See the Series Introduction for Just Tao It, Part I: HERE
See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE
See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE
From my interpretation of Chapter 71 of the Tao Te Ching (Unpublished):
Seeing that you don’t know
is brilliance.
Not seeing that you don’t know
is blindness.
To know is to see.
To see
is to be.
The way to brilliance
is patient.
—
There was a stretch in my career where I became increasingly convinced that organizations rise or fall on the quality of their relationships. I had seen enough damage from Task to the neglect of Relationship that the pattern began feeling unmistakable to me. People stopped listening carefully to one another. Trust weakened underneath the surface. Cultures became brittle in ways performance metrics often failed to capture until much later. Decisions still got made, though they carried less commitment and less staying power once pressure arrived.
So I moved strongly toward Relationship. I slowed conversations down. Tried creating more space for people to feel heard. Encouraged inclusion, reflection, understanding, and connection. For a while, many positive things emerged from that shift. People felt seen differently. Tension softened in places where systems had become overly rigid.
Other consequences eventually surfaced too.
The work itself started drifting. Decisions took longer. Clarity blurred. What felt like depth to me increasingly felt like distance to others. The same people frustrated by too much Task began reacting to what looked, to them, like too much Relationship.
They were seeing something real.
Though so was I.
What I could not recognize at the time was how attached I had become to one side of the tension. Their blindness to the downside of Task without Relationship was probably only matched by my blindness to the downside of Relationship to the neglect of Task. We reinforced each other beautifully while imagining we were solving the problem.
That pattern feels painfully human now.
We finally experience relief from one form of suffering and immediately start treating the corrective insight as though it contains the entire truth. The side that helped us suddenly begins feeling morally superior, intellectually obvious, emotionally safer, or historically necessary. Then over time the limitations waiting inside that certainty gradually introduce themselves too.
I have watched entire organizations circle that same pattern repeatedly. A Task-focused leader replaces a Relationship-focused leader. Then a Relationship-focused leader replaces another Task-focused leader. Each shift arrives carrying the promise of correction. The dysfunction simply changes shape while cynicism deepens underneath.
At this point in life, I sometimes suspect adult development largely consists of circling the same barn repeatedly with slightly more humility each decade. I apparently earned a PhD from the University of Hard Knocks with a specialization in OCD-fueled overcertainty.
Adult development researchers describe a similar progression. Earlier stages of development often seek security through certainty, expertise, fixed answers, clear identity, and confidence in one’s conclusions. That orientation can be extraordinarily useful for building capability, solving problems, and accomplishing goals. Though over time, more mature developmental stages increasingly recognize something more unsettling: reality remains larger than the frameworks used to explain it.
The movement is humbling.
What once felt like clarity increasingly reveals itself as partial perspective. Complexity expands. Contradictions become harder to eliminate cleanly. Other people stop looking merely wrong and start looking like carriers of information we may still be missing ourselves.
That shift does not eliminate conviction.
It changes our relationship to certainty.
Had I encountered Polarity Thinking much earlier in life, I genuinely wonder how much unnecessary suffering I might have spared myself and others from. Polarities are wonderfully humbling that way. They do not eliminate the need for action, discernment, or conviction. They simply keep reminding us that overidentification with one pole eventually produces blindness toward the other.
And we were already struggling with all of this before AI entered the room.
The pace was slower then. Fewer inputs. More time between decisions. More room for reflection, disagreement, second thoughts, relational repair, and collective meaning-making. Task AND Relationship was already difficult enough to leverage wisely. It required patience, humility, discipline, discernment, and enough maturity to remain present inside tensions refusing clean resolution.
Then AI turned the volume up on everything.
We are now surrounded by answers.
Ask almost anything and something coherent appears within seconds. Structured. Plausible. Confident. Often genuinely useful. The temptation is understandable. Use it. Move quickly. Decide. Keep pace.
Though speed changes human perception more than we usually acknowledge.
Faster answers compress reflection. Less space remains for questioning assumptions, recognizing emotional undercurrents, noticing unintended consequences, or asking who may absorb the cost later. Systems begin rewarding immediacy while quietly weakening the developmental capacities complexity actually requires.
And the deeper temptation may not even be technological capability itself.
It may be discomfort avoidance.
I watched this happen recently with a team working through a genuinely difficult issue. The kind of issue requiring people to remain inside uncertainty long enough for something more honest and complete to emerge together. The silence in the room stretched. Discomfort became visible. Finally someone laughed nervously and asked, “Should we just ask ChatGPT?”
Everybody laughed.
Everybody also immediately understood the temptation.
The technology was sitting there offering relief from discomfort, ambiguity, tension, slowness, relational friction, and the vulnerability of not yet knowing. For a few seconds the room could have tipped either direction.
I stayed present with them inside the tension.
Eventually they stayed too.
