McGee’s Musings

Ross Mayfield points to an interesting post by Bob Sutton at Stanford. Ross nicely captures the essence of Bob’s post.

More important, for my selfish purposes, is learning that Sutton is blogging. Sutton is a Professor at Stanford’s Engineering School, the author of several recent, excellent, books on management and innovation and one of the vocal proponents of the design dimension of management in today’s knowledge-based organizational world. I’ve added his blog, Work Matters, to my subscriptions and commend it to you as well.

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held

Bob Sutton, who was an inspiration around the time we started Socialtext, is becoming one of my favorite bloggers. I’ve been sharing his posts like The Snowstorm Study in my internal blog and talking too much about the No Asshole Rule. But Strong Opinions, Weakly Held is an absolute gem:

…Perhaps the best description I’ve ever seen of how wise people act comes from the amazing folks at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future. A couple years ago, I was talking the Institute’s Bob Johansen about wisdom, and he explained that – to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – they advise people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.” Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to “see” and “hear” evidence that clashes with your opinions. This is what psychologists sometimes call the problem of “confirmation bias.”