The more responsibility you take on at work and in life, the more often you face gray area problems, and these problems com in all shapes and sizes. When you face a gray area problem, you have usually done a lot of hard work —on your own and often with other people— to understand a problem or a situation. You’ve analyzed everthing carefully. But in your own mind you keep going back and forth about what is really going on and about the right next steps.

When you face really hard decisions, there is no way to escape the personal responsibility of choosing, committing, acting, and living with the consequences.

When you grapple successfully with a gray area problem, you are testing and developing your skills as a manager. A basic test of whether you are ready for more responsibility in an organization isn’t how well you manage routine situations; it is how well you handle really hard, uncertain, important challenges. This is because gray area problems are the core of a manager’s work.

When you face a gray area problem at work, you should work through it as a manager and resolve it as a human being.

Approaching a gray area as a manager means working with other people to get the right information on a problem, analyze the data thoughtfully and rigorously, and look for practical solutions to problems. Then, you have to resolve the problem as a human being. This means grappling with the problem, not just as an analyst or a manager or a leader, but as a person. It means making decisions on the basis of your judgment —which means drawing on your intelligence, feelings, imagination, life experience, and, ata a deeper level, your sense of what really matters at work and in life.

Summing-up: Algorithms can’t solve the hard human problems of life and work. Managers who face these problems have to learn all they can from rigorous analysis, and then they also have to think deeply —as human beings— about what they really should do.