I was recently reading an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review about how elite sports coaches make high-pressure decisions.
Drawing on interviews with coaches from professional sports around the world, the authors describe how the best decisions rarely emerge from instinct alone. They are shaped by careful preparation, disciplined emotional regulation, close attention to people and thoughtful reflection after the event.
As I read, I found myself nodding in agreement.
These coaches had clearly developed sophisticated ways of navigating uncertainty. They prepared meticulously long before pivotal moments arrived. They learned to regulate their own emotions under pressure. Afterwards, they reflected honestly on what had gone well, what had not and how they could improve next time.
One of the practices I found particularly interesting was this.
While the coaches harnessed the value of all available analytics, they still paid close attention to the people behind the data. They observed their team members’ behaviour in “everyday settings”, paying “close attention to people across multiple channels in real time” so they might notice subtle changes that could be significant, way ahead of critical incidents when high stakes decisions would need to be made.
While the coaches may not have realised it, some of these practices are quite anthropological in nature, and highly transferable. The approaches they describe certainly resonate with my own experience of working with leaders in business, education, healthcare and other diverse contexts.
But as I read the article, a recurring question gnawed insistently at the back of my mind.
Before we ask how leaders make better decisions, should we be asking how they have come to understand the human situation they are deciding about?
That may sound like a subtle distinction, but I believe it changes where we direct our attention.
Much of the leadership literature focuses on improving judgement: gathering better information, regulating emotion, weighing alternatives and choosing wisely. All of these matter. Yet every decision rests upon something more fundamental. Before we exercise judgement, we first have to interpret the situation before us. We decide what we think is happening, whose perspectives matter, which patterns appear significant and what explanations seem most plausible.
In other words, every judgement begins with perception followed by interpretation, and neither are neutral.
That is where anthropology has something further to contribute: a disciplined way of improving the quality of perception itself.
Because the quality of our decisions can never exceed the quality of the understanding from which they emerge.
Mistaking the Map for the Territory
After one of my recent executive briefings, a participant asked a thoughtful question.
“How do you know when you’re on the right track?“
It is exactly the kind of question leaders are expected to ask. Organisations reward confidence. They expect timely decisions, clear direction and reassuring certainty, particularly when the stakes are high. We naturally want to know whether our interpretation of a situation is the correct one.
Resisting the urge to reassure colleagues with promises of certainty, my answer is usually less satisfying, but necessarily embraces the complexity such astute questions deserve: there may not be a single “right track” waiting to be discovered.
Instead, our task is to develop an increasingly rich, accurate and nuanced understanding of the human systems we are trying to navigate. Better decisions emerge not because uncertainty disappears, but because the map from which we are working becomes progressively more faithful to the terrain.
Better decisions emerge not because uncertainty disappears, but because the map from which we are working becomes progressively more faithful to the terrain.
Mark Anderson
I have found the metaphor of a map increasingly helpful.
Imagine trying to cross unfamiliar country using a map that shows only roads, but omits rivers, steep gradients, bridges and changing weather conditions. You might still make progress. You might even reach your destination. But every decision you make along the way is constrained by the limits of what your map allows you to perceive.
Leadership is often much the same.
Every one of us carries an internal map of the organisations and communities we inhabit. It is shaped by our upbringing, professional training, organisational culture, personal experience and countless assumptions that have gradually become invisible to us. We rely upon it constantly, often without realising that it exists. It tells us what we notice, what we overlook, which behaviours seem meaningful and which explanations feel immediately convincing.
The greatest challenge is not simply that our maps are incomplete. It is that we so easily mistake them for the territory itself. And the territory is constantly shifting.
Anthropologists have long been wary of our natural tendency to grasp tightly to the comfort of certainty. They know that what appears obvious from one vantage point may look entirely different from another. Behaviour that initially seems irrational or disruptive often becomes understandable once its wider social and cultural context comes into view. Equally, patterns that appear self-evident can dissolve entirely when previously unheard perspectives are brought into the conversation.
Perhaps, then, the goal of leadership is not to eliminate uncertainty.
Perhaps it is to become steadily better at recognising where the edges of our own map still lie, and that maps can only represent (imperfectly) a snapshot in time.
Because every new perspective we encounter, every assumption we uncover, every relationship we begin to understand and every layer of context we previously overlooked makes that map a little more faithful to the world we are trying to navigate.
And even though a map cannot be fully comprehensive or permanently accurate, it can change the decisions that become possible.
Expanding the Field of View
Thinking back to the HBR article and the high performance coaches, imagine a coach notices that one of their most reliable players has become unusually withdrawn. They speak less during training. Their body language changes. Their performance begins to drift.
These observations may be important, but they are not yet explanations.
The temptation in leadership is to move quickly from observation to interpretation.
“They’re losing motivation.” “They’re disengaged.” “Their commitment has changed.”
Those interpretations may sometimes prove correct, but they may also be entirely wrong.
The same outward behaviour could equally reflect a parent caring for an unwell child, the breakdown of a relationship, financial anxiety, an experience of discrimination, uncertainty about the future, or countless other realities that remain invisible to everyone else.
Behaviour rarely explains itself.
More often, it invites further inquiry.
I learned this lesson myself, and not very skilfully.
A few years ago, I led a significant redesign of a professional programme I was responsible for, working to a demanding external deadline. It succeeded — formally, visibly, by every measure I had been tracking.
What I did not see, until weeks later, was that a senior colleague was quietly angry with me. I learned that he had helped build the original version years before, alongside colleagues he deeply respected who had since moved on. To him, my changes were not improvements. They may have been felt as a kind of erasure.
