-- I absolutely *love* this talk! -- Openness alone cant drive change. So for 25 years Alice Stewart had a very big fight on her hands. So, how did she know that she was right? Well, she had a fantastic model for thinking. She worked with a statistician named George Kneale, and George was pretty much everything that Alice wasnt. So, Alice was very outgoing and sociable, and George was a recluse. Alice was very warm, very empathetic with her patients. George frankly preferred numbers to people. But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship. He said, My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong. He actively sought disconfirmation. Different ways of looking at her models, at her statistics, different ways of crunching the data in order to disprove her. He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories. Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong, that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right. Its a fantastic model of collaboration -- thinking partners who arent echo chambers. I wonder how many of us have, or dare to have, such collaborators. Alice and George were very good at conflict. They saw it as thinking. So what does that kind of constructive conflict require? Well, first of all, it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves. That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive, which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves, and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them. That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy. And the more Ive thought about this, the more I think, really, that thats a kind of love. Because you simply wont commit that kind of energy and time if you dont really care. And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds. Alices daughter told me that every time Alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist, they made her think and think and think again. My mother, she said, My mother didnt enjoy a fight, but she was really good at them.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 10:40:40 +0000
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