Blink

 

By Malcom Gladwell

 

And excellent book on thinking without thinking…too much.  In another word; intuition thinking with your gut, hence the phrase “what does you gut say.”  Another word that comes out in the book: instinct.  Taking a thin slice of the decision to make, and making it.  A very high percentage, it’s the right decision.  In summary, don’t over think.

In the beginning of the book, professors run a test on married young couples and with observation of a 10 minute conversation between the couple, they can predict which marriages will end up in divorce.  Later in the book, the reader learns that “thin slicing” becomes more accurate with age.  This comes with a positive spin on the merit of prejudice.  With age one becomes more proficient in ‘gut’ decisions.

Twice in the book it refers the reader to military situations.  Early on with a Middle East war game and then in the end with a Civil War battle, whereby the losers of the battles were extremally well planned and the winners were commanded by ‘cowboy’ commanders  who made decisions from the gut.  Those gut decisions were instinctive rather than rational.  And the point stressed is the instinctive decision made by the ‘cowboy’ commanders were made without a complete picture of the battlefield.

The message is trust your gut, but don’t stop thinking

 

Notes:

1.     …intuitive repulsion,” they were absolutely right. In the first two seconds of looking—in a single glance—"

2.     …our brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of the situation. The first is the one we’re most familiar with. It’s the conscious strategy. We think about what we’ve learned, and eventually we come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and definitive.

3.     The second strategy was the path taken by Evelyn Harrison and Thomas Hoving and the Greek scholars. They didn’t weigh every conceivable strand of evidence. They considered only what could be gathered in a glance. Their thinking was what the cognitive psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer likes to call “fast and frugal”

4.     This new notion of the adaptive unconscious is thought of, instead, as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings

5.     Then Ambady compared those snap judgments of teacher effectiveness with evaluations of those same professors made by their students after a full semester of classes, and she found that they were also essentially the same. A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the teacher’s class for an entire semester. That’s the power of our adaptive unconscious.

6.     The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately

7.     Our unconscious is a powerful force. But it’s fallible. It’s not the case that our internal computer always shines through, instantly decoding the “truth” of a situation. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled. Our instinctive reactions often have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions and sentiments. So, when should we trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them? Answering that question is the second task of Blink.

8.     The third and most important task of this book is to convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled. 

9.     Blink is concerned with the very smallest components of our everyday lives—the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new person

10.  Thin-slicing” refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

11.  Thin-slicing is part of what makes the unconscious so dazzling. But it’s also what we find most problematic about rapid cognition. How is it possible to gather the necessary information for a sophisticated judgment in such a short time? The answer is that when our unconscious engages in thin-slicing, what we are doing is an automated, accelerated unconscious version of what Gottman does with his videotapes and equations. Can a marriage really be understood in one sitting? Yes it can, and so can lots of other seemingly complex situations. What Gottman has done is to show us how.

12.  What Gottman is saying is that a relationship between two people has a fist as well: a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically. That is why a marriage can be read and decoded so easily, because some key part of human activity—whether it is something as simple as pounding out a Morse code message or as complex as being married to someone—has an identifiable and stable pattern. Predicting divorce, like tracking Morse Code operators, is pattern recognition. “People are in one of two states in a relationship,” Gottman went on. “The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative. In the negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, it’s a selfish person doing a positive thing. It’s really hard to change those states, and those states determine whether when one party.

13.  Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.

14.  When a patient has a bad medical result, the doctor has to take the time to explain what happened, and to answer the patient’s questions—to treat him like a human being. The doctors who don’t are the ones who get sued.” It isn’t necessary, then, to know much about how a surgeon operates in order to know his likelihood of being sued. What you need to understand is the relationship between that doctor and his patients.

15.  the ability of an art expert to look at the Getty kouros and know, instantly, that it’s a fake. Something in the way the tennis players hold themselves, or the way they toss the ball, or the fluidity of their motion triggers something in his unconscious. He instinctively picks up the “giss” of a double fault. He thin-slices some part of the service motion and—blink!—he just knows. But here’s the catch: much to Braden’s frustration, he simply cannot figure out how he knows.

16.  Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. But they are also unconscious.

17.  think that approach is a mistake, and if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that—sometimes—we’re better off that way.

18.  Even more impressive, however, is how mysterious these priming effects are. When you took that sentence-completion test, you didn’t know that you were being primed to think “old.” Why would you? The clues were pretty subtle. What is striking, though, is that even after people walked slowly out of the room and down the hall, they still weren’t aware of how their behavior had been affected. Bargh once had people play board games in which the only way the participants could win was if they learned how to cooperate with one another. So he primed the players with thoughts of cooperativeness, and sure enough, they were far more cooperative, and the game went far more smoothly.

19.  What my research with priming race and test performance, and Bargh’s research with the interrupters, and Maier’s experiment with the ropes show is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’ more often.

20.  Because everyone in that room had not one mind but two, and all the while their conscious mind was blocked, their unconscious was scanning the room, sifting through possibilities, processing every conceivable clue. And the instant it found the answer, it guided them —silently and surely—to the solution.

21.  In the previous chapter, I wrote about the experiments conducted by John Bargh in which he showed that we have such powerful associations with certain words (for example, “Florida,” “gray,” “wrinkles,” and “bingo”) that just being exposed to them can cause a change in our behavior. I think that there are facts about people’s appearance—their size or shape or color or sex—that can trigger a very similar set of powerful associations. Many people who looked at Warren Harding saw how extraordinarily handsome and distinguished-looking he was and jumped to the immediate—and entirely unwarranted—conclusion that he was a man of courage and intelligence and integrity.

