Editor’s note: Besides tracking technological advancements and innovations, our author is a Juilliard-trained musical composer. Listen to “Intelligibility Reset”, an original extemporaneous improvisation by Howard Lieberman, composed for this column.
When the world becomes difficult to understand, the problem is not always a lack of information but a loss of intelligibility. Signals blur, assumptions go unchecked, and the frameworks we rely on begin to distort rather than clarify. In moments like these, pushing harder often makes things worse. What is required instead is a reset, not of activity, but of perception. By reexamining the models and filters through which we interpret reality, we can begin to separate signal from noise and restore a clearer sense of direction.
When orientation breaks down
There are moments when the world feels like it is moving faster than our ability to understand it. Information arrives in fragments, events unfold without clear context, and the signals we rely on to make sense of things begin to contradict one another. In times like these, the instinct is often to push harder, to gather more information, and to try to force clarity out of confusion. But there is another approach, one that is both simpler and more powerful: reset. Not as a reaction to failure, but as a deliberate act of recalibration. We tend to think of a reset as something we do when things break but, in reality, it is far more useful as a proactive tool, a way to pause long enough to ask a different set of questions. What assumptions am I making? What models am I using to interpret what is happening? Are those models still valid? Because when the environment changes, even slightly, the models that once worked can quietly become liabilities.
There is also a more serious dimension to this than we often acknowledge. When people begin to feel that the world as they know it is ending, something fundamental shifts. If the future no longer feels accessible, if the systems they rely on appear to be collapsing or incoherent, a sense of disenfranchisement can take hold. In extreme cases, that loss of orientation can lead to destructive behavior, not because people are inherently destructive, but because they no longer feel they have anything to lose. While that may sound distant, the underlying mechanism is not. When the connection between effort and outcome breaks down, when meaning becomes unclear, people disengage, sometimes quietly and sometimes dramatically. This is why intelligibility matters, and why the loss of it is not just uncomfortable, but destabilizing. A reset, in this context, is not just a personal productivity tool. It is a way of restoring orientation, of reestablishing a sense that actions still connect to outcomes and that choices still matter.
Models shape the space we see
There is a useful way to think about this that comes from physics. In relativity, mass shapes space; the presence of mass curves the geometry around it, influencing how objects move and interact, and the larger the mass, the greater the curvature. Something similar happens with the models we carry in our minds. Our assumptions, experiences, and frameworks create a kind of conceptual mass that shapes the space through which we interpret events. They influence what we notice, what we ignore, and what we believe is possible. When those models are well aligned with reality, they provide stability and predictive power. But when the world shifts and the models do not, that same mass can distort perception. We continue to see what we expect to see, even when it no longer matches what is actually happening. In that sense, the problem is not a lack of information, but the inertia of outdated frameworks, and a reset is how we reduce that inertia, how we lighten or reconfigure the conceptual mass so that the space we are navigating more accurately reflects current reality.
This becomes even more critical when the signals coming from leadership are inconsistent or incoherent. In stable environments, leadership helps align perception by providing shared reference points and creating a degree of predictability that allows individuals and organizations to coordinate effectively. But when those signals become fragmented or contradictory, they introduce noise into the system, making it harder to distinguish signal from interpretation. At that point, even experienced individuals can find themselves disoriented, not because they lack capability, but because the external cues they rely on are no longer reliable. Continuing to operate with old assumptions under these conditions is not just ineffective, it can lead directly to poor outcomes, which again points to the need for reset.
From noise to intelligibility
There is also a more literal way to understand this idea of noise. During the years I worked at Bose, one of the breakthroughs we were involved in was noise-canceling headphones. They were almost miraculous in certain environments. A pilot, for example, might struggle to understand communication from the tower because of engine noise, but when those headphones were put on, the intelligibility went way up. Nothing about the message changed, only the noise was reduced, and that made all the difference. It is hard not to see this as a metaphor for the moment we are in now. If much of what we are receiving is a mix of signal and incoherent noise, then simply increasing the volume of input is not the answer. More information does not necessarily produce more clarity and often does the opposite. What we may need instead is the equivalent of cognitive noise cancellation, not shutting out the world, but selectively reducing what does not contribute to understanding, filtering out contradictions, amplification of extremes, and the constant churn of partial information so that what remains can actually be heard. A reset, in this sense, is not just a change in thinking, but a reconfiguration of what we allow into our perceptual field.
What became clear to me recently, through a discussion with my men’s group, is how uncomfortable this process can be. We like to believe we know what is going on and that we understand what to do next, but in periods of real uncertainty, that confidence is often an illusion. There is something deeply important about being willing to say, “I don’t know,” not as a failure, but as a starting point, because the moment you admit that your current model may be incomplete, you create space for a new one to emerge. In innovation, this is where everything begins, not with answers, but with better questions. This aligns with something I have been exploring for some time now: the idea of scaffolding. We are always operating within some form of scaffolding, a set of structures that shape how we perceive and respond to the world, guiding our attention, filtering our inputs, and influencing our decisions. But scaffolding is not fixed, it can and must be updated, and a reset is, in many ways, a scaffolding adjustment, a way of modifying the framework through which we interpret reality so that it better reflects the conditions we are actually in.
A reset, then, is not a retreat, it is a strategic repositioning. It allows you to step out of automatic behavior and re-engage with intention, to choose your direction rather than simply react to circumstances, and perhaps most importantly, it gives you permission to evolve, to let go of what no longer fits, to update your lens, and to realign with what actually makes sense now rather than what made sense before. In a world that is increasingly noisy, this may be one of the most valuable capabilities we have, not certainty, not speed, but intelligibility.
