Negative Space: Leadership, Moose and the things we don't know we don't know
One of the first things I learned about driving in Alaska was how to look for something I couldn't see.
Moose are surprisingly difficult to see in the dark. That might seem strange considering a full-grown moose can weigh well over a thousand pounds and stand taller than most cars. But against the darkness of an Alaskan winter, their dark bodies can simply disappear into the landscape. And when something that large disappears, learning how to find it matters.
A lifelong Alaskan friend taught me the trick. "Don't look for the moose," he told me. "Look for the negative space." Sometimes the most important thing you can see is what isn't there.
For nearly eight years, I lived and pastored on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, where much of life revolved around a single highway running from Soldotna through Kenai and north toward Nikiski. The church I pastored was on that road. The schools where my children attended and where I sometimes substitute taught were connected by it. Safeway was there. Walmart was there.
If you were going somewhere, chances were pretty good you were going to spend at least part of the trip on that highway. The State of Alaska did a remarkably good job keeping it relatively clear through the winter. The moose apparently appreciated the state's efforts to maintain their favorite walking trail.
That becomes particularly problematic during an Alaskan winter because daylight is a precious commodity. As December approached, the sun might not make an appearance until around 10:30 in the morning and could disappear again by three or four in the afternoon. So, I spent a lot of time driving on that highway in the dark. And in Alaska, darkness has moose in it.
I had hit deer before moving to Alaska. They can certainly damage a vehicle. A moose is an entirely different proposition. They stand high enough that a vehicle may take out their legs and then receive the rest of the animal through the windshield. I saw what happened when vehicles encountered moose, including much larger vehicles than mine. I had no desire to join that particular club.
Fortunately, I had a good friend who had lived in Alaska his entire life. He was a science teacher at the local high school and had spent years working with Alaska Fish and Game during the summers. He knew wildlife, and as far as I knew, despite a lifetime of driving Alaskan roads, he had never hit a moose. That made him an expert worth listening to, and his advice was surprisingly simple. "Look for the negative space."
Moose are remarkably difficult to see at night. Their dark bodies can disappear against the landscape, and you cannot necessarily count on the familiar reflection from an animal's eyes to alert you to their presence. So instead of staring into the darkness hoping to recognize the outline of a moose, my friend taught me to watch the landscape. Trees. Brush. Snow. The shoulder of the road. You learned what should be there. And then you watched for the place where something seemed to be missing. Negative space.
Sometimes what looked like an empty place in the landscape wasn't empty at all. Something very large was occupying it. I wasn't simply learning how to see moose. I was learning how to notice what I couldn't see.
When the Negative Space Moved
I learned just how important that lesson was one winter morning. It was early, still dark, and I was driving from my house toward Nikiski. I don't remember exactly where I was going or what I needed to do when I got there. I remember that there weren't many cars on the highway. I was listening to a book and enjoying that rare quiet that exists before the chaos of the day begins. By then I had been in Alaska long enough to understand negative space. I knew to keep a broad awareness of the shoulders of the highway rather than staring straight ahead.
Then something registered. I still don't know whether I saw movement, noticed something in my peripheral vision, or simply had that strange intuition that tells you something isn't right. I looked to my right. The negative space moved. A large cow moose was coming across the highway. I slammed on the brakes. That seemed like an excellent idea until I remembered that I was driving on an Alaskan highway in winter.
The road was relatively clear, but there was still ice. My Dodge Journey began to fishtail. For a few moments I was trying to control the car while simultaneously watching an enormous moose move directly across the space my vehicle had occupied only seconds earlier. Somehow, we missed each other. It was close. Very close. I remember thinking that one of her back legs couldn't have been more than a few inches from my driver's-side mirror.
Then everything stopped. My car sat in the highway. The moose stood on the other side. I looked at her. She looked at me. She gave me what I can only describe as the Alaskan-moose equivalent of, "Idiot. Watch where you're going." Then she lowered her head and went back to eating.
I sat there for a moment with my heart somewhere near my throat, looking at an animal whose belly seemed almost level with the roof of my Dodge Journey. She was enormous, and I remember thinking she might even have been pregnant. I have no grand explanation for why everything happened exactly as it did that morning. I only remember sitting there thinking that the Lord had spared my life. I have also thought many times since about what my friend had taught me. Look for the negative space.
