INSUFFICIENT SELF-SUFFICIENCY

When a changing world outgrows experience

Self-sufficiency sounds good. Mature. Solid. I’ve got this. Leadership loves it. Promotes it. Rewards it.

 And yet — it becomes insufficient exactly when it matters most.

Self-sufficiency works… as long as reality doesn’t improvise. As long as past experience still maps onto present reality. As long as decisions require efficiency, not rethinking. Then a quiet threshold is crossed.

Self-sufficiency stops being strength. It becomes momentum with a good résumé. It looks like competence. Which makes it almost untouchable.

But self-sufficiency isn’t low intelligence. It’s loyalty — to what once worked. To an identity built on being right before. To a role that paid off.

 And the issue isn’t knowing. It’s when knowing starts to close things.

Insufficient self-sufficiency doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t fight. It doesn’t fail loudly. It produces something quieter: decisions that make perfect sense - in a world that’s already gone.

Self-sufficiency doesn’t make you deaf. It makes others stop talking.

It doesn’t make you blind. It makes others disappear.

That’s why the most fragile moments aren’t crises. They’re periods of apparent stability. When things still work, self-sufficiency is hardest to see… and hardest to challenge.

Leadership doesn’t break when you don’t know. It erodes when there’s no room left for not knowing. Not because something went wrong, but because searching no longer seemed necessary.

Insufficient self-sufficiency isn’t a flaw. It’s a side effect of having gone far enough, that relying only on yourself becomes risky.

And maybe the answer isn’t FEEDBACK… but AMBIGUITY. Self-sufficiency performs beautifully right up until certainty disappears. Can we operate in ambiguity long enough for something new to emerge? 

We’re not stuck because we don’t know enough. We’re stuck because we know enough.

—

One way of seeing.

For now.