The conversation deepened. They wrestled through it together. What emerged afterward was imperfect, though deeply owned. Their answer. The human work itself still mattered: the listening, the struggling, the reflection, the trust-building, the collective meaning-making, and the developmental process of becoming more capable together while working through something difficult.
Reflecting later, I realized how narrow the margin had been.
How easily the group could have outsourced the very struggle producing their growth.
And how often modern systems increasingly reward exactly that reflex.
That concerns me well beyond coaching or organizational life.
Democracy itself depends upon human beings remaining willing to stay inside tensions long enough for legitimacy to emerge collectively. Shared governance is slower than domination. Deliberation is slower than command. Relationship is slower than coercion. Listening is slower than certainty. Democracies frustrate people precisely because human beings frustrate people.
The temptation to bypass those slower human processes always intensifies during periods of instability, fear, polarization, economic strain, technological acceleration, and institutional distrust. Strong certainty starts feeling emotionally safer than shared complexity. Faster answers start sounding wiser than difficult discernment. Efficiency begins sounding more attractive than relational friction.
And over time, something essential quietly erodes underneath.
Trust rarely disappears dramatically at first. Curiosity weakens. Questions decrease. Conversations shorten. People stop interrupting momentum because systems increasingly reward acceleration over reflection. Meetings become more efficient while alignment becomes thinner underneath. I have watched teams approve beautifully structured AI-generated strategic frameworks in thirty minutes instead of wrestling together for three difficult hours around assumptions, implications, tradeoffs, and concerns.
Everybody leaves earlier.
Very few leave deeply aligned.
The decisions move faster.
They simply hold less.
The same pattern now appears in many of the larger questions shaping our future: democracy, AI, climate, governance, leadership, education, institutional trust, economics, and collective meaning itself. These are not tensions improved by speed alone. They require staying with difficult questions long enough for deeper forms of understanding to emerge collectively.
The V-Dem Institute’s 2026 report documented the accelerating global movement toward autocratization. Democracies increasingly weaken not primarily through military coups, but through elected leaders promising to cut through complexity, eliminate obstacles, bypass friction, and deliver faster results than democratic processes naturally allow.
That promise has enormous emotional appeal.
Democracy moves slowly because people move slowly. Relationships move slowly. Trust moves slowly. Shared understanding moves slowly.
Authoritarianism moves fast.
That is part of its appeal too.
Clear answers. Strong leadership. Simple narratives. Reduced ambiguity. Less patience required for complexity, dissent, opposition, negotiation, or collective meaning-making.
For a while, it can even feel like relief.
Until the compensations begin.
Brilliance to the neglect of Patience increasingly becomes authoritarianism: certainty over discernment, domination over deliberation, acceleration over legitimacy, confidence over wisdom. Though Patience to the neglect of Brilliance creates its own dangers too. Systems unable to act decisively when action genuinely becomes necessary slowly lose the capacity to interrupt harm effectively.
Both poles matter.
Democracy weakens whenever either side loses relationship with the other long enough.
Which may be part of what Lao Tzu is pointing toward in Chapter 71.
Seeing that you do not know is brilliance because certainty itself shapes perception. What we use to fix systems gradually narrows what we are able to see inside them. The deeper question eventually becomes less about finding the right answer and more about recognizing what may still be missing.
That kind of patience feels increasingly countercultural now. Modern systems reward immediacy, decisiveness, certainty, acceleration, optimization, and visible movement. Remaining present long enough for something more complete to emerge can easily look inefficient by comparison. Though many of the most important realities in human systems still require slower forms of attention: trust, legitimacy, relational repair, discernment, collective meaning-making, and the maturity to recognize when confidence has quietly hardened into overcertainty.
Over time, a steadier form of confidence seems to emerge there. Less urgency to appear certain. Less attachment to immediate resolution. More capacity to remain present while complexity reveals itself more honestly. The movement feels less connected to passivity than participation — staying engaged enough to notice what faster systems increasingly train human beings to overlook.
Maybe brilliance has always required some form of patience.
Especially now.
Because the future may depend less upon whether humanity becomes more technologically capable.
We clearly will.
The deeper question is whether human beings remain willing to do the slower human work wisdom still requires:
listening,
struggling,
reflecting,
repairing,
questioning,
discerning,
meaning-making,
and learning together inside tensions refusing easy answers.
More than most systems reward.
Though over time, it may be one of the few things allowing what we build — relationships, organizations, technologies, democracies, and societies — to actually hold.
INVITATIONS
How do you make decisions under uncertainty, over time? To take a short Polarity Assessment based on the Brilliance And Patience polarity, CLICK HERE
NOTE: the results include Leveraging Action Steps and Early Warnings (to support maximizing upside benefits and minimizing downside limitations).
To use an AI-trained “Chat w/Cliff for Step 1, Seeing” CLICK HERE.
Ready for the Polarity Advantage? Go deeper into Polarity Thinking, see our online self-directed Credentialing and Introduction to Polarity Practice or in-person training with Barry Johnson and me at Kayser Ridge by CLICKING HERE.