22.  The Warren Harding error is the dark side of rapid cognition. It is at the root of a good deal of prejudice and discrimination. It’s why picking the right candidate for a job is so difficult and why, on more occasions than we may care to admit, utter mediocrities sometimes end up in positions of enormous responsibility. Part of what it means to take thin-slicing and first impressions seriously is accepting the fact that sometimes we can know more about someone or something in the blink of an eye than we can after months of study. But we also have to acknowledge and understand those circumstances when rapid cognition leads us astray.

23.  you’d like to try a computerized IAT, you can go to www.implicit.harvard.edu.

24.  or the fight for civil rights, this is the kind of discrimination that we usually refer to. But the IAT measures something else. It measures our second level of attitude, our racial attitude on an unconscious level—the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we’ve even had time to think. We don’t deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes. And as I wrote about in the first chapter, we may not even be aware of them.

25.  The IAT is more than just an abstract measure of attitudes. It’s also a powerful predictor of how we act in certain kinds of spontaneous situations. If you have a strongly pro-white pattern of associations, for example, there is evidence that that will affect the way you behave in the presence of a black person. It’s not going to affect what you’ll choose to say or feel or do. In all likelihood, you won’t be aware that you’re behaving any differently than you would around a white person. But chances are you’ll lean forward a little less, turn away slightly from him or her, close your body a bit, be a bit less expressive, maintain less eye contact, stand a little farther away, smile a lot less, hesitate and stumble over your words a bit more, laugh at jokes a bit less. Does that matter? Of course it does. Suppose the conversation is a job interview. And suppose the applicant is a black man. He’s going to pick up on that uncertainty and distance, and that may well make him a little less certain of himself, a little less confident, and a little less friendly. And what will you think then? You may well get a gut feeling that the applicant doesn’t really have what it takes, or maybe that he is a bit standoffish, or maybe that he doesn’t really want the job. What this unconscious first impression will do, in other words, is throw

26.   the interview hopelessly off course

27.  But unconscious discrimination is a little bit trickier.

28.  If something is happening outside of awareness, how on earth do you fix it

29.  but just because something is outside of awareness doesn’t mean it’s outside of control

30.  which means that we can change our first impressions—we can alter the way we thin-slice—by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions

31.  Effects-Based Operations, which directed them to think beyond the conventional military method of targeting and destroying an adversary’s military assets. They were given a comprehensive, real-time map of the combat situation called the Common Relevant Operational Picture (CROP).

32.  One Saturday evening not long ago, an improvisation comedy group called Mother took the stage in a small theater in the basement of a supermarket on Manhattan’s West Side. It was a snowy evening just after Thanksgiving, but the room was full. There are eight people in Mother, three women and five men, all in their twenties and thirties. The stage was bare except for a half dozen white folding chairs. Mother was going to perform what is known in the improv world as a Harold. They would get up onstage, without any idea whatsoever of what character they would be playing or what plot they would be acting out, take a random suggestion from the audience, and then, without so much as a moment’s consultation, make up a thirty-minute play from scratch. One of the group members called out to the audience for a suggestion. “Robots,” someone yelled back. In improv, the suggestion is rarely taken literally, and in this case, Jessica, the actress who began the action, said later that the thing that came to mind when she heard the word “robots” was emotional detachment and the way technology affects relationships. So, right then and there, she walked onstage, pretending to read a bill from the cable television company. There was one other person onstage with her, a man seated in a chair with his back to her. They began to talk. Did he know what character he was playing at that moment? Not at all; nor did she or anyone in the audience. But somehow it emerged that she was the wife, and the man was her husband, and she had found charges on the cable bill for porn movies and was distraught. He, in turn, responded by blaming their teenaged son, and after a spirited back-and-forth, two more actors rushed onstage, playing two different characters in the same narrative. One was a psychiatrist helping the family with their crisis. In another scene, an actor angrily slumped in a chair. “I’m doing time for a crime I didn’t commit,” the actor said. He was the couple’s son. At no time as the narrative unfolded did anyone stumble or freeze or look lost. The action proceeded as smoothly as if the actors had rehearsed for days. Sometimes what was said and done didn’t quite work. But often it was profoundly hilarious, and the audience howled with delight. And at every point it was riveting: here was a group of eight people up on a stage without a net, creating a play before our eyes.

33.  Do you have to be particularly quick-witted or clever or light on your feet to play that scene? Not really. It’s a perfectly straightforward conversation. The humor arises entirely out of how steadfastly the participants adhere to the rule that no suggestion can be denied. If you can create the right framework, all of a sudden, engaging in the kind of fluid, effortless, spur-of-the-moment dialogue that makes for good improv theater becomes a lot easier. This is what Paul Van Riper understood in Millennium Challenge. He didn’t just put his team up onstage and hope and pray that funny dialogue popped into their heads. He created the conditions for successful spontaneity.

34.  But he never got specific guidance from me of how to do it. Just the intent.” Once the fighting started

35.  It was, by his own admission, a “messy” way to make decisions. But it had one overwhelming advantage: allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves.

