PERCEPTION: CLAIMING LEADERSHIP

Depending on Diversity

When a paradigm no longer provides reliable guidance for how to live in the world, the most common response is to grasp hold of it more firmly.

As it dawns on us that we don’t know how things work—that it’s not working—we become more insistent that it has to work just as we thought it did. Opening to the uncertainty, to the need for a new way of seeing, is not what we humans do well. We use our big brains and our powers of cognition to resist change. Our skills at manipulating information lead us to become more fundamentalist, more certain.

We see this type of fundamentalism in too many leaders these days as they grasp for handholds in practices that didn’t work in the past, but that they ...

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