You Don’t Need the Whole Staircase, Just the Next Step
What Jim Collins’ “Simplex Stepping” Teaches About Building a Coaching Career
Principle: Simplex Stepping
Jim Collins is one of my favorite researchers, and I’m currently working my way through his newest book, What to Make of a Life. In it, he shares a framework he calls simplex stepping, built from an idea he traces to the mathematician George Dantzig.
Dantzig invented the simplex method in the 1940s, an algorithm for solving problems with too many variables to see all at once. Instead of trying to map the entire solution space, the method finds a starting point and moves to the next best neighboring point, over and over, always improving, until it reaches the optimal answer. You never need to see the whole shape of the problem. You only need the best next move from where you’re already standing.
Collins applies the same logic to a career. Simplex stepping means taking the best step visible right in front of you without needing to know your ultimate destination, then from that new position, identifying the next best step. He illustrates it with Katharine Graham, who spent seven years simplex stepping her way into her leadership identity at the Washington Post before the Pentagon Papers and Watergate gave her the moment to demonstrate who she’d become. She didn’t have a ten-year plan sitting in a drawer in 1963. She took the next right step, then the next, until she was ready for a moment nobody could have scheduled in advance.
Most career advice assumes the opposite. Map the destination first, then plan backward. Simplex stepping suggests that’s backward for a reason. You often can’t see the destination clearly enough to plan toward it, and waiting until you can is its own way of never moving.
Perspective: Stop Waiting for the Whole Staircase Before You Move
Coaches love to ask young practitioners where they see themselves in five years. It’s a reasonable question and it usually produces an answer that’s mostly fiction, because nobody actually knows, and pretending to know teaches people to perform certainty instead of building it.
What actually predicts whether someone builds a real career isn’t the quality of their long-term plan. It’s whether they take the next visible step in front of them and pay enough attention to recognize the one after that. The practitioners who end up somewhere worth being rarely got there by executing a five-year plan. They got there by being unusually good at noticing the next right move and taking it, repeatedly, long before the destination was visible.
If you’re mentoring someone who’s stuck because they can’t see where the path leads, the answer isn’t to help them build a more detailed map. It’s to help them get honest about the next step in front of them right now, and trust that the step after that will become visible once they’ve taken it.
Story: Jim Collins’ Bug Book
In his twenties, Collins was, in his own description, lost in the fog of youth. His mentor at Stanford, Rochelle Myers, gave him an assignment that sounds almost too simple to matter. Observe yourself without judgment. Study yourself like a bug.
Collins started carrying a small composition notebook, writing down observations about himself without knowing what he was looking for or where it was leading. No plan, no destination, just the discipline of noticing.
One day at work, he was asked to make sense of the early days of network computing for his team, to take something genuinely complicated and explain it clearly enough for people to actually use it. Something clicked. Looking back through the bug book, he recognized a pattern he’d been recording without realizing what it meant. He was wired, in his own term, to take complexity and make it teachable. Not a skill he’d trained into himself. A capacity that had been there the whole time, waiting to be noticed.
He didn’t set out with a plan to become one of the most read business researchers of his generation. He took the next visible step and wrote down what he noticed. Only years later could he see the shape of where all those small steps had actually taken him.
The bug book wasn’t a plan. It was a discipline of paying close enough attention to recognize the next right step when it showed up, and having the record to prove the pattern was real instead of just a feeling.
Question:
What’s the smallest next visible step you’ve been putting off because you can’t see the whole staircase yet? What would it look like to start writing down what you actually notice about yourself and your work, instead of waiting for a five-year plan to arrive before you move?
Closing Thought:
You don’t need to see the whole staircase.
You need the next step, and the discipline to notice it.
The plan usually isn’t ready before you are.
Pay attention to what you’re actually wired for, not what you think you should want.
Take the step in front of you. The next one will become visible from there.
Until next week,
Caleb Cousens
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