36.  constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition

37.  We all have an instinctive memory for faces. But by forcing you to verbalize that memory—to explain yourself—I separate you from those instincts. Recognizing faces sounds like a very specific process, but Schooler has shown that the implications of verbal overshadowing carry over to the way we solve much broader problems. Consider the following puzzle: A man and his son are in a serious car accident. The father is killed, and the son is rushed to the emergency room. Upon arrival, the attending doctor looks at the child and gasps, “This child is my son!” Who is the doctor? This is an insight puzzle. It’s not like a math or a logic problem that can be worked out systematically with pencil and paper. The only way you can get the answer is if it comes to you suddenly in the blink of an eye. You need to make a leap beyond the automatic assumption that doctors are always men. They aren’t always, of course. The doctor is the boy’s mother!

38.  chooler did this experiment with a whole sheet of insight puzzles, he found that people who were asked to explain themselves ended up solving 30 percent fewer problems than those who weren’t. In short, when you write down your thoughts, your chances of having the flash of insight you need in order to come up with a solution are significantly impaired—just as describing the face of your waitress made you unable to pick her out of a police lineup. (The solution to the pyramid problem, by the way, is to destroy the bill in some way—tear it or burn it.

39.  We can hold a face in memory, and we can solve a puzzle in a flash. But what Schooler is saying is that all these abilities are incredibly fragile. Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out."

40.  This is a beautiful example of thin-slicing in action. The fireman’s internal computer effortlessly and instantly found a pattern in the chaos. But surely the most striking fact about that day is how close it all came to disaster. Had the lieutenant stopped and discussed the situation with his men, had he said to them, let’s talk this over and try to figure out what’s going on, had he done, in other words, what we often think leaders are supposed to do to solve difficult problems, he might have destroyed his ability to jump to the insight that saved their lives

41.  hat Reilly and his team at Cook County were trying to do, in short, was provide some structure for the spontaneity of the ER. The algorithm is a rule that protects the doctors from being swamped with too much information—the same way that the rule of agreement protects improv actors when they get up onstage

42.  The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters. John Gottman took a complex problem and reduced it to its simplest elements: even the most complicated of relationships and problems, he showed, have an identifiable underlying pattern. Lee Goldman’s research proves that in picking up these sorts of patterns, less is more. Overloading the decision makers with information, he proves, makes picking up that signature harder, not easier. To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit. When we thin-slice, when we recognize patterns and make snap judgments, we do this process of editing unconsciously.

43.  I think we get in trouble when this process of editing is disrupted—when we can’t edit, or we don’t know what to edit, or our environment doesn’t let us edit

44.  Who are you?” the fans were yelling by the end. Kenna is the sort of person who is constantly at odds with your expectations, and that is both one of the things that make him so interesting and one of the things that have made his career so problematic.

45.  The big giant is tied down by those little rules and regulations and procedures. And the little guy? He just runs around and does what he wants.

46.  And Vic Braden discovered that while people are very willing and very good at volunteering information explaining their actions, those explanations, particularly when it comes to the kinds of spontaneous opinions and decisions that arise out of the unconscious, aren’t necessarily correct

47.  Getting to the bottom of the question of how good Kenna really is requires a more searching exploration of the intricacies of our snap judgments

48.  their thinking was that music lovers can thin-slice a new song in a matter of seconds, and there is nothing wrong with that idea in principle. But thin-slicing has to be done in context. It is possible to quickly diagnose the health of a marriage. But you can’t just watch a couple playing Ping-Pong. You have to observe them while they are discussing

49.  This is reminiscent of Schooler’s experiments that I described in the Van Riper story, in which introspection destroyed people’s ability to solve insight problems. By making people think about jam, Wilson and Schooler turned them into jam idiots. In the earlier discussion, however, I was referring to things that impair our ability to solve problems. Now I’m talking about the loss of a much more fundamental ability, namely the ability to know our own mind. Furthermore, in this case we have a much more specific explanation for why introspections mess up our reactions

50.  locked room, and we can’t look inside that room. But with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret—and decode—what lies behind our snap judgments and first impressions.

51.  This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren’t grounded in real understanding.

52.  Perhaps the most common—and the most important—forms of rapid cognition are the judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people. Every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone, we come up with a constant stream of predictions and inferences about what that person is thinking and feeling. When someone says, “I love you,” we look into that person’s eyes to judge his or her sincerity. When we meet someone new, we often pick up on subtle signals, so that afterward, even though he or she may have talked in a normal and friendly manner, we may say, “I don’t think he liked me,” or “I don’t think she’s very happy.” We easily parse complex distinctions in facial expression. If you were to see me grinning, for example, with my eyes twinkling, you’d say I was amused. But if you were to see me nod and smile exaggeratedly, with the corners of my lips tightened, you would take it that I had been teased and was responding sarcastically. If I were to make eye contact with someone, give a small smile, and then look down and avert my gaze, you would think I was flirting. If I were to follow a remark with a quick smile and then nod or tilt my head sideways, you might conclude that I had just said something a little harsh and wanted to take the edge off it. You wouldn’t need to hear anything I was saying in order to reach these conclusions. They would just come to you, blink. If you were to approach a one-year-old child who sits playing on the floor and do something a little bit puzzling, such as cupping your hands over hers, the child would immediately look up into your eyes. Why? Because what you have done requires explanation, and the child knows that she can find an answer on your face.

53.  What Ekman is describing, in a very real sense, is the physiological basis of how we thin-slice other people. We can all mind-read effortlessly and automatically because the clues we need to make sense of someone or some social situation are right there on the faces of those in front of us. We may not be able to read faces as brilliantly as someone like Paul Ekman or Silvan Tomkins can, or pick up moments as subtle as Kato Kaelin’s transformation into a snarling dog. But there is enough accessible information on a face to make everyday mind reading possible

54.  what even a child intuitively understands as the clear signal of fear? We make these kinds of complicated, lightning-fast calculations very well. We make them every day, and we make them without thinking.

