Count The Wolves

How to balance emotion and objectivity

In 1845, a young army lieutenant named Ulysses S. Grant was racing back to his base in Corpus Christi, Texas to avoid being reported AWOL. He and a companion had fallen behind and were pushing hard through open prairie to catch up to their group.

Then they heard it.

Out of the darkness came a howling that stopped both men cold.

Wolves.

This didn’t sound like just one animal. This was a terrifying, overlapping chorus, rising from somewhere just ahead. Grant wrote in his Personal Memoirs that to his ear, there must have been enough of them to devour their party, horses and all.

His companion, equally terrified, leaned over and asked: “Grant, how many wolves do you think there are in that pack?”

Grant, not wanting to seem rattled, deliberately undersold his real estimate. “Twenty,” he lied.

They pressed on. But when they finally spotted the source of all that noise (and all that fear) they were pleasantly surprised. As Grant wrote:

“There were just TWO of them. Seated upon their haunches, with their mouths close together, they had made all the noise we had been hearing for the past ten minutes.”

Two wolves. Not twenty.

Something to be cautious of, sure.

But nowhere near the life-or-death threat they’d imagined from what they first heard.

Grant captured the lesson with one line:

“There are always more of them before they are counted.”

What Fear Is For

Picture yourself in that situation. You’re out in the dark. You’ve fallen behind your group. You’re moving through unsettled wilderness. And then a pack of wild animals starts announcing themselves a few feet in front of you.

Of course you’d be scared. I would be.

And guess what? In that situation, fear isn’t a bad thing. Fear is a rational thing. A useful thing. Fear gets your attention. It gets you ready to act.

But here’s the problem with fear.

Fear gets you ready. Fear does not tell you what to do.

When he first heard those wolves, Grant didn’t know how scared to be — or what to do next — because he hadn’t assessed what he was actually dealing with. He could hear the wolves. He couldn’t see them. So, faced with what might be a dangerous situation, his mind did what all of our minds do: it filled in the blanks.

And when fear fills in the blanks (when we guess at how big a problem is before we can really see it) fear rounds up. Every time. Whatever we’re only starting to understand, we assume is really bad. From a few seconds of howling, we get twenty wolves. Or more.

Here’s why that overreaction matters: when you misjudge the size or shape of a problem, you misjudge your options for dealing with it. Grant thought he might have to fight or outrun an entire pack. His eventual move (keep walking past two relatively disinterested wolves) never entered his mind, because he didn’t get what was actually going on.

It wasn’t until he saw the truth for himself that he could clear his head, assess his options, and make the obvious choice.

Thank god. Two wolves. Not twenty.

Let’s keep moving.

It’s tempting to read Grant’s wolf story as a parable about emotion getting in the way of good decisions. But Grant needed that fear. We all do.

That fear got him to stop, focus, take the situation seriously, and get ready to act.

That’s what fear is for. In life and at work.

That sick drop in your stomach when a piece of bad news lands (the customer’s cancellation notice, the unexpected product outage, the competitor’s threatening announcement, the star employee’s resignation) isn’t weakness. It’s your biology telling you that something meaningful is happening.

Pay attention, it says. This matters. Get ready to do something.

But way too often, that initially useful signal goes overboard. Grant’s fear alerted him. Then that same fear told him there were twenty wolves out there waiting to eat him alive. The emotion that told you “this matters” (thank you, fear) starts screaming “game over, man” (easy, fear).

Those are two very different messages coming from the same source. And learning to tell them apart (paying attention to the one that says this matters, and ignoring the one that says this is the end of the world) is what it’s all about.

That’s what the best leaders do. They stay alert enough to notice the problem the second it shows up. They allow themselves to get amped up. But then they just as quickly center themselves and take the first step they can towards learning the truth of the situation, instead of acting on their first, overly-emotional read.

Alert but Centered

There’s a certain emotional aliveness you need to notice there’s problem in the first place. And there’s a discipline in tempering that aliveness so you don’t blow it up bigger than it really is. That’s the fundamental tension in being a good strategist, a good businessperson, a good leader.

Noticing isn’t hard. We do this almost automatically, thanks to our five senses and the constant flow of communication we’re subjected to at work. The hard part is what comes next: when that same energy starts lying to you about how big the problem is.