What We Don't Know
Leadership has a great deal in common with driving through Alaska in the dark. There are things we know. There are also things we know we don't know. Those are usually manageable. If I know that I don't understand something, I can ask a question. I can read. I can research. I can call somebody who has spent his life studying wildlife and ask him how not to hit a moose.
But there is another category that is much more dangerous. There are things we don't know that we don't know. We don't ask questions about them because we don't know there is a question to ask. That is difficult for leaders because most of us think we are a little smarter than we really are. I certainly do. Experience can actually make the problem worse.
Experience is enormously valuable. After years of ministry or organizational leadership, we begin recognizing patterns. Someone tells us about a conflict and we think, "I've seen this before." A church encounters a problem, and we remember another congregation that experienced something similar. We begin drawing from a reservoir of accumulated knowledge. That's part of wisdom.
But experience carries a temptation. Eventually, "I've seen something like this before" can quietly become "I know what this is." Sometimes we do. Sometimes there is a moose standing in the dark. The danger was there before I saw her. My headlights didn't create the moose. My awareness didn't make her real. My inability to see her clearly certainly didn't make her less capable of totaling my car. Reality does not wait for the leader to recognize it before becoming real.
Wisdom Knows Its Limits
Paul wrote something to the Corinthians that has increasingly struck me as an important posture for leadership: "If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know" (1 Corinthians 8:2). Paul wasn't writing a leadership manual. He was dealing with questions of knowledge, conscience, love, and food offered to idols. But his warning about knowledge reaches much farther.
Knowledge can produce confidence. It can also produce conceit. Proverbs approaches the same problem from another direction: "If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame" (Proverbs 18:13). A few verses later we read: "The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him" (Proverbs 18:17).
The first explanation sounds right. The pieces fit. We understand the situation. Then somebody else walks into the room carrying information we didn't possess. Suddenly the landscape changes. Biblical wisdom isn't knowing everything. Biblical wisdom includes knowing that we don't.
For the Christian leader, there ought to be an additional reason for this kind of humility. We believe in an omniscient God. Which means we are not Him. That theological distinction is worth remembering before we become too impressed with our own assessment of a situation.
Negative Space in Leadership
After enough years of leadership, you begin realizing that negative space is everywhere. It can be the person who used to contribute during meetings but has stopped talking. The family that quietly disappeared from church. The ministry everyone assumes is healthy because nobody is complaining. The neighborhood that changed while the church continued operating according to a twenty-year-old picture of the community. The volunteer everybody depends upon but nobody has asked how they're doing. The pastor who keeps saying, "I'm fine." The financial practice nobody remembers starting. The person who is never invited into the room.
Sometimes negative space isn't even a problem. Sometimes it is possibility. Who aren't we reaching? What aren't we trying? Whose gifts have we overlooked? Where might God already be working that doesn't fit neatly into the categories we normally use? The question isn't merely, "What am I seeing?" Sometimes wisdom requires asking, "What am I not seeing?"
Transition and Negative Space
Leadership transitions have a way of making these questions unavoidable. Every new leadership position comes with things you know you need to learn. There are budgets to understand, names to remember, organizational charts to study, policies to read, and relationships to develop. Those are the visible things.
Then there is everything else. Organizations, and churches in particular, contain enormous amounts of institutional knowledge that have never been written down. There are histories, relationships, wounds, victories, habits, expectations, unwritten rules, and assumptions that everybody who has been around long enough simply knows. The new leader doesn't.
Questions I have increasingly learned to ask during transition is: What does everybody else know that they assume I know? What did the previous leader know that nobody thought needed to be written down? And perhaps the most unsettling question: What question haven't I learned to ask yet?
Those questions require humility because leadership transitions create pressure to demonstrate leadership. We want to do something, change something, fix something, move something. We see something that doesn't seem right and our instinct is to hit the brakes. Which brings me back to that highway.
Seeing the Moose Isn't Enough
I saw the moose. That was good. Then I slammed on the brakes. That was understandable. But I was driving on ice. Recognizing a problem correctly does not guarantee that we will respond to it wisely. Leaders can correctly identify a problem and still make things considerably worse through panic, speed, overcorrection, or simply acting before they understand enough.