55.  eter is a highly intelligent man. He has graduate degrees from a prestigious university. His IQ is well above normal, and Klin speaks of him with genuine respect. But because he lacks one very basic ability—the ability to mind-read—he can be presented with that scene in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and come to a conclusion that is socially completely and catastrophically wrong.

56.  Most police officers—well over 90 percent—go their whole career without ever firing at anyone, and those who do describe the experience as so unimaginably stressful that it seems reasonable to ask if firing a gun could be the kind of experience that could cause temporary autism.

57.  officer appears to be describing something that is quite impossible. How can someone watch his bullets hit someone? Just as strange is the second man’s claim not to have heard the sound of his gun going off. How can that be? Yet, in interviews with police officers who have been involved with shootings, these same details appear again and again: extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. This is how the human body reacts to extreme stress, and it makes sense. Our mind, faced with a life-threatening situation, drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with. Sound and memory and broader social understanding are sacrificed in favor of heightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us. In a critical sense, the police officers whom Klinger describes performed better because their senses narrowed: that narrowing allowed them to focus on the threat in front of

58.  Fyfe, head of training for the NYPD, who has testified in many police brutality cases. “The Liberty City riot in Miami in 1980 was started by what the cops did at the end of a chase. They beat a guy to death. In 1986, they had another riot in Miami based on what cops did at the end of the chase. Three of the major race riots in this country over the past quarter century have been caused by what cops did at the end of a chase

59.  dog in the hunt doesn’t stop to scratch its flees

60.  Arousal leaves us mind-blind

61.  When you remove time,” de Becker says, “you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction.

62.  When we make a split-second decision,” Payne says, “we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.

63.  Our unconscious thinking is, in one critical respect, no different from our conscious thinking: in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.

64.  How long was this encounter? Two seconds? One and a half seconds? But look at how the officer’s experience and skill allowed him to stretch out that fraction of time, to slow the situation down, to keep gathering information until the last possible moment.

65.  Why, for so many years, were conductors so oblivious to the corruption of their snap judgments? Because we are often careless with our powers of rapid cognition. We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don’t always appreciate their fragility. Taking our powers of rapid cognition seriously means we have to acknowledge the subtle influences that can alter or undermine or bias the products of our unconscious.

66.  hey solved the problem, and that’s the second lesson of Blink. Too often we are resigned to what happens in the blink of an eye. It doesn’t seem like we have much control over whatever bubbles to the surface from our unconscious. But we do, and if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition. We can prevent the people fighting wars or staffing emergency rooms or policing the streets from making mistakes.

Strong Ground

 Strong Ground

Brene Brown

 

Brene Brown comes at the reader in this book was thought you have been close friends your whole life.  She owns a firm that consults with corporate world.  She has her own podcast which I am sure promotes her consulting business.  She knits this with metaphor and real life stories that exposes her all this into a message: “be human”.  She opens with this:  "I recognize that choosing courage, discipline, and kindness can feel impossible and increasingly vulnerable in a time when even empathy has been vilified. I understand that fostering care, connection, and belonging in our organizations seems downright subversive. But I have hope. In my work I get to see people who have not given up on their values and what it means to lead while honoring what it means to be human."

 

The first thing that pops up is Senior Leadership is task oriented with performance reviews that are metric driven.  HR may go through motions towards human development, yet when an employee’s pay check does not recognize human development, the end result is disenchanted employees who move in in search of humanness. She starts her approach with a metaphor in physical training that begins with your core.  If you ignore your core other areas are strained to compensate leaving you vulnerable. Tying individual to organizational that Leaders should make a priority Brenee writes.   "Developing core stability and functional strength in organizations means investing in people, because for an organization, people, and our connection to each other, are the strong ground."

While Brene spends 300 pages plus drawing techniques from experts in numerous areas and then sharing how they played out with leaders of many large organizations, she closes out with two chapters on how those lessons showed up in her life as she is now in her fifties with grown children.  Doing this made the whole book human and the lessons memorable.  I’ll leave with one here and ask you to read the book for the rest.

Compliance is unhuman and you come up short to your true potential.  Commitment is human desire where you exceed tasks on your performance review.

Excerpts:

 

1.     "He defines mindfulness as the “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally…in the service of self-understanding and wisdom.”"

2.     Today, when I’m working with leaders who desperately want to transform their organizations and even disrupt entire industries, it’s normal to bump into some resistance up front. They’re often hopeful that the big change effort can be predictable, not too messy, and dependent on tools rather than the tough and courageous work of changing mindsets and building new skills."

3.     "What you’re trying to achieve will require a deep, broad, and disciplined commitment to individual change, team change, culture change, and systems change."

4.     "Despite my best efforts to minimize the level of change I needed to make to get the results I was seeking in my own life, it was clear that I didn’t need a new app. I needed a personal version of the deep, broad, and disciplined commitment to change across my life. For me, this looked like getting back into therapy, working more with my leadership coach, becoming more spiritually fit, committing to my work with Tony and Morgan, and doing what’s always"

5.     "If you’d like to try a computerized IAT, you can go to www.implicit.harvard.edu. There you’ll find several tests, including the most famous of all the IATs, the Race IAT. I’ve taken"

6.     "We need a sense of discerning urgency driven by smart prioritization, trust-building skills, strategic risk-taking, paradoxical thinking, pattern recognition, meaning making, situational and anticipatory awareness in the markets served, agility, tenacity, the humility and confidence to unlearn and relearn, systems and symphonic thinking that deliver operational excellence, and the courage to lead people in a way that honors and protects the wisdom of the human spirit."

