Navigating Uncertainty? A Former CIA Analyst Tells CEOs To Practice ‘Tactical Ignorance’

With Q4 fast approaching, CEOs continue to navigate through a thick fog of challenges: global economic instability, recession fears, election year uncertainty, to name just a few, amid the constant pressure to innovate while maintaining stakeholder trust. The role is more demanding than ever, requiring a blend of visionary leadership and pragmatic decision-making, often in situations where the playbook is being rewritten on the fly.

In this constantly shifting landscape, how can leaders stay agile, make informed decisions, and lead with confidence?

Rupal Patel, a former CIA analyst turned CEO, has a few ideas. In the following interview, she applies key principles from the world of intelligence analysis to the corporate suite, providing CEOs with strategies to tackle the unpredictable, embrace uncertainty, and make decisions with conviction—even, and perhaps especially, when they have only a partial view of the future. “[The CIA] helped me realize the other side of information and analysis, which is the uncertainty and the randomness, and to accept that that is part of the process,” says Patel, who has advised four-star generals under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

She notes that another key part of the process is accepting that you won’t always get it right. “As CEOs and executives, we love information. We love figures and metrics and measurements, but there is a huge amount that either is unknowable or that is really opaque or is out of our control,” says Patel, CEO of Blue Infinity Property Group, based in Berkshire, U.K., and author of From CIA to CEO: Unconventional Life Lessons for Thinking Bigger, Leading Better, and Being Bolder. “Being at a place like the CIA and serving in the field in some really intense environments gave me an appreciation for the fact that, yes, you can try to know as much as possible, and it’s really important to have the best analysis, check all of your assumptions, et cetera. But there is a huge amount that you will never know, so always leave room for humility and for being proven wrong.”

So a fundamental part of strategic decision-making at the CIA was accepting, from the outset, that any plan might go off the rails. What does that look like in practice?

[You say], ‘This is the general strategy. These are the parameters. This is what’s gonna get us going.’ But once the plan meets the real world, let’s leave room for adaptation, for taking in new information and making tweaks if necessary, or continuing on that path if it’s appropriate. Always be willing to take on new information that is relevant and adapt accordingly. The other  performance/decision-making aspect that I got trained in more concretely at the agency was on engaging with other people effectively, and also how you communicate with others effectively, because regardless of where you sit in an organization, you’re going to always have to be talking to stakeholders above you and below you.

One of the things that being at the CIA really got me comfortable doing was adapting the way I shared a message—not the message itself, but the language I used or the format I used for the audience in front of me. So, for example, when we were briefing the president or the cabinet or senators, the kind of briefings and the level of information they got was very, very different than when I was in the field briefing special forces units who were sort of eight or 10 men in the middle of nowhere. Same analysis, same intelligence, but the communication of that was different. The language used was different, the level of detail was different. So adapting the delivery to the audience in front of you was one of the most invaluable not just business skills, but life skills that I was given a lot of opportunity to practice and get better at while I was at the agency.

What’s an example of how, as a sitting CEO, you had to adapt a plan that went awry?

So yeah, there was a little thing called Covid. In the real estate business, the plan and the intention was always to grow and scale and grow and scale and grow and scale—and of course, to do that in a way that I thought was sustainable and not overly chasing vanity metrics or whatever, but the assumption was always growth. And then the pandemic happened. And it was a real crash course in coming back to the essentials and making sure that the fundamentals were all in place and that you weren’t just growing for growth’s sake.

So what that looked like in our business was getting much more vigilant about the way we grew and saying no to a lot of ‘opportunities’ and actually consolidating and downsizing for quite a stretch, both during the pandemic and post-pandemic. And it was a real slap in the face because the plan was always growth, so to then not only not be growing, but to actively choose to shrink was a hard pill to swallow, but it was incredibly necessary to survive those crazy tumultuous years. And it was probably the best decision I could have made in the moment or over the course of those many moments, because it also cut out a lot of the noise and a lot of the distraction.

One thing that, with the benefit of hindsight, I can now see was that in growing, yes, it was sustainable and it was thoughtful, et cetera, but there was a lot of, ‘yeah, even if this isn’t the best idea, we can make it work’ or ‘even if this isn’t part of our main strategy, we can accommodate or we can absorb it.’ And all of this sort of spreading yourself wider than the core strategy was something that when the times were good, you could get away with. But Covid forced me to be much more vigilant and diligent about the things that we were saying yes to as a business and no to as a business.

