“…consider the story of what’s happened with the Indigenous tradition of ‘cool burns’. Indigenous Australians have, for thousands of years, employed this practice to safely burn off fuel in the underbrush of the bush. It reduces the amount of fuel that could eventually lead to catastrophic bushfires. It makes fires more manageable because they are intentionally lit at night or near dawn, when air temperatures are lower and dew slows the progress of the burns. It triggers seed germination in the local vegetation. And it protects the tree canopy. For decades, this practice was eschewed by colonial firefighting institutions, which tended to focus narrowly on extinguishing any blaze as soon as it occurred, rather than thinking in the longer term about reducing risk and encouraging biodiversity. Yet recently, especially after the devastating Australian bushfires of 2019-20, collective intellectual humility on the part of various firefighting institutions, both in Australia and elsewhere, has led to this Indigenous practice being recognised, appreciated and adopted.
Similarly, collective intellectual humility plausibly contributed to major international achievements that required diverse experts to recognise the limits of their own knowledge, such as the development of the COVID-19 vaccines. At a more modest scale, fostering collective intellectual humility can help families avoid conflict or companies achieve greater productivity and innovation.
You likely belong to a number of groups that could benefit from being intellectually humble as a group. From your place of employment to your book club, neighbourhood watch, parent group, religious community or volunteer organisation, you can have an important role to play in contributing to group dynamics that promote collective intellectual humility. And, no, you don’t have to be in charge of the group to make a meaningful difference. Leaders and ordinary members alike can agree to participate in an intellectually humbling environment.
It won’t all be plain sailing. Social dynamics frequently get in the way of collective intellectual humility. These include expectations of conformity, a lack of diverse thinking, or simply the social decorum that keeps us from shouting out each other’s weaknesses. These processes can land groups in the territory of pluralistic ignorance, group think or toxic polarisation. However, when done right, being able to count on each other to notice and respond to our intellectual limitations is a beautiful thing.”
The authors then go on to give practical tips to build collective intellectual humility in workplaces or any other group, summarized below:
- Help foster a group culture that encourages intellectual humility. Cultural changes can begin with the individual members of a collective. You can play your part by stimulating broad participation from members of the collective, encouraging diverse perspectives within the group, and promoting postures of transparency, accountability, and openness to criticism.
- Introduce anonymous balloting. Whether a collective needs to solve a problem or have space to reimagine, developing easy ways for people to voice opinions or provide ideas or feedback (for example, via online platforms or emails) is helpful. When people can contribute anonymously, this can increase the diversity of the perspectives shared.
- Play devil’s advocate. For example, assign team members to explore contrary evidence, misrepresentations, and flaws of current positions or ways of doing things; initiate meetings to argue for alternative views or opposing options; or simply initiate informal conversations to this effect.
- Conduct premortems. Rather than analysing failed plans after they fall apart, collectives can proactively imagine various ways in which they may not live up to their potential in the future, and then analyse reasons for the imagined failures.
- Use a linguistic trick to create psychological distance from a problem. In group conversations, try talking about your group as ‘they/them/their’ rather than ‘we/us/our’ as a way to gain a distanced perspective.
- Embrace dissenting voices. Having a sprinkling of intellectually arrogant or dogmatic members in the collective, even when these individuals are wrong, can keep the discussion going so the collective can generate more ideas, explore more evidence, and form more arguments.”
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