I’ve been working through Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, a really fine book that explores the neuroscience behind how we make decisions. In one of the early chapters, Lehrer describes the role dopamine neurons play in decision-making. Essentially, they are those elements of the brain that register experience and create emotions. Interestingly, these neurons actually learn from experience. That is, they take note of successes and failures and improve their predictive performance (creating an emotion before something actually occurs – pleasure at the sight of an ice cream cone, anxiety when noticing that the back door to the house is...

There are so many things I love about this TEDTalk by Benjamin Zander that it’s hard to list them all. He’s incredibly passionate, and funny, and warm, and engaging. That will be obvious within about two minutes. He’s talking about music – and he does that very effectively – but he’s also talking about so much more. If I were to boil it down, I think he’s talking about what it means to be a leader and, perhaps most expansively, about what it means to be human. There’s a ton here. It’s another video I often use in class and have seen numerous times and still learn something new each time. But since I can’t cover...

This is the third post on reclaiming the power of saying “I don’t know.” In the first I suggested that when we can’t admit when we don’t know the answer, but always have to come up with one, we’re far more likely to give inaccurate information and, perhaps worse, fail to seize opportunities for learning. In the second post I suggested that we might encourage each other to admit when we have things to learn by considering the possibility that intelligence isn’t simply a measure of the stuff you know but of the stuff you know you don’t know, and therefore are eager to learn. Today I want to offer one more thing: that reclaiming...

We have, I think, a cultural bias against admitting what we don’t know. It’s as if by admitting our ignorance in a particular subject we undermine our credibility on any subject. I find this particularly true of leaders – whether in a church, corporation, faculty, or family. Perhaps that’s because when we are placed into positions of leadership we feel that it’s our responsibility to live up to this trust. Or maybe it’s simply because if we are leading in our organization it’s precisely because we’ve proven ourselves competent, and so we feel that any demonstration of ignorance calls into question our competence and,...