So that was difficult, and there was definitely a financial impact, and a bit of an ego hit, if I’m being totally honest about it. But it made sense, and I think all CEOs know this, but it’s so easy to forget—that we have to take the emotion out of the business decisions and try as much as possible to make objective, detached, pragmatic choices instead of emotional decisions. That’s not to say that there is no room for emotion, but we can get so wrapped up in either competing with others or in growing or in executing on a strategy that sometimes we can forget that actually, we need to take that some of that emotion out and be a bit more calculating.

What other ways can CEOs challenge conventional thinking?

It’s hard for me to say what’s conventional anymore, but I think many of the stereotypes around decision-making and the expectations on CEOs are still somewhat valid. One is this idea of the CEO as the all-knowing, all-seeing decider, right? The oracle. There’s so much pressure for them to somehow figure it all out and be able to predict the future and anticipate this and prevent that. I understand why that assumption or expectation is there, but it’s totally false. And I think too many CEOs try to live up to that and don’t allow for showing the vulnerability of not knowing certain things or being uncertain about decisions.

What I subscribe to and what I often talk to other leaders about is this idea of being a learning leader and being not the oracle, but the orchestrator of the experts around you. You don’t have to be the expert at everything—you can’t be. And one of the things I talk about in my book is about how it’s really important to actually surround yourself with other people who can, who are experts at the things that you’re not expert in, so that you as an individual, as the orchestrator, can really double down on your specific strengths, because of course, every individual, every CEO will have very unique strengths and very unique, uh, blind spots. And so instead of trying to be Chief Everything Officer, a lot of CEOs would be better served if they acknowledge that they can’t be and then backfill for those blind spots and enable themselves to be a bit more curious about things instead of feeling like they have to have the answer already. They can then have a much more collaborative, ideas-based, decision-making style instead of being like,  ‘this is what I’ve decided and this is what we’re gonna do.’ That will enable you, the CEO, to be the best at what you are good at, which might be motivating the troops or it might be selling the vision to shareholders. But if you try to be Chief Everything Officer, you’ll inevitably fail in many different ways personally and professionally.

The second thing I see a lot is this presumption from those who work for us that we only want to hear good news, that we need to be shielded from bad news, or things need to be filtered as it comes across our desks. That serves absolutely no one. The idea that CEOs are these fragile flowers that need to be protected from bad news and that they’ll kill the messenger, it’s so outdated and unnecessary. One of the things I do to try to avoid that is, if a team member is giving me an assessment of an opportunity or a strategy, I will always ask them to then argue against themselves. So then we can see where some of the hidden challenges are, right? And it gets them talking about the things that they might not otherwise want to share, the bad news or the threats or the challenges or whatever. So it’s about inviting that discourse so you’re not just getting what you want to hear, but you’re getting what you need to hear.

In your book, you talk about the concept of ‘tactical ignorance.’ What is that and why is it important in decision making?

This is something I came up with when I was in Afghanistan, sort of without realizing it, but I remember very clearly because I was 26, a civilian young woman going into a war zone where my job was to brief the four-star general in charge of the U.S. and international forces. And I remember very, very consciously deciding before I went into that briefing room on the first day that I was gonna find out as little as possible about him or his team, or what all of the various ranks on people’s shoulders and sleeves meant, because I knew that it was going to be a distraction for me, that I would get so wrapped up in the hierarchy, and who’s in the room, and ‘this person is so important’ that it would distract me from delivering on what I needed to deliver on.  Instead I focused on preparing the best briefing possible, on being as well-versed on the information that I needed to present as possible, on practicing my delivery and all of the tangible things that I can control instead of the bazillions of things that I can’t.

So I call that tactical ignorance—being very intentional about the information you’re letting in and being very intentional about the information you’re keeping out. Not burying your head in the sand, not cherry-picking data, but knowing what you’re walking into so that you can focus only on your delivery, on the value you are adding, and none of the atmospherics, none of the distraction, none of the nonsense. Because whether you’re going to a shareholder meeting or a board meeting or even talking to your team or doing town halls, there’s so many ways that we can psych ourselves out, right?

I often talk about the head game of leadership and the head game of high performance, because a lot of leadership skills, tangible skills, can be learned. You can sort of figure it out technically. But it’s all the intangibles and the mindset around it that can really make or break the difference of how you perform and how you lead. Tactical ignorance for me is about choosing those inputs very carefully so that you can be at your best.

Another area in which tactical ignorance is really helpful is in looking at competitors. So many organizations get sucked up into this, ‘Ooh, what are they doing? How do they do that? We need to do that.” And it’s this constantly chasing of somebody else’s strategy, but you can only do what you can do as an organization. You can only deliver on your promise, on your vision, on your values, on your product, on your services. So being aware of everything that’s happening amongst your competitors is too often a distraction. And it’s not to say you don’t know anything, of course, right? That’s where the word tactical comes from. It’s not about being an ignoramus and not knowing anything, but it’s being very careful, strategic, tactical about the inputs so that you can deliver on your organization’s best, on your specific individual best and not get distracted or sidelined by chasing what other people are doing.

