I heard this metaphor once—drawn from patterns researchers have observed—and it stuck with me:
When a storm approaches, bison run toward it.
It wasn’t offered as fact. It was offered as encouragement—a way of naming something familiar about discomfort and movement.
I’ve thought about it since, not because I needed it to be true, but because it suggests that facing what might otherwise be avoided or uncomfortable is often where answers can be found—and where the work begins.
Why This Myth Survives
The story doesn’t survive because it’s accurate.
It survives because uncertainty is heavy.
When something feels off—an unspoken tension, a delayed decision, a conversation waiting to happen—time stretches. The discomfort isn’t overwhelming at first, but it becomes draining the longer it’s carried.
The metaphor points toward engagement instead of avoidance. Toward movement instead of circling.
While researchers have observed bison moving into storms, there’s no scientific evidence showing they do so intentionally to reduce discomfort. Like most animals, they respond to conditions—sometimes moving into the weather, sometimes away from it, sometimes holding their ground.
What matters isn’t the literal behavior.
It’s the orientation.
Heading Toward the Storm
Heading toward the storm is a choice to stop working around discomfort and engage it directly. Not with force or urgency, but with enough presence to stay with what’s real.
Avoidance stretches the storm.
When you turn toward what’s uncomfortable, it stops being something you manage from a distance—or fear—and loses its power.
Like the storm itself, discomfort doesn’t need to be solved all at once.
It needs to be entered.
This same principle shows up clearly in how teams reflect on their work, especially during experiment-driven retrospectives.
Through the Storm
Facing discomfort doesn’t make it disappear, but it changes the experience entirely. What felt overwhelming from the outside becomes specific once you’re in it. What lived in your head becomes tangible.
Storms are hardest when you stay on the edges.
Once you step in, the guessing stops. You’re no longer preparing, rehearsing, or bracing. You’re responding to what’s actually there.
This is where the signal begins to separate from the noise.
What matters becomes clearer.
What doesn’t, falls away.
This shift—from managing discomfort to engaging it—is central to the kind of formative work that helps individuals and teams move forward with clarity.
On the Other Side
On the other side, you don’t find relief because the storm was easy.
You find it because you faced it.
The conversation has been had.
The decision is no longer pending.
The tension isn’t being carried internally.
What replaces it is confidence—not bravado, but the quiet confidence that comes from knowing you didn’t avoid what mattered.
Resilience builds here too. You’ve moved through something difficult and come out intact.
That changes how the next storm feels.
From Individuals to Teams and Leaders
This starts as personal work.
It shows up in the conversations you don’t want to have and the decisions you keep delaying.
But it never stays personal.
Unfaced discomfort creates noise. In teams, it shows up as side conversations, misalignment, and unspoken assumptions. In leaders, it often looks like waiting for clarity that never arrives.
Teams feel storms long before they talk about them.
When discomfort goes unaddressed, energy gets spent managing around it. What starts small becomes structural if it’s left untouched.
Leaders don’t find the signal by waiting for the noise to quiet on its own.
They find it by engaging what’s real.
Heading toward the storm early changes the system. It keeps tension from hardening and prevents discomfort from becoming culture.
Closing
Whether or not bison actually run toward storms with intention is almost beside the point.
The pattern endures because it points toward something that works.
Discomfort doesn’t shorten on its own.
It shortens when it’s faced.
That’s often where the signal emerges from the noise.
And where the work begins.
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