7.     "By “emotionally dysregulated,” I mean overwhelmed by big feelings that are hard to name and contain and can drive behaviors and thinking that are not always aligned with who we want to be. In a time fueled by discord, divisiveness, and increasing dehumanization, we need to find ways to actually want to be with other people. It’s hard to buy that what makes us human will save our sanity and our jobs when in fact so many of us have become untethered from our humanity and fundamentally disconnected from one another. This disconnection from our inherent human wisdom—our poetry, our joy, our innate creativity, our yearning for connection, collaboration, and innovation—stems from at least three converging forces:"

8.     "Regardless of the tools, including AI, organizations that build and maintain strong ground do so by respecting and protecting human wisdom and connection as foundational. Technology built on dysfunction is dysfunction, regardless of the genius of the code or the power of the algorithm. Strong ground is the only thing that can provide both unwavering stability in a maelstrom"

9.     "Our strong ground is made up of two elements: Our own footing, including our values, a clear sense of our contribution, our curiosity, and our humility Our connection to another person or group of people who are also grounded In Newtonian teamwork, everyone must be responsible for understanding that it’s the strength of the team that makes winning possible, and, conversely, the cost to the entire team when individuals lose touch with their ground."

10.  "The embodied expression of emotion, mastery, and skill demonstrated by all kinds of performers, artists, and athletes can make the invisible visible and the unknowable more knowable. I say more knowable because no matter how hard we try and how many gadgets we attach to performers to better understand the biology of their craft, there will always be mystery in artistic, emotional, spiritual, and athletic expression. I believe this is why bearing witness often generates more than appreciation—the mystery of it all inspires awe. And in today’s world we need more awe, wonder, and joy. These are the fuel for restoration and meaning."

11.  "But do the engineer and HR leader need to be embodied, strong, grounded, and connected in mind, body, and spirit? Yes. That’s part of our need for recommitment to the human spirit."

12.  "Tom Brady’s excellent footwork is a direct translation of a leader’s need to have situational, anticipatory, and temporal awareness in decision making."

13.  "The second thread running across the lessons is a clear global yearning for more humanity within us and between us, a real call for a collective recommitment to the human spirit."

14.  "To understand the tenacity of paradox and the wisdom of the human spirit is to realize that following these"

15.  "define spirituality as “recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love, compassion, and mystery.” God, nature, humanity, fishing—there are as many sources of that power as there are people. The human spirit emerged from the data as those undefinable and undeniable connections between all of us that, when honored, allow us to see one another. A Great Witness"

16.  "define spirituality as “recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love, compassion, and mystery.” God, nature, humanity, fishing—there are as many sources of that power as there are people. The human spirit emerged from the data as those undefinable and undeniable connections between all of us that, when honored, allow us to see one another. A Great Witness"

17.  "The gift of the paradox is that if we hang in there and tolerate the tension—grounding down and holding both ideas—a new and deeper level of understanding is born. Paradox is stubborn and never lets go. We are the ones who tap out."

18.  "Jung explained that a paradox is one of our most valued spiritual possessions. He explained, “Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.” In a world defined by spiritual crisis, where we seem to be slicing and dicing our fullness by orphaning pieces of our humanity, the paradox seems more important than ever. It’s no wonder that whenever I’m in a room of thinkers I respect but with whom I often differ, paradoxical thinking is everywhere. I can give you a great example from earlier this year, when I sat in the audience at a luncheon to listen to Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Sir Demis Hassabis talk about the future of AI. Only a few months before the interview, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions to protein structure prediction. To make things more interesting, this luncheon took place within days of Trump’s inauguration, and in the same week that the world was learning more about DeepSeek, the Chinese AI platform that shook global markets and sent geopolitical shockwaves around the world."

19.  "“There are sound philosophical reasons why our arguments should end in paradox and why a paradoxical statement is the better witness to truth than a one-sided, so-called ‘positive’ statement.”"

20.  "“There are sound philosophical reasons why our arguments should end in paradox and why a paradoxical statement is the better witness to truth than a one-sided, so-called ‘positive’ statement.”"

21.  "by having tough conversations about data governance, manufacturing organizations attempting to move from selling products to selling thought partnership that starts with defining problems. It didn’t matter how complex and competing the ideas, the answers to the questions were always Yes, and."

22.  "The goal is to develop the strength and grounding required to hold the tension of two opposing ideas until a new idea is born—until something more encompassing, more connected, and more nuanced emerges."

23.  "spirituality can’t be separated from paradox, because the spirit’s job is about wholeness—and that’s always both/and."

24.  "accessing the genius he describes requires a disciplined practice of recognizing paradox and finding strong ground to push into while holding the tension."

25.  "Stockdale told Collins, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”"

26.  "But do the engineer and HR leader need to be embodied, strong, grounded, and connected in mind, body, and spirit? Yes. That’s part of our need for recommitment to the human spirit. Does a leader who is forced to make a fast decision in the face of looming pressure need the same level of footwork as the former NFL quarterback Tom Brady, a player known for his ability to stay aware, avoid being tackled, and get the ball downfield in three to five seconds? No, but Tom Brady’s excellent footwork is a direct translation of a leader’s need to have situational, anticipatory, and temporal"

27.  "Stockdale told Collins, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” In Dare to Lead, I shared that our organization started calling this paradoxical learning “gritty faith and gritty facts,” and it helped us reconcile a growing divide that was negatively affecting our culture and our impact. Before reading Jim’s book, we had unconsciously divided ourselves into two camps: the dreamers and the reality checkers. I was not only the founder and CEO, but the head dreamer. I’m pretty sure there were days when I made it miserable for the reality checkers—you know the ones, the folks who keep everything operational,"

28.  "gritty faith and gritty facts, we decided that every single individual would be responsible for both dreaming and reality checking those dreams with facts."

