reaches you through someone bridging to a world you’re not in. Those bridges are your scouts.
Ronald S. Burt, University of Chicago: Structural Holes (1992); “Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” American Journal of Sociology (2004).
3. Disasters happen when the people who can see aren’t heard.
Examining catastrophes from aviation to the Columbia shuttle loss, researchers keep finding the same pattern: someone in the organization saw the danger in time, and the structure failed to carry that view to the person with authority. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety shows that teams catch more errors and perform better when people lower down feel able to say what they see, and that the binding constraint is almost never knowledge. It’s whether the scout believes the general actually wants the report.
Amy C. Edmondson, Harvard Business School: “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly (1999); The Fearless Organization (2018).
4. But more sightlines aren’t free, and at some point, someone has to decide.
Here’s the limit, because it’s real. Research on information load and group decision-making finds that gathering more input has a downward slope: past a point, additional perspectives stop sharpening the picture and start blurring it, raising confidence without raising accuracy and stalling the call entirely. The lesson isn’t “post infinite scouts.” It’s that scouting and deciding are two different jobs. The general still has to choose a direction the moment the reports stop converging, and the leader who hides inside endless input is failing in the opposite direction from the one who ignores it. Widen the beam, then commit.
On information overload: Eppler & Mengis, “The Concept of Information Overload,” The Information Society (2004). On analysis paralysis and decision quality: Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (2004).
Put them together, and the shape is honest. Power narrows your view; the signal that matters sits at edges you can’t reach, and the warnings only help if people feel safe enough to raise them, so you need scouts. And more is not always better; the reports eventually have to stop, and someone has to choose. The lone visionary at the front of the column was always a myth. So is the leader who gathers input forever to avoid making a decision. The skill is knowing you can’t see it all, building a ridge that can, and then driving.
Send someone up the ridge. Then take the next stretch of road yourself.
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