This may be particularly tempting during transition. We discover something strange and immediately want to fix it. Change the structure, rewrite the policy, end the program, or start another one. Sometimes moving the furniture is the change we see but is a moose in the dark. Sometimes that is exactly what leadership requires. Sometimes we have just sent the car sideways across an icy highway.
Recognition has to be followed by discernment. Seeing something should lead us to another question: Do I understand this well enough yet to act? Sometimes the answer will be yes. Sometimes wisdom means slowing down, asking another question, finding someone who knows the landscape better than we do, and looking again.
Learning to Drive in the Dark
I didn't stop driving after that morning. I lived in Alaska for years afterward. I still had sermons to preach, children to raise, schools to visit, groceries to buy, people to see, and places to go. You cannot live your life terrified that somewhere in the darkness there might be a moose.
Leadership works the same way. Humility does not require paralysis. We have to move. We make decisions with incomplete information. We lead without knowing everything. We take the next step without being able to see every consequence that step might produce.
That's not necessarily recklessness. That's life. The question is how we travel. Good leaders listen and they ask questions, seek counsel, and learn history. They pay attention to people's faces and notice who is present and who isn't. Most importantly they pray and become a little suspicious of easy answers, especially their own. And every once in a while, instead of asking only, "What am I seeing?" a good leader will ask, "What am I not seeing?"
Headlights are wonderful things. They illuminate enough of the road for us to keep moving. But they do not illuminate everything. Leadership is much the same. We rarely get the entire landscape. God usually gives us enough light for the stretch of road in front of us and then asks us to move faithfully through it. So, we move but we move humbly.
Good leaders learn to watch the road in front of them. Wise leaders learn to watch the edges too. They listen for what isn't being said, notice who isn't present, question what everyone assumes, and remain humble enough to believe there may still be something in the darkness they haven't learned to see.
You cannot spend your life afraid that a moose might step onto the highway. You still have somewhere to go. But it helps to remember that the reach of your headlights is not the boundary of reality. Sometimes wisdom means learning to look for the negative space.
Moose are surprisingly difficult to see in the dark. That might seem strange considering a full-grown moose can weigh well over a thousand pounds and stand taller than most cars. But against the darkness of an Alaskan winter, their dark bodies can simply disappear into the landscape. And when something that large disappears, learning how to find it matters.
A lifelong Alaskan friend taught me the trick. "Don't look for the moose," he told me. "Look for the negative space." Sometimes the most important thing you can see is what isn't there.
For nearly eight years, I lived and pastored on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, where much of life revolved around a single highway running from Soldotna through Kenai and north toward Nikiski. The church I pastored was on that road. The schools where my children attended and where I sometimes substitute taught were connected by it. Safeway was there. Walmart was there.
If you were going somewhere, chances were pretty good you were going to spend at least part of the trip on that highway. The State of Alaska did a remarkably good job keeping it relatively clear through the winter. The moose apparently appreciated the state's efforts to maintain their favorite walking trail.
That becomes particularly problematic during an Alaskan winter because daylight is a precious commodity. As December approached, the sun might not make an appearance until around 10:30 in the morning and could disappear again by three or four in the afternoon. So, I spent a lot of time driving on that highway in the dark. And in Alaska, darkness has moose in it.
I had hit deer before moving to Alaska. They can certainly damage a vehicle. A moose is an entirely different proposition. They stand high enough that a vehicle may take out their legs and then receive the rest of the animal through the windshield. I saw what happened when vehicles encountered moose, including much larger vehicles than mine. I had no desire to join that particular club.
Fortunately, I had a good friend who had lived in Alaska his entire life. He was a science teacher at the local high school and had spent years working with Alaska Fish and Game during the summers. He knew wildlife, and as far as I knew, despite a lifetime of driving Alaskan roads, he had never hit a moose. That made him an expert worth listening to, and his advice was surprisingly simple. "Look for the negative space."
