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- title: Strong Opinions, Weakly Held
- url: http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/strong_opinions.html
- hash_url: c804a7d9f07b6005718f1de0a577e744
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- <p class="MsoNormal"><span>I’ve been pretty
- obsessed about the difference between smart people and wise people for
- years. I tried to write a book called
- “The Attitude of Wisdom” a couple times. And the virtues of wise people – those
- who have the courage to act on their knowledge, but the humility to doubt what
- they know – is one of the main themes in Hard Facts. We show how leaders including Xerox’s Ann
- Mulcahy, Intel’s Any Grove, Harrah’s
- Gary Loveman, and IDEO’s David Kelley
- turn this attitude into organizational action. Perhaps the best description I’ve ever seen of how wise people act comes
- from the amazing folks at<a href="http://www.iftf.org/index.html"> Palo Alto’s
- Institute for the Future.</a> A couple
- years ago, I was talking the Institute’s <a href="http://www.iftf.org/people/bjohansen.html">Bob Johansen </a> 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.” They've been giving this advice for years, and I understand that it was first developed by Instituite Director <a href="http://www.saffo.com/">Paul Saffo</a>. 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.”</p>
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