29.  "There are two essential dimensions of leadership: “plumbing,” i.e., the capacity to apply known techniques effectively, and “poetry,” which draws on a leader’s great actions and identity and pushes him or her to explore unexpected avenues, discover interesting meanings, and approach life with enthusiasm. The plumbing of leadership involves keeping watch over an organization’s efficiency in everyday tasks…. This requires competence, not only at the top but also throughout all the parts of the organization; a capacity to master the context (which supposes that the individuals demonstrating their competence are thoroughly familiar with the ins and outs of the organization); a capacity to take initiatives based on delegation and follow-up; a sense of community shared by all the members of the organization, who feel they are “all in the same boat” and trust and help each other; and, finally, an unobtrusive method for coordination, with each person understanding his or her role sufficiently well to be able to integrate into the overall process and make constant adjustments to it."

30.  "Leadership also requires, however, the gifts of a poet, in order to find meaning in action and render life attractive. The formulation and dissemination of interesting interpretations of reality form the basis for constructive collective action. A leader is equipped with the power and words for this purpose. If power is not used as an instrument for winning personal influence, but as a means of encouraging other people to blossom, its charms can be enjoyed while the fear that it inspires is minimized. Words allow us to forge visions and poetic language, through its evocative power, allow us to say more than we know, to teach more than we understand."

31.  "From my experience in organizations, some of the most transformative leaders I’ve met—at all levels—have the ability to cast a poetic vision that excites people and gives them a sense of agency and can oversee the building of systems and communities of connected people that are able to deliver against that vision."

32.  "enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”"

33.  "Rather than coming to an immediate conclusion about an event, idea or person, Keats advises resting in doubt and continuing to pay attention and probe in order to understand it more completely. In this, he anticipates the work of Nobel laureate economist Daniel Kahneman, who cautions against the naïve view that “What you see is all there is.”"

34.  "Keats reminds us that we are most likely to gain new insights if we can stop assuming that we know everything we need to know about people by neatly shoehorning them into preconceived boxes."

35.  "Negative capability is a difficult muscle to build. We’re wired to resolve tension and seek certainty. This capability requires the courage to reach inward toward stillness rather than out toward counterfeit facts and reason. One of the best examples of daring leadership is a leader who can say “I don’t know” or “We need to slow down and make sure we’re not rushing to make a decision before we’re ready.” Negative capability is a grounding tool, and it is fundamental to practicing courage."

36.  "Because along with our need to accept our impermanence is our need for meaning. The gift is the paradox; the skill we need to straddle the tension and develop paradoxical thinking skills is negative capability—resist the urge to reach for certainty where it does not exist."

37.  "That makes me wonder: is it possible to train people in other fields to think more like scientists, and if so, do they end up making smarter choices? Recently, a quartet of European researchers decided to find out. They ran a bold experiment with more than a hundred founders of Italian startups in technology, retail, furniture, food, health care, leisure, and machinery. The entrepreneurs arrived in Milan for a training program in entrepreneurship. Over the course of four months, they learned to create a business strategy, interview customers, build a minimum viable product, and then refine a prototype. What they didn’t know was that they’d been randomly assigned to either a “scientific thinking” group or a control group. The training for both groups was identical, except that one was encouraged to view startups through a scientist’s goggles."

38.  "Core to finding strong ground and embracing paradoxical thinking is a commitment to intellectual humility. We have to challenge ourselves to challenge our thinking.

39.  In psychology there are at least two biases that drive this pattern. One is confirmation bias: seeing what we expect to see. The other is desirability bias: seeing what we want to see. These biases don’t just prevent us from applying our intelligence."

40.  "As we question our current understanding, we become curious about what information we’re missing. That search leads us to new discoveries, which in turn maintain our humility by reinforcing how much we still have to learn. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom."

41.  "My follow-up question: Why courage? What were the specific problems that CEOs believed increased courage could help address? We avoid tough conversations, including giving honest, productive feedback. Some leaders attributed this to a lack of courage, others to a lack of skills; shockingly, more than half talked about a cultural norm of “nice and polite” that’s leveraged as an excuse to avoid tough conversations. Whatever the reason, there was saturation across the data that the consequence is a lack of clarity, a decrease in trust and engagement, and an increase in problematic behavior, including passive-aggressive behavior, talking behind people’s backs, pervasive back-channel communication (or “the meeting after the meeting”), gossip, and the “dirty yes” (when I say yes to your face and then no behind your back). Rather than spending a reasonable amount of time proactively acknowledging and addressing the fears and feelings that show up during change and upheaval, we spend an unreasonable amount of time managing problematic behaviors. Diminishing trust caused by a lack of connection and empathy. Not enough people are taking smart risks or creating and sharing bold ideas to meet changing demands and the insatiable need for innovation. When people are afraid of being put down or ridiculed for trying something and failing, or even for putting forward a radical new idea, the best you can expect is status quo and groupthink. We get stuck in and defined by setbacks, disappointments, and failures. Instead of spending resources on clean-up to ensure that consumers, stakeholders, or internal processes are made whole, organizations expend too much time and energy reassuring team members who are questioning their contribution and value. Too much shame and blame, not enough accountability and learning. People tend to opt out of vital conversations about diversity and inclusivity because they fear looking wrong, saying something wrong, or being wrong. When something goes wrong, individuals and teams rush into ineffective or unsustainable solutions rather than staying with problem identification and solving. When we fix the wrong thing for the wrong reason, the same problems continue to surface. It’s costly and demoralizing. Organizational values are gauzy and assessed in terms of aspirations rather than actual behaviors that can be taught, measured, and evaluated. Perfectionism and fear are keeping people from learning and growing.