That’s the part I want to get into.

Mindfulness is great, but the answer here isn’t learning to calm down. Telling yourself to relax in the middle of a crisis (real or imagined) never works. Centering yourself works. Getting objective is what works. And you get objective By replacing the size of the problem you’re feeling with the size of the problem that’s actually there.

Good strategy is mostly about forcing objectivity onto emotionally-overwhelming situations. The people who can force themselves to get objective when shit gets hard produce a better diagnosis. A better diagnosis tells you what the real challenge is inside the mess you’re looking at. And once you understand the real challenge, the options you have (and the winning option) tend to become rather obvious.

The reason you have to force it is that objectivity almost never comes from your gut. Under pressure, your gut doesn’t measure the problem. It guesses at it. And when it guesses, it always rounds up.

So how can you learn to force that kind of objectivity onto emotionally-challenging, downright scary situations?

It’s hard. But here’s three moves that work for me.

Move 1: Get closer to the problem

You could argue that Grant’s whole problem in that story was distance. He could hear the wolves. But he couldn’t see them. He was too far away.

And from that distance, out in the wilderness, out in the dark, that sound was all his imagination needed to build a monster. It wasn’t until he got close enough to lay eyes on them that the threat (and the magnitude of the threat) became clear. The closer he got, the better he understood what he was dealing with.

It’s the same thing with strategy. The higher you climb in any organization or team, the further you get from the truth. Customers get handled by your salespeople, not you. Products get built by your engineers, not you. You’re always a couple of degrees removed from what’s actually going on, and you have to be. You need that distance to do your job. It’s how you create your leverage.

But distance also distorts. Every layer between you and the truth is a kind of lens you’re forced to look through. Stack enough of those lenses up on top of one another, and the picture you see from your leadership perch looks quite different from the truth.

So when you find a problem worth solving, the first move is to collapse that distance. Get closer to the problem. Closer to the work. Closer to the customers you serve and the numbers your report on.

This is what weak leaders don’t do enough. They stay removed enough that they never build a real point of view on what’s actually happening. They accept the distortion instead of combatting it. And they end up misjudging the problem, their options, and ultimately, their decisions.

Don’t let that be you. When in doubt, just get closer.

Move 2: Find something to measure

This is the literal interpretation of Grant’s quote.

Count the wolves.

I’ve written about this in my What Data-Driven Leaders Do Differently series: If you only rely on your own five senses to tell you what’s going on, you’re going to miss things.

Your senses are built to detect threats, not measure them. Sure, they’ll tell you something’s wrong. But they’ll lie to you about how bad things really are.

Numbers don’t lie. Numbers are the same whether you’re panicking or calm. They’re a fixed point, immovable by human emotion. Grant’s gut told him there were twenty wolves out there. But his count told him there were only two. The count didn’t care that he was scared. The count told him the truth.

When you finally put a number against a thing, the thing is almost always smaller than it felt when you first encountered it. And smaller things are always easier to deal with.

Move 3: Borrow someone else’s objectivity

The trouble with your own read is that it’s yours. You’re standing inside the problem with your pride and your identity and your fears and insecurities wrapped up in the decision that created it, and the little movie running in your head about what this all says about you and what others think about it. Some problems are harder to get objective about. Some are impossible.

What do you do when you can’t get in touch with your own objectivity? Go get someone else’s.

If you’re panicking, find the person who isn’t.

If you’ve never seen this before, find the person who’s seen it twenty times.

If the problem is technical or complex or niche (and you’re not), find the person who speaks the language of the problem. You’re guessing at how big it is from the outside. They can open it up, pick it apart, and show you what’s actually going on.

And if your blind spot is you (and your habit of inflating, flinching, catastrophizing, or talking yourself out of the hard call) find the person who knows your tendencies well enough to check you.

This is what great coaches, friends, mentors, and teammates do. Use them.

Final Thoughts

When you hit the next big, ugly, emotionally loaded problem, try this:

Sit in the discomfort one beat longer. Get in touch with your objectivity. By getting closer to what’s going on, finding something to measure, or connecting with someone you trust who can look at the problem with fresh, less biased eyes.

Count the wolves.

Then work the problem.