Terry Newell is currently director of his own firm, Leadership for a Responsible Society. His work focuses on values-based leadership, ethics, and decision making. A former Air Force officer, Terry also previously served as Director of the Horace Mann Learning Center, the training arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and as Dean of Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute. Terry is co-editor and author of The Trusted Leader: Building the Relationships That Make Government Work (CQ Press, 2011). He also wrote Statesmanship, Character and Leadership in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and To Serve with Honor: Doing the Right Thing in Government (Loftlands Press 2015).
All in The Ways We Think
We need to question what we see in cyberspace. We need to remember that passionate belief must not override reasoned analysis. We need to understand that what we “know” is colored by our assumptions and prejudices.
We often employ simplistic mental strategies to deal with our own mental exhaustion.We are endangering democracy by doing so.
The anchor effect suggests that we tend to “anchor” or rely too heavily in our decision making on a single piece of data to the exclusion of other information. Once the anchor is set, it dominates our thinking and moves us in the direction of the anchor.
Einstein said that if he had a minute to live and only one question he could answer, he'd spend 59 seconds framing the question. He knew the power of a well-framed question. Asking the right question is worthy of a greater investment than we usually give it.
Distractions cost time, resources, and attention. They leave us confused and uncertain about where to focus. As a nation, we have been distracted too long from serious attention to our problems
Simple solutions on this side of complexity are partial at best and dangerous at worst. They mislead us into thinking they will actually work and breed cynicism when they inevitably fail. But simplicity on the other side of complexity is valuable and essential
A society that feels it can safely ignore science can create far more havoc than science itself, and it will then be woefully ill-equipped for the twenty-first century.
