Category: Inspiration

Morgan Folk writes:

Wow. I am half way through.

I have looked into various kinds of schooling philosophy.

This man was a teacher for 30 years in New York and he spent time in the low income schools as well as in the affluent schools.

This book feels like truth but also feels offensive ??

He discusses the design of compulsory schooling and how the various constructs come together to make (intentionally) compliant people who consume and trust authorities. Woah.

A great and relatively short read that I am definitely enjoying.

If you have read the story of the life of Abraham Lincoln you would appreciate that it is not how many times you fail that is important, it is that fact that you get up and try again after each failure.

I had a discussion with someone on the subject of our disagreement on US politics. They had told me in effect that Trump was bad because he incited the storming of the Capitol. I sent that person a small sample of the inflammatory remarks by four Communist US politicians regarding the Antifa/BLM rioting.

The person’s response was to suggest we not talk about politics because we have different opinions and we are each only going to pull up examples to support our own opinion.

At that point it struck me that the person had zero interest in the aquisition or acceptance of data to determine truth but only in gathering data to support their apparently fixed and unchangeable viewpoint. In other words they operated like a one man debating team rather than a data collection and evaluation processing unit. This is, of course, why nobody wins an argument. All each person’s communication does is more firmly fix the other person’s viewpoint.

Opinions, viewpoints, fixed ideas and conclusions are all well and good but to use them instead of and in contradiction to data, facts and evidence is a sure path to destruction and death, individually and collectively. Evidence Western civilisation circa 2021.

The situation has deteriorated to a point where most people do not (and perhaps cannot) differentiate between facts and opinions.

I was struck by this recent observation from Timothy Clark in his HBR article on cultivating “Intellectual Bravery”:

“Intellectual bravery is a willingness to disagree, dissent, or challenge the status quo in a setting of social risk in which you could be embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way. When intellectual bravery disappears, organizations develop patterns of willful blindness. Bureaucracy buries boldness. Efficiency crushes creativity. From there, the status quo calcifies and stagnation sets in.

“The responsibility for creating a culture of intellectual bravery lies in leadership. As a leader, you set the tone, create the vibe, and define the prevailing norms. Whether or not your company has a culture of intellectual bravery depends on your ability to establish a pattern of rewarded rather than punished vulnerability.”

You can tell a lot about an organization by what gets punished and what gets rewarded.  Stanford professor Bob Sutton famously observed twenty years ago that many organizations follow an unspoken motto to “reward success and inaction, punish failure.”

He advised instead to “reward success and failure, punish inaction.”