Terry Newell is currently director of his own firm, Leadership for a Responsible Society. His work focuses on values-based leadership, ethics, and decision making. A former Air Force officer, Terry also previously served as Director of the Horace Mann Learning Center, the training arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and as Dean of Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute. Terry is co-editor and author of The Trusted Leader: Building the Relationships That Make Government Work (CQ Press, 2011). He also wrote Statesmanship, Character and Leadership in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and To Serve with Honor: Doing the Right Thing in Government (Loftlands Press 2015).
All in The Ways We Think
Partisan political hatreds stoked by politicians and social media close our minds to the possibility that some of what we think of the opposition is wrong.
Most voters are very tied to their candidates. Changing their minds is possible but not easy.
Political arguments often result from people who see different versions of reality but are convinced theirs is the only accurate one.
Formal efforts to stop the viral spread of disinformation have had limited success. The best antidote is citizens who think critically.
Efforts at fact-checking fake news fight an uphill battle against the flood of disinformation.
The attack by Confederate forces on Fort Sumter in 1861 was preceded by miscalculations on both sides, the result of thinking mistakes still common today.
Groups perform best when everyone fully contributes. Achieving this means preventing the problem of social loafing.
A bad outcome does not mean it came from a faulty decision making process. That’s just one trap of the outcome bias.
Too many assume that the “red” and “blue” divisions in American cannot be healed. We sell ourselves short.
Life is filled with people certain they “just know” about a topic, event or person. Yet what people “just know” can be wrong, choking off the learning needed to fully understand.
Most of us know that what we think is not what others must think, yet we can be prone to ignoring this. We see a consensus that just isn’t there.
Violent extremists can change. Former Ku Klux Klanner Chris Buckley and Muslim refugee Heval Kelli demonstrate the power of openness, listening and healing.
Political extremism is hard to combat, but encouraging people to open their minds and leaders to support that offers hope.
We think of our eyes as a camera, reproducing reality exactly so we can act on it. But what if we cannot see some things because we unconsciously don’t want to see them?
You might assume Einstein is one of the few who used 100 percent of his brain. You’d be wrong because we all do.
Democracy suffers when warring camps on major issues insist their side has to win. Some problems just can’t be solved, but creative ways to manage them can be found.
We tend to think that continuing to get more information always leads to a better decision. That’s not always the case.
There are ways to help people who believe in an unfounded conspiracy think more carefully. Arguing with them, however, doesn’t work.
Questions drive learning. We should trust our children more to learn from the questions we and they pose in school.
The “Citizen’s Guide” offers helpful tips on sixteen core tasks of citizenship. How we answer the questions our role as citizens raise is important for our democracy.