Moose are remarkably difficult to see at night. Their dark bodies can disappear against the landscape, and you cannot necessarily count on the familiar reflection from an animal's eyes to alert you to their presence. So instead of staring into the darkness hoping to recognize the outline of a moose, my friend taught me to watch the landscape. Trees. Brush. Snow. The shoulder of the road. You learned what should be there. And then you watched for the place where something seemed to be missing. Negative space.
Sometimes what looked like an empty place in the landscape wasn't empty at all. Something very large was occupying it. I wasn't simply learning how to see moose. I was learning how to notice what I couldn't see.
When the Negative Space Moved
I learned just how important that lesson was one winter morning. It was early, still dark, and I was driving from my house toward Nikiski. I don't remember exactly where I was going or what I needed to do when I got there. I remember that there weren't many cars on the highway. I was listening to a book and enjoying that rare quiet that exists before the chaos of the day begins. By then I had been in Alaska long enough to understand negative space. I knew to keep a broad awareness of the shoulders of the highway rather than staring straight ahead.
Then something registered. I still don't know whether I saw movement, noticed something in my peripheral vision, or simply had that strange intuition that tells you something isn't right. I looked to my right. The negative space moved. A large cow moose was coming across the highway. I slammed on the brakes. That seemed like an excellent idea until I remembered that I was driving on an Alaskan highway in winter.
The road was relatively clear, but there was still ice. My Dodge Journey began to fishtail. For a few moments I was trying to control the car while simultaneously watching an enormous moose move directly across the space my vehicle had occupied only seconds earlier. Somehow, we missed each other. It was close. Very close. I remember thinking that one of her back legs couldn't have been more than a few inches from my driver's-side mirror.
Then everything stopped. My car sat in the highway. The moose stood on the other side. I looked at her. She looked at me. She gave me what I can only describe as the Alaskan-moose equivalent of, "Idiot. Watch where you're going." Then she lowered her head and went back to eating.
I sat there for a moment with my heart somewhere near my throat, looking at an animal whose belly seemed almost level with the roof of my Dodge Journey. She was enormous, and I remember thinking she might even have been pregnant. I have no grand explanation for why everything happened exactly as it did that morning. I only remember sitting there thinking that the Lord had spared my life. I have also thought many times since about what my friend had taught me. Look for the negative space.
What We Don't Know
Leadership has a great deal in common with driving through Alaska in the dark. There are things we know. There are also things we know we don't know. Those are usually manageable. If I know that I don't understand something, I can ask a question. I can read. I can research. I can call somebody who has spent his life studying wildlife and ask him how not to hit a moose.
But there is another category that is much more dangerous. There are things we don't know that we don't know. We don't ask questions about them because we don't know there is a question to ask. That is difficult for leaders because most of us think we are a little smarter than we really are. I certainly do. Experience can actually make the problem worse.
Experience is enormously valuable. After years of ministry or organizational leadership, we begin recognizing patterns. Someone tells us about a conflict and we think, "I've seen this before." A church encounters a problem, and we remember another congregation that experienced something similar. We begin drawing from a reservoir of accumulated knowledge. That's part of wisdom.
But experience carries a temptation. Eventually, "I've seen something like this before" can quietly become "I know what this is." Sometimes we do. Sometimes there is a moose standing in the dark. The danger was there before I saw her. My headlights didn't create the moose. My awareness didn't make her real. My inability to see her clearly certainly didn't make her less capable of totaling my car. Reality does not wait for the leader to recognize it before becoming real.
Wisdom Knows Its Limits
Paul wrote something to the Corinthians that has increasingly struck me as an important posture for leadership: "If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know" (1 Corinthians 8:2). Paul wasn't writing a leadership manual. He was dealing with questions of knowledge, conscience, love, and food offered to idols. But his warning about knowledge reaches much farther.
Knowledge can produce confidence. It can also produce conceit. Proverbs approaches the same problem from another direction: "If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame" (Proverbs 18:13). A few verses later we read: "The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him" (Proverbs 18:17).
The first explanation sounds right. The pieces fit. We understand the situation. Then somebody else walks into the room carrying information we didn't possess. Suddenly the landscape changes. Biblical wisdom isn't knowing everything. Biblical wisdom includes knowing that we don't.
