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Leadership and Intellectual Humility

2020-08-08 by Roberto Zoia Leave a Comment

We need to remind ourselves often that we don’t know everything. The Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that states that when you lack knowledge or expertise, you’re not in a position to realize that you lack knowledge and expertise. It’s not that we are in denial of our errors. It’s that they are simply invisible to us.

We must learn to listen and consider other people’s opinions, specially if it differs from ours. From a stand of empathy and tolerance, we need to be intellectually humble to listen and try to understand others and their opinions.

From a leadership point of view, a great leader doesn’t try to be the smartest person in the room. She seeks for the best people she can get for her team, specially in fields that are outside of her own circle of competence. The great leader knows that she has blind spots, and that she may not be aware of them when she must make a decision. So she hears what her team has to say and makes the best decision with the available information.

The BBC has this great reel about intellectual humility.

Blind to Biases

2019-08-27 by Roberto Zoia Leave a Comment

Runner’s World tells the storie of Ellie Pell, who won the overall first place in a 50K Ultra Marathon.

The organizers of the event had assumed that the overall winner would male.

While there was an award made for the first place female, there was no award prepared for the first place male. Instead, there was only a trophy for the overall winner, which was predicted to be a man.

What’s worth noting is not the organizers’s bias, but that they were blind to it. Blind to the possibility that a woman could actually win the race.

Being aware that we may be blind to our own biases is the first step towards overcoming them. Blindness may come, for example, from taking for granted what for others may be a privilege¹.

Photo by Andrea Leopardi on Unsplash

For example, check McKinsey’s article on Why gender diversity at the top remains a challenge. ↩

Teach it to a Child

2019-04-22 by Roberto Zoia Leave a Comment

If you have experience in something, it can be difficult to explain it succinctly to other people.

This may seem counterintuitive. Doesn’t experience give you the advantage of understanding how something works? When you’ve been doing things for a long time, your brain makes part of the process transparent to you. You unconsciously make leaps.

Other times, it’s not that you are taking things for granted that may look like magic to other people. We think that we’ve got a solid understanding of something, when there may be important gaps in our knowledge.

Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman used a method for learning that relied on teaching. He found that explaining things to others is a great way to learn. His method is now known as the Feynman Technique: Choose a concept. Teach it to a child. Identify the gaps and go back to the source material. Review and simplify.

Give it a try. You’ll find that children are curious and acute. Finding solid explanations for things you thought you knew will help you consolidate that knowledge.

Privacy Trade-Offs

2019-02-25 by Roberto Zoia Leave a Comment

As Facebook continues to raise scandals about the way they record, store and sell their user’s data (and not only their user’s data), you may wonder why people continue to use Facebook at all.

I found one answer while reading Kill Process, a science-fiction novel by William Hertling. In the novel, most people in the world are connected by Tomo, the world’s larges social network company. Even if the book is fictional, the similarities between Tomo and Facebook are too many not to think ‘Facebook’ every time you read ‘Tomo’. Despite Tomo’s worst practices regarding user’s privacy, people continue to use the service because in a world where real, face-to-face connections are scarce, Tomo is how people remain connected to their friends. Even if it’s a feeble connection, they don’t dare drop out of Tomo because they fear loosing those conections.

Last year, I did a simple experiment: I deleted the Facebook app from my cel phone. I did not delete my Facebook account, but I only logged into Facebook on the laptop, ideally twice a day.

I’ve never considered myself a heavy user of Facebook. My posts are mostly quotes about things I’m reading. It also serves me as a reminder of my friend’s birthdays. Even so, I was surprised at how many times a day I tapped into my phone trying to open the now non-existent Facebook app. It took me more than a week to unlearn this ‘unconscious’ behavior.

Kevin Kelly, in his great book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, gives another explanation:

If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy. This has surprised the experts. So far, at every juncture that offers a choice, we’ve tilted, on average, toward more sharing, more disclosure, more transparency. I would sum it up like this: Vanity trumps privacy. (p. 262)

The important question you should ask yourself is: why am I on Facebook?

Photo by Eaters Collective on Unsplash.

Finally, you can download your Kindle highlights

2018-12-11 by Roberto Zoia Leave a Comment

I do most of my reading either on my Kindle device or on the Kindle app on my laptop. Highlighting and adding notes is an essential part of my reading process. It somehow replaces the marking of paragraphs and jotting down of annotations some people do when reading a physical book.

The Kindle app for MacOs has always been consistently bad. Particularly annoying was the fact that in order to download your highlights and notes, you had to rely on applications like clippings.io because Amazon didn’t support either functionality.

It’s incredible that such a basic feature had not been implemented by Amazon until now. Amazon’s latest Kindle app version not only let’s you review your highlights and notes side by side with the book, but also let’s you download them.