You also talk about ‘identity-driven leadership.’ What is that?

When it comes to leadership—and this is true for all people, but it can be more pronounced when you are a woman or  underrepresented minority—you look for archetypes, right? This is how that person did it, or I had this really incredible boss that I worked for and I love this about them. And people often talk about role models or like, cobbling together a Frankenstein of [these different traits] and ‘I’m gonna try to be like that.’

But, while I appreciate that it’s great to be inspired by others, when I say identity-driven leadership, I’m not talking about identity politics. What I’m talking about is you, as an individual person, your identity, all of the things that make you who you are, all of the strengths that make you who you are, that you have developed over a lifetime are very specific to you. So instead of trying to be like the CEO before you, or trying to not be like the CEO before you or being like your role models, it’s far more important for you to be the kind of leader you are. So if you are a naturally introverted, thoughtful person, it’s okay to be introverted and thoughtful instead of feeling like, oh, well, I have to be this sort of gregarious, walking around the halls, high-fiving people. That’s not durable. That’s not who you are. And it’s going to create a lot of tension in not just your leadership style, but also for your mental health, your physical health. You don’t have to be like anybody else. You don’t have to follow the ‘best practice’ of your industry or of the people who came before you or the people you admire. You’re not them, you never will be and you shouldn’t even want to be.

So identity-driven leadership for me is fundamentally about knowing who you are, knowing very clearly what your values are, how you want them to show up on a day-to-day basis, knowing what your strengths are. And then, as I shared, having a team of people around you that can make up for the things that you think need making up for, but not apologizing for it, not trying to constantly fix things or to work on this developmental area, but owning that by the time you are a CEO, you are who you are, and it’s okay to not be perfect and amazing at everything.

What’s better than trying to be perfect and amazing at everything is being perfect and amazing at the things that you are uniquely qualified to do. So know what those things are—your unique strengths, attributes, values, et cetera. Then bring that to your leadership role, to your leadership style.

It seems like we’re in this prolonged period of constant uncertainty, which makes a lot of leaders hesitant to take bold risks, which we know is really necessary for growth. What are your top tips for CEOs to push beyond their comfort zones effectively?

Two things come immediately to mind. One is to have a very deep culture of experimentation, where it’s not just throwing spaghetti at the walls and seeing what sticks but having some way that smart capable people cross-functionally in your organization can come together and come up with ideas. It’s having many experiments—not huge, resource-intensive, like we need a whole new team and millions of dollars and all of that. But rather, what I refer to as resource-efficient discovery teams, or RED teams. You pull together smart people from across the organization, you give them a problem, you give them a challenge, and then you say, go figure out a couple of things that we could do in response to this. And you run many experiments and test to see what could work, what might work, what does work, what doesn’t work.

But to have that experimental approach somehow embedded in your organization, at all levels, because as we all know, good ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. Just because someone is in a finance function doesn’t mean that they might not actually have some really good sales ideas, or just because someone’s in marketing doesn’t mean that they might not have some insights into some legal elements of your organization. So I think the cross-functionality of it is hugely important, up and down the organization. And it does not have to be this constant burden. It can be something that folks are called on to do for a couple of hours of week or on just the biggest strategic challenges or the biggest strategic opportunities. But having a structured mechanism for experimentation is hugely valuable.

The other thing is what I call all-source intel, and it’s this idea of using lateral insights from very lateral disciplines. So whether you’re in manufacturing or in banking and finance or in retail, there will be things that you can learn from, say, pharmaceuticals or from the natural sciences or from tech or from, I don’t know, the world of elite sports. You can’t have a lateral expertise necessarily, but a lateral curiosity, right? An openness of, what’s happening in other industries? How are they dealing with this challenge? Or how have they approached experimentation? You can learn best practice from external sources, and it can be non-commercial. It can be sports, it can be intelligence, it can be many other fields of human endeavor.

And again, doing it in a very structured way, like, just as a thought experiment, I’m gonna see what that other industry is doing on this specific element or in this specific region. And then forcing yourself to ask, can I adapt any of that to our context? The answer won’t always be yes, but at least it forces you to get a bit more creative and a bit more open than you might otherwise be. Because so much best practice is best practice only because it’s been happening for a really, really long time, not because it’s necessarily the best way of doing something. So that lateral approach, that all-source intel approach, can be really helpful at just navigating the constant need to be on your toes and to be able to respond and not react to the changing nature of what’s happening around us.