42.  One change that’s developed over the past several years as the challenges mount is that courage skills are not enough—we need to develop daring mindsets in addition to building skills. One thing that has not changed is our definition of leadership. A leader is anyone, regardless of title and position, who holds themself accountable for finding potential in people and ideas, and who has the courage to develop that potential. Developing daring mindsets requires getting underneath a lot of fear and self-"

43.  "In my experience, CEOs and CTOs often underestimate the importance of emotional and cultural adaptation, and they overfocus on the technology. Dr. Hill’s research highlights the emotional toll and complexity of digital transformations for employees, noting that transformation requires changing mindsets, behaviors, and even the sense of purpose within an organization. Digital mindsets require daring mindsets."

44.  Operationalizing and reoperationalizing existing values. One hundred percent of the organizations that we’ve researched or partnered with have a list of values. Approximately 10 percent have operationalized their values into observable behaviors

45.  Operationalizing and reoperationalizing existing values. One hundred percent of the organizations that we’ve researched or partnered with have a list of values. Approximately 10 percent have operationalized their values into observable behaviors that are grounded in their mission and integrated across their systems

46.  list of values means nothing if the values are not translated into behaviors that are grounded in your mission and integrated across the organization

47.  What needs to change to meet the new demands of changing markets, shifting competition, technology, and geopolitical instability is how they’re operationalizing those values.

48.  Challenging is driven by trust and commitment to mission

49.  feeling fear is not the barrier

50.  The Heart of Daring Leadership Remains You can’t get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability. Embrace the suck. Self-awareness and self-love matter. Who we are is how we lead. Courage is contagious.

51.  There is no courage without vulnerability

52.  A rumble is a discussion, conversation, or meeting defined by a commitment to lean into vulnerability, to stay curious and generous, to stick with the messy middle of problem identification and solving, to take a break and circle back when necessary, to be fearless in owning our parts, and, as the psychologist Harriet Lerner teaches, to listen with the same passion with which we want to be heard. More than anything else, when someone says “Let’s rumble,” it cues me to show up with an open heart and mind so we can serve the work and each other, not our egos.

53.  "The foundational skill of courage building is the willingness and ability to rumble with vulnerability. Without this core skill, the other three skill sets are impossible to put into practice."

54.  How would you rewrite your thoughts on vulnerability if you had it to do over again? Maybe it was the jet lag peeling away my filters, but I responded with “Learn how to do vulnerability or risk being an asshole when you reach for that armor."

55.  How would you rewrite your thoughts on vulnerability if you had it to do over again? Maybe it was the jet lag peeling away my filters, but I responded with “Learn how to do vulnerability or risk being an asshole when you reach for that armor."

56.  How would you rewrite your thoughts on vulnerability if you had it to do over again? Maybe it was the jet lag peeling away my filters, but I responded with “Learn how to do vulnerability or risk being an asshole when you reach for that armor."

57.  humiliation is not only the most underappreciated force in international relations, it may be the missing link in the search for root causes of political instability and violent conflict…perhaps the most toxic social dynamic of our age.”

58.  Daring leaders welcome conversations about power and model self-reflection and curiosity, which is in itself a demonstration of using power in service of mission, not ego

59.  genuine power is not coercive control, but coactive control. Coercive power is the curse of the universe; coactive power, the enrichment and advancement of every human soul.

60.  Power with “has to do with finding common ground among different interests in order to build collective strength."

61.  Leaders who work from power over Believe that power is finite and use fear and control to self-protect and serve self-interest. Leverage fear and control to divide, destabilize, and devalue decency. Give people experiencing fear and uncertainty a sense of false certitude and safety based on ideology and nostalgia rather than facts. Give people someone to blame for their discomfort—preferably someone who looks/acts/sounds different from them. Maintain power over by demonstrating an ever-increasing capacity for cruelty, especially toward vulnerable populations.

62.  Again, effective transformations are led by relational leaders. It’s thrilling and scary.

63.  Transformation is an iterative process that begins with the application of rigorous assessment sets to identify and critically interrogate the assumptions and thinking that underpin existing systems, structures, and ways of working that are no longer creating value, driving growth, and supporting employees in meaningful ways. These systems are intentionally and strategically dismantled and deconstructed so that what remains is a strong mission-grounded foundation on which new mindsets, skill sets, tool sets, coaching sets, and system sets are built to support the vision of the organization."

64.  People are the strong ground on which big change happens; therefore, people must always be the priority in transformation. This means clear communication of the why, making space for questions and conversations, and a constant flow of well-crafted and honest messaging. In our transformations, the person who leads comms is a linchpin of our success. This is why you will see care, connection, and mission-grounded communications as the nucleus of the transformation illustration at the end of this chapter."

65.  The goal of a transformation should be a rock-solid core that is functional, highly adaptable, agile, and strong."

66.  Assessment Sets—Most change efforts require a current state assessment, a future state definition assessment, and a gap analysis. This is also true of transformations; however, before the current state assessment, we start with a rigorous readiness assessment at the C-suite level."

