Most leaders treat hesitation as a problem to overcome — push harder, decide faster, project certainty. But the 13th-century Japanese general Kusunoki Masashige, celebrated in Zen military culture, was legendary precisely for his willingness to hold strategic ambiguity without collapsing into premature action. This resonates strangely well with what psychologist Gary Klein discovered studying expert decision-makers in high-stakes fields: the best leaders don't choose between options A and B — they recognize patterns early enough to generate a third option that wasn't on the table yet. Zen calls this 'mu' — a negative space that isn't emptiness but potential. The practical upshot for your Monday: when you feel pressure to resolve a tension quickly, ask whether you're eliminating ambiguity or just discomfort. Those are different problems with very different solutions.

Where in your current work are you forcing a binary choice that might dissolve entirely if you waited one more day?

Drawing from Zen Buddhism combined with Naturalistic Decision-Making — Gary Klein (Sources of Power, 1998) and Zen military tradition (Kusunoki Masashige)