Both Sides

I Didn’t Believe This Either

Certainty

For most of my career, I was righteous. Not a little—very. I believed in clarity. Right and wrong. Accountability. I thought if you had enough information, the correct choice was obvious, and I had very little patience for people who couldn’t see it. Looking back, it’s almost embarrassing how certain I was.

That certainty held for a long time because the problems I was solving fit that frame. Then it started to give way. The higher I moved, the less the world organized itself cleanly. Information came layered, conflicting, incomplete, and time-bound. Decisions stopped presenting as good versus bad and started showing up as bad versus worse, fast versus right, now versus later. What I once read as confidence in leaders began to look more like a decision about which part of the truth to act on.

Clarity

From where I sit in corporate hell, the story doesn’t simplify. It expands. I see how one team’s win creates another team’s stall. How something that feels personal is often structural. How timing does damage no one intended. I didn’t see any of that earlier in my career. None of this excuses poor judgment, but it does dismantle the idea that there is a single, tidy version of events waiting to be uncovered.

The dissonance comes from how different it looks from the outside. At a distance, decisions appear obvious, even careless. Up close, they rarely are. People are operating with partial view. Each person is right about what they can see and unaware of what they can’t, Bitches. What looks like disagreement is often incomplete perspectives colliding with full confidence.

Perspective doesn’t make the job easier. It removes the comfort of certainty. You don’t get to stand cleanly on one side when you’re responsible for the impact on all of them. Clarity doesn’t come from simplifying the story—it comes from holding more of it at once and deciding anyway.