67.  "Using a combination of expert human coding and AI analysis, the research identified five consistent elements associated with transformative coaching experiences: Understanding and Connection Inquiry and Reflection Designing Goals and Actions Guiding the Process Expanding Possibilities"

68.  Organizational systems have to support new mindsets and skill sets. In our work building daring mindsets

69.  "Using a combination of expert human coding and AI analysis, the research identified five consistent elements associated with transformative coaching experiences: Understanding and Connection Inquiry and Reflection Designing Goals and Actions Guiding the Process Expanding Possibilities"

70.  "accurate diagnosis and grounded, frequent communication and information sharing with the people who are engaged in the changes. And all levels of successful change require relational leaders at the helm."

71.  "The solution for me is finding my own strong ground and focusing on building my foundation. I can either get strong and operative from my own values and groundedness, or I can shift my focus and become reactive to how people are working through their anger or fear of powerlessness and lose my contact with ground. I’m going for the tush push—I’m going to fight for what I believe by keeping my feet planted, seeing the turf below me flying, and pushing toward the next one yard."

72.  "All of these fault lines will be examined and spotlighted, power will be made visible, and the mandate for change will be crystal clear. Making the invisible visible, naming what no one has named, and saying the unsaid stuff are the tools of transformation."

73.  "We now have a process for identifying senior leaders whom we observe as too transactional to lead transformative change."

74.  There is no consultancy PowerPoint or team of strategic advisers that will deliver you from the reality that transformation means walking through the darkness of the tomb and the darkness of the womb. The tomb is the dying of old systems and ways of working, and the womb is the darkness before rebirth. The challenge is that darkness is darkness, and it’s sometimes impossible to tell where you are in the process."

75.  "Ginny is the creator of Fifth Dimensional Leadership—a transformative approach that empowers individuals to lead from a place of higher consciousness and authenticity."

76.  "Ginny is the creator of Fifth Dimensional Leadership—a transformative approach that empowers individuals to lead from a place of higher consciousness and authenticity."

77.  I am committed to developing more conscious, empathetic and inspired leaders for the 5 percent of you who hold those formal positions. For the other folks, the ones I call ‘the 95 percent,’ I intend to empower you to participate in reimagining a workplace that supports the needs of not only our families, but our communities, our civilization, and our planet.”

78.  dictionary, it’s very clear. I will read for you. This is managing: The process of dealing with or controlling things or people. Organizing and coordinating activities to achieve specific goals through planning, organizing, and overseeing resources."

79.  guiding, directing, or influencing others through a common vision or goal. Inspiring and motivating people to achieve something greater than themselves. So the skills are: vision, influence, empathy, and risk-taking."

80.  "Gallup poll from 2015 said only 18 percent of leaders—and they’re using “leaders” and “managers” interchangeably—are considered good at leading. I’ve often reflected on how few leaders I’ve had who were really strong."

81.  Call it control, call it respect. Now we’re getting into what’s actually missing. Integrity is missing. Respect is missing. Honesty, transparency. All the reasons why things break and stop working. Because we have not insisted that either one of these individuals, whether they’re a manager or a leader, have these as cornerstones of their being, of who they are. This, to me, is the biggest problem."

82.  March explained that leaders need t

83.  to be able to cast a vision that is so compelling we want to follow it, and to be able to build systems that deliver on that vision. I want everyone to want to cast incredibly complex and beautiful visions."

84.  Their people loved them, there was mutual respect and trust, and their teams got great shit done on time. And I’m contradicting my own theory. They were not compliant. They worked from commitment, not to compliance. They"

85.  manager’s focus is on the execution, but not in the absence of an awareness of the vision. Right? So they have to interpret the vision every damn day to figure out, Okay, well, what does this mean to me now? What does that mean for the team? How do I connect their work with this vision?

86.  Right. Maybe they did what’s on that CV, or maybe they’re taking credit for something their team did. An accomplishment may deserve to be on your résumé, but I still want to hear about how it got done."

87.  One place where the hard boundaries between plumbing and poetry are disappearing in this environment is within sales functions. Highly relational salespeople who have been successful at building trust and providing services that are then delivered inside highly operational systems of customization, integration, and delivery are finding themselves in new territory. I’m no longer calling you and saying, “Hey, I need four cooling systems for my new facility—what model do you recommend and when can your team deliver?” I’m calling you now and saying, “Shit. Here’s what we’re trying to do. I have no idea what we need, and I’m under pressure to get it done now.” In every example I’ve seen"

88.  "Regardless of your industry, there will be no successful outcome here without both plumbing and poetry. Everyone will need to understand and contribute to both relational and operational excellence."

89.  "short, operational excellence determines whether an organization will or will not deliver against their poetic and bold visions. Without trust, relationship, and poetry, the plumbing is irrelevant. Most experienced leaders have developed some level of confidence in leading operational teams by narrowing the expectations of people and teams to technical rigor, accountability, standardization, and compliance. But if we want them to solve big, fast-moving problems, we need to develop and encourage new types of creative and design thinking. In addition to their logical and analytic expertise, people need the freedom and the courage to play with wildly implausible ideas. This means working from a place of agency and self-belief."

90.  creative and design thinking. In addition to their logical and analytic expertise, people need the freedom and the courage to play with wildly implausible ideas. 

91.  they were coached on how their outcomes were related to bigger strategies, and they were clear about the operational parameters of the projects (cost and consequences).