Low diatribe

I find myself vexed by the illogical, but that's the thing about illogic. It's under no obligation to make sense to anyone. The only way to navigate is to accept and move on.

This came into focus during a project where a stakeholder kept changing requirements based on what seemed like pure whim. Every time we'd nail down the specifications, they'd pivot to something completely different. My engineering brain wanted to understand the pattern, to find the underlying logic that would make their decisions predictable.

There wasn't one.

I spent weeks trying to rationalize their behavior, looking for the hidden framework that would explain why they wanted feature A on Monday and feature B on Wednesday. I built needlessly complex theories about their motivations, their pressures, their strategic thinking. None of it held up. The more I tried to impose logic on their choices, the more frustrated I became.

This same pattern shows up in smaller, more mundane ways. I'm hyper-aware of my space and others' spaces in public. I hold doors, step aside, maintain appropriate distances. I'm the kind of person who stands up and gets ready to deplane as soon as it's my aisle's turn because I don't want the people behind me to get mad. It really bothers my wife. I'm working on it when I can catch it, but sometimes I can't help it. When someone blocks an aisle while texting, or stands directly in front of the subway doors, or takes up two parking spaces, my limbic response is that it's intentional. Surely they see what they're doing. Surely they understand the social contract they're violating.

But they're not plotting against collective harmony. They're just oblivious, or preoccupied, or genuinely unaware of the situation. My brain wants to find the malicious logic behind their behavior when the reality is much simpler. There is no logic. They're just being human.

When I was younger and upset about some perceived injustice, my Pops would try to comfort me by saying, "That just sounds like something an idiot would do." I learned later that it was his version of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." Most of the time, people aren't being deliberately inconsiderate. They're just being people.

The same futile pattern that had me building elaborate theories about my stakeholder's motivations was playing out in grocery store aisles and airplane cabins. I was exhausting myself looking for intentionality where none existed.

The frequency shifted when I stopped my quest for understanding and began trying to flow with it. Instead of thrashing under chaos, I built systems that could handle it. Modular designs that could pivot quickly. Processes that expected change rather than resisting it. Communication patterns that surfaced decisions early rather than assuming they'd stay fixed.

This is the paradox of rational leadership in an irrational world. The most logical response to illogic is often to stop demanding logic. Not because logic doesn't matter, but because forcing logical frameworks onto inherently illogical situations creates more problems than it solves.

People aren't spreadsheets. Organizations aren't algorithms. Markets aren't mathematical models. They're complex, contradictory, and often inexplicable. The leader who insists on finding the rational explanation for every irrational behavior will spend their energy fighting reality instead of working with it.

I'm learning to recognize the signs. When I catch myself saying "but that doesn't make sense" for the third time about the same situation, it's time to shift strategies. Instead of asking "why is this happening?" I start asking "how can I work with this?" Instead of trying to rationalize the irrational, I navigate through it.

This doesn't mean abandoning critical thinking or accepting poor decisions without question. It means distinguishing between situations where logic can create clarity and situations where logic creates friction. Sometimes the most rational thing you can do is acknowledge that rationality has limits.

The strongest leaders I've worked with shared this quality. They could hold space for contradiction without needing to resolve it immediately. They could work with incomplete information, inconsistent stakeholders, and changing priorities without losing their center. They treated illogic not as a problem to solve but as a condition to navigate, and in doing so showed what authentic leadership actually looks like. Not the ability to make everything make sense, but the wisdom to know when sense-making isn't the point. Sometimes the job is simply to move forward despite the contradictions, to focus on what matters even when the context defies explanation.

Even as I write this, I'm wearing one of my seventy-plus hats. Literal hats. Today's choice is a Manchester City cap because it's Matchday 1 of the new Champions League season. I have somewhere in the neighborhood of two dozen ball caps for warmer weather. Different colors of Carhartt, favorite soccer teams, and hip-hop heroes. Winter brings out twice as many Carhartt beanies. For formal occasions, I maintain a collection of bowlers, fedoras, top hats, and trilbys. I have more than one "chores" hat. I tell myself it's about coordination, about having the right hat for every outfit. But the truth is simpler and more illogical: I love hats.

There's no rational framework that explains why anyone needs that much headwear. I could try to construct one... Weather preparedness, outfit coordination, social appropriateness. But why? Strip away the elaborate justifications and what remains is pure preference masquerading as logic. I'm as guilty as anyone of trying to construct rational systems from fundamentally irrational choices.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us. Neither are the people in it. Neither am I. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can get back to the work that actually matters. The human work of building, growing, and moving forward together.

This is what leadership looks like when we stop pretending we're purely rational beings. We acknowledge the ridiculousness of our nature instead of hiding it. We lead with the full spectrum of human inconsistency rather than some sanitized version of ourselves.

When we can laugh at our own elaborate justifications for owning an absurd number of hats, we create space for others to be equally human. The leaders who matter most aren't the ones who have eliminated their contradictions. They're the ones who have made peace with them and learned to work with the beautiful, frustrating, illogical reality of being human.