I had been focused entirely on the criteria in front of me. I had not thought to ask what the programme symbolised, to whom, or why.
The outcome looked like a success from the outside. But my map of that situation had a gap in it I never saw coming.
This is what I mean by deepening our field of view.
I had been focused entirely on the criteria in front of me. I had not thought to ask what the programme symbolised, to whom, or why.
Mark Anderson
Anthropologists are trained to resist accepting the first explanation (or a perceived pathway to ‘success’) that presents itself. They learn to look beneath observable behaviour towards the meanings, histories, relationships and lived experiences that make that behaviour intelligible in context. The goal is not to replace one explanation with another, but to remain curious for long enough that richer explanations have an opportunity to emerge.
But depth alone is not enough.
As well as deepening, we also need to widen our lens.
Leadership often encourages us to understand people within the boundaries of the organisation.
Anthropology gently dissolves those boundaries.
Every person who walks into the office, hospital or field site each morning brings with them a much larger world.
They arrive not simply as employees, executives or professionals, but as parents, carers, neighbours, partners, volunteers, community members, migrants, mentors, learners and friends. They carry cultural identities, family histories, financial realities, personal aspirations, health concerns and experiences of power, belonging and exclusion that continue to shape how they interpret the world around them.
None of those worlds are left at the threshold of the workplace or the perimeter of a project.
They accompany people into every meeting, every conversation and every decision.
In many respects, organisations are less like self-contained systems than meeting places where hundreds of different worlds continually intersect and interact.
That perspective changes how we think about leadership.
What appears to be resistance to change may actually reflect the memory of previous organisational restructures or abrasive policies encountered in a previous role. A decline in performance may have little to do with motivation and everything to do with responsibilities outside work. A disagreement about strategy may stem less from personality than from fundamentally different assumptions about authority, risk or success that have been shaped over many years.
The behaviour may look similar.
The worlds producing that behaviour may be entirely different.
This, I believe, is where anthropology contributes something distinctive to leadership.
It encourages us to become less concerned with explaining behaviour quickly and more committed to understanding the conditions from which behaviour emerges.
The challenge for leaders, then, is not simply to become better readers of people. It is to become better readers of the worlds that people inhabit. And, as the coaches attested to, that’s a consistent practice that needs to be implemented over time.
The challenge for leaders, then, is not simply to become better readers of people. It is to become better readers of the worlds that people inhabit.
Mark Anderson
When we deepen and widen our field of view, something subtle but important begins to happen.
Our certainty often decreases.
But the quality of our understanding increases.
We begin to notice assumptions we had mistaken for facts. We recognise relationships we had previously overlooked. We become less surprised by the behaviour of others because we are gradually learning to perceive more of the context from which that behaviour arises.
Our map is still incomplete. It always will be.
But it becomes a more faithful guide to the shifting terrain we are trying to navigate.
From Questions to Practices
Over the past few months, many of my articles have encouraged leaders to ask different kinds of questions. Questions that slow us down. Questions that challenge our assumptions. Questions that help us resist premature certainty.
Those kinds of questions go beyond representing an approach or an orientation. They need to be integrated into practice.
Those kinds of questions go beyond representing an approach or an orientation. They need to be integrated into practice.
Mark Anderson
Applied anthropology is not simply a way of thinking. It is a way of practising attention.
Anthropologists do not become better observers because they possess some unusual gift of perception. They become better observers because they cultivate habits that gradually reshape how they notice, interpret and make sense of the world around them.
Leadership deserves similar disciplines.
Imagine leaving a meeting convinced that a colleague has become resistant to a new initiative. Rather than immediately acting on that conclusion, or harbouring resentment, you pause.
What did I actually observe? Which parts of my interpretation are inference rather than evidence? What other explanations remain plausible? Whose perspective have I not yet heard? What aspects of this person’s world might I still be unable to see?
Notice that none of these questions delays the decision indefinitely.
Nor do they require perfect knowledge.
Their purpose is much simpler.
They encourage us to become more deliberate about the quality of attention that precedes our judgement.
Over time, these habits begin to change something subtle but profound. We become slower to confuse observation with interpretation. We become more comfortable holding several possible explanations in mind before settling on one. We become less surprised by other people’s behaviour because we have learned to look beyond the behaviour itself.
Most importantly, we become more willing to revise our understanding as new perspectives emerge.
Questions like these, when asked about specific situations that challenge us, stop being simply reflective exercises. They become leadership practices.
And, like all meaningful practices, they become stronger through repetition.
Towards Contextual Wisdom
I have come to understand leadership as being less about discovering the one correct route than continually improving and updating the map.
Not the accumulation of ever more answers. Nor the confidence that we have finally understood the people around us. Rather, the disciplined practice of becoming a more attentive observer of human systems — one who learns to recognise the limits of their own map, who actively seeks perspectives that lie beyond it, and who is willing to redraw it whenever the landscape reveals something new.
Those elite coaches invest a great deal of time, intention and experience in preparing themselves before moments of consequence arrive, ahead of crunch time, when there’s no time to dither and the stakes are high. Anthropology invites us to extend that discipline further still — not simply by becoming better readers of behaviour, but by becoming better readers of the worlds from which that behaviour emerges.
That shift may seem modest, but I believe it changes everything. Leadership does not begin with deciding what to do in a particular moment. It begins much earlier. It begins with learning to see more clearly what is really there, and why.
Because ultimately, the quality of our leadership will never exceed the quality of the attention we bring to the human systems we are privileged to serve.