For the Christian leader, there ought to be an additional reason for this kind of humility. We believe in an omniscient God. Which means we are not Him. That theological distinction is worth remembering before we become too impressed with our own assessment of a situation.
Negative Space in Leadership
After enough years of leadership, you begin realizing that negative space is everywhere. It can be the person who used to contribute during meetings but has stopped talking. The family that quietly disappeared from church. The ministry everyone assumes is healthy because nobody is complaining. The neighborhood that changed while the church continued operating according to a twenty-year-old picture of the community. The volunteer everybody depends upon but nobody has asked how they're doing. The pastor who keeps saying, "I'm fine." The financial practice nobody remembers starting. The person who is never invited into the room.
Sometimes negative space isn't even a problem. Sometimes it is possibility. Who aren't we reaching? What aren't we trying? Whose gifts have we overlooked? Where might God already be working that doesn't fit neatly into the categories we normally use? The question isn't merely, "What am I seeing?" Sometimes wisdom requires asking, "What am I not seeing?"
Transition and Negative Space
Leadership transitions have a way of making these questions unavoidable. Every new leadership position comes with things you know you need to learn. There are budgets to understand, names to remember, organizational charts to study, policies to read, and relationships to develop. Those are the visible things.
Then there is everything else. Organizations, and churches in particular, contain enormous amounts of institutional knowledge that have never been written down. There are histories, relationships, wounds, victories, habits, expectations, unwritten rules, and assumptions that everybody who has been around long enough simply knows. The new leader doesn't.
Questions I have increasingly learned to ask during transition is: What does everybody else know that they assume I know? What did the previous leader know that nobody thought needed to be written down? And perhaps the most unsettling question: What question haven't I learned to ask yet?
Those questions require humility because leadership transitions create pressure to demonstrate leadership. We want to do something, change something, fix something, move something. We see something that doesn't seem right and our instinct is to hit the brakes. Which brings me back to that highway.
Seeing the Moose Isn't Enough
I saw the moose. That was good. Then I slammed on the brakes. That was understandable. But I was driving on ice. Recognizing a problem correctly does not guarantee that we will respond to it wisely. Leaders can correctly identify a problem and still make things considerably worse through panic, speed, overcorrection, or simply acting before they understand enough.
This may be particularly tempting during transition. We discover something strange and immediately want to fix it. Change the structure, rewrite the policy, end the program, or start another one. Sometimes moving the furniture is the change we see but is a moose in the dark. Sometimes that is exactly what leadership requires. Sometimes we have just sent the car sideways across an icy highway.
Recognition has to be followed by discernment. Seeing something should lead us to another question: Do I understand this well enough yet to act? Sometimes the answer will be yes. Sometimes wisdom means slowing down, asking another question, finding someone who knows the landscape better than we do, and looking again.
Learning to Drive in the Dark
I didn't stop driving after that morning. I lived in Alaska for years afterward. I still had sermons to preach, children to raise, schools to visit, groceries to buy, people to see, and places to go. You cannot live your life terrified that somewhere in the darkness there might be a moose.
Leadership works the same way. Humility does not require paralysis. We have to move. We make decisions with incomplete information. We lead without knowing everything. We take the next step without being able to see every consequence that step might produce.
That's not necessarily recklessness. That's life. The question is how we travel. Good leaders listen and they ask questions, seek counsel, and learn history. They pay attention to people's faces and notice who is present and who isn't. Most importantly they pray and become a little suspicious of easy answers, especially their own. And every once in a while, instead of asking only, "What am I seeing?" a good leader will ask, "What am I not seeing?"
Headlights are wonderful things. They illuminate enough of the road for us to keep moving. But they do not illuminate everything. Leadership is much the same. We rarely get the entire landscape. God usually gives us enough light for the stretch of road in front of us and then asks us to move faithfully through it. So, we move but we move humbly.
Good leaders learn to watch the road in front of them. Wise leaders learn to watch the edges too. They listen for what isn't being said, notice who isn't present, question what everyone assumes, and remain humble enough to believe there may still be something in the darkness they haven't learned to see.
You cannot spend your life afraid that a moose might step onto the highway. You still have somewhere to go. But it helps to remember that the reach of your headlights is not the boundary of reality. Sometimes wisdom means learning to look for the negative space.
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