Authority arrives before understanding.
My first Monday in the chair, fourteen decisions were already waiting for me.
I did not yet know the names of the people who had been living with most of them for six months. I did not know which were genuinely urgent and which had simply been left for the new person because nobody else wanted to own them. I did not know the history behind any of it.
And I had to decide anyway.
I want to write to you today from inside that window, because if you have ever taken charge of something you did not build, you know exactly the weight I mean.
The one nobody warns you about.
You hold all of the authority and almost none of the knowledge.
The signature is already yours. The context has not arrived yet.
When you inherit an organisation, you inherit it whole. Not the tidy version in the handover document. The real one, with its history buried in people's memories and its logic hidden inside systems whose reasons no one can quite explain anymore.
You ask why something is done a certain way.
They tell you it has always been done that way.
And they are not being difficult. They genuinely do not know. The person who knew left years ago, and the practice stayed behind, like a path worn across a field long after the gate it led to was bricked up.
So you are making decisions on top of foundations you cannot see.
And the temptation, the genuinely dangerous one, is to pretend you can see them.
Let me tell you something I have never put in a public letter before.
In one of my first weeks, in one of these roles, I found a process that looked obviously wasteful to me.
Slow.
Clumsy.
The kind of thing a sharp new leader is supposed to spot and fix in week one.
So I fixed it.
Quickly. Visibly. With the quiet satisfaction of having shown everyone that a new hand was on the wheel.
It took about three months for the cost to surface.
The process was slow because it was catching a particular kind of error that almost never happened. But when it did happen, it was expensive and very hard to undo.
The clumsiness was not waste.
It was insurance.
Paid for by people who had been burned once and built a defence the rest of us had forgotten the reason for.
I had removed the bandage without asking what the wound was.
Nobody had told me, because I had not asked.
I had walked in performing certainty.
And certainty does not invite anyone to correct it.
That is the lesson I carry from those early weeks more than any other.
The things that look most obviously broken to a newcomer are often the scar tissue of a problem they have not met yet.
Sometimes the most decisive thing you can do in your first month is leave something alone a little longer than your ego would like.
Here is the tension that defines those ninety days, and I am not sure it ever fully resolves.
You cannot wait until you understand everything, because the decisions will not wait.
But you also cannot pretend.
Because the moment you perform a confidence you do not have, you teach everyone around you to perform it back to you.
So you move, but you move honestly.
You make the call with the eighty percent you have, and you say plainly that it is a call made on partial information and may have to change.
You hold the decision and the uncertainty in the same hand.
I used to think this got easier with seniority.
It does not.
The decisions simply get larger.
And the distance between your authority and your understanding often gets wider.
A frontline manager can walk across the room and inspect a problem with their own eyes.
A chief executive is often making decisions about things they will never directly see, relying on information and judgement from people they are still learning whether to trust.
If I could give the version of me sitting at that desk one instruction, it would be small and unglamorous.
Spend the first weeks learning the names of the people who have been quietly carrying the problems.
Not the org chart.
The actual people.
The ones holding something together that would have collapsed without them.
The ones who never got asked.
The ones who assumed the new arrival would change everything without ever finding out what they already knew.
Ask them what they would fix if the decision were theirs.
You will learn more in one afternoon than the handover gave you in a month.
And you will discover the insurance policies before you tear them out.
The reason all of this is on my mind now is that I am, in my own way, standing at the start of one of these windows again.
Not in a corporate chair this time.
On my own next mountain.
Where once again I have a kind of authority over a direction I do not yet fully understand.
And once again the decisions will not wait until I am ready.
What those first ninety days taught me, across more than one of them, is that the goal was never to remove the uncertainty.
It was to stop being ashamed of it.
The leaders I respected most were never the ones who arrived already knowing.
They were the ones who could act decisively and stay genuinely curious in the same breath.
The ones who never confused the size of their authority with the depth of their understanding.
That confusion is the most expensive mistake a new leader can make.
Authority over a thing is not the same as understanding of it.
They arrive on different days.
Sometimes months apart.
And the whole discipline of those early weeks is to keep moving in the gap between them without lying to yourself about which one you actually hold.
So if you are inside your own first ninety days right now, of a role, a company, a venture or a new chapter, you are not supposed to understand it yet.
You are supposed to move carefully.
Find the people who know.
And leave the insurance policies in place until you understand what they are insuring against.
And if you are long past your first ninety days, settled and fluent in the thing you run, the harder question is this.
Are you still curious about it?
Or did you decide, somewhere along the way, that your authority over it was the same as understanding it?
Until the next climb,
Avinash
Every Sunday, The Next Mountain carries one lesson from the climb.
If this letter reminded you of someone standing in their own first ninety days, send it to them.
It is the letter I wish someone had sent me on a certain first Monday.