It's More Nuanced Than That
‘It’s more nuanced than that.’
Few sentences are as valuable to use in the 21st Century as that.
I had the thought recently when listening to a podcast episode about BMI and pregnancy (our third child is due in December, so I’m back in the weeds of maternity medicine).
Throughout Dr Sara Wickham’s research into the impact of BMI on maternity and complications, the message was: it’s more nuanced than that.
BMI is a simplistic measure of healthiness, when in reality it’s more nuanced than that.
Higher BMI isn’t bad in all ways… it’s more naunced than that.
It doesn’t always lead to better outcomes to have more monitoring by a doctor… it’s more nuanced than that.
And the list goes on.
As I reflected on that, I was reminded how powerful a practice this idea is: ‘it’s more nuanced than that’. There are sections in The Power to Choose which directly relate to this, but there’s even more in the three chapters I cut in the final round of editing, focused on some of the most divisive conversations we have today: those on political and moral issues.
Reading the research of people like Jonathan Haidt - and indeed pretty much any ‘difficult conversations’ research - curiosity and openness to changing our mind rank highly in what helps us be successful in changing people’s minds. And a powerful way to maintain those things is to remember: it’s more nuanced than that.
It’s also a very low-threat way of challenging someone’s certainty: ‘my feeling is that it might actually be more nuanced than that’ is a challenge far more likely to succeed in beginning to change someone’s mind than ‘you’re wrong, and here’s why…’
Humans love certainty.
We crave control.
That’s because we evolved for simpler times, and the level of complexity we have to deal with now is often far greater than our nervous systems have capacity for.
Our groupishness takes us further, binding us into tribes that disagree and fight it out as if the fate of the world rested on the outcome.
The truth is: it’s almost always more nuanced than the individual or the tribe thinks. We almost always need to transcend our current way of doing things and include it as we create a bigger, more nuanced perspective.
In fact, Jennifer Garvey Berger, one of the most brilliant teachers I know on how to prepare ourselves for modern complexity once said that wherever we are certain, we are subject to our certainty. We are a victim of it.
We can use this to support the people we lead or coach: every time they say something is ‘always’ like something, or ‘never’ like something, or they fuse together two ideas which don’t look quite as fused to us, we can reflect it back.
‘Wow, it sounds like you’re really certain that that person is always like that. But my guess is, it’s more nuanced than that. What’s your intuition?’
In a presentation I gave last year to a functional leadership team in a large retail organisation, I outlined what I believe are the key leadership principles for a complex world.
Underlying all that is that we have to move from black and white to shades of grey.
From certainty, to doubt.
It isn’t pleasant. Certainty feels really nice. Doubt feels really uncomfortable. (to me at least)
We don’t want doubt all the time - it’s more nuanced than that.
We don’t never want certainty - it’s more nuanced than that.
We need to remember that where things are simple, or even complicated, we can rely on certainty and on black and white.
But where things are complex, it’s more nuanced than that.
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PS My latest book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World, is out now. Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.