17 February 2008

Why speaking truth to power is hard

An intriguing piece of research, this: When People Feel Powerful, They Ignore New Opinions, Study Finds which indicates that "The best way to get leaders to consider new ideas is to put them in a situation where they don’t feel as powerful, the research suggests. “If you temporarily make a powerful person feel less powerful, you have a better chance of getting them to pay attention,”"
I think that this probably indicates that if you want good thinking from leaders, they need to feel a little insecure, or you need self-aware leaders who actively put structures in place to offset this psychology of power. It does suggest that distributing power and accountability are important for the health of a society. And it's intriguing, therefore, to think about God's apparent preferred governance option in the Hebrew scriptures which seemed to be decentralised without a king...

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Review: It happened in Hell

 It seemed to me that this book set out to do two main things. One was to demonstrate that so many of our notions of what goes under the lab...