Chapter Three – Experts and Leaders are Fallible – And Sometimes Manipulative
We turn in this chapter to the other side of the ledger: those who provide information or guide the use of information. Leaders who attempt to predict the future make mistakes. What tends to worsen these situations and make them more dangerous is that people with the most knowledge (and with narcissistic tendencies) can tend to emerge as leaders. They influence people around them. These leaders can sometimes develop a sense of infallibility and hubris, surrounding themselves with sycophants that believe everything these leaders utter. This is a dangerous combination.
We are living through a period in our history where people are dying (mainly because of the Covid pandemic). Many of them could be saved if they followed the advice of medical experts and engaged some fairly simple techniques and practices. While we may think this is a problem manifested by the pandemic, it is not – the problem of distrusting experts has a long history and numerous causes. Experts are fallible, and laypeople are often mis-informed, or in some cases blatantly ignorant on certain important topics. Our society requires awareness of our collective ignorance—as well as rules and guidelines for more constructive engagement between experts and laypeople.
In this chapter we further explore the notion that we humans are often unaware of why and how we think, feel and behave. Our unconscious biases and behavioral drivers or triggers (heuristics) are largely unknown to us–leading to beliefs and decision-making that can be damaging to oneself and others. These biases and resulting behaviors serve as the foundation for our analysis of the crises of expertise and belief that we find to be pervasive in our mid-21st Century society.
Chapter Four – The VUCA Plus Challenge – An Environment that Multiplies Distrust and Blind Trust
Leaders operating in 21st Century societies often must deal with major challenges associated with the anxiety experienced by members of their society. This anxiety can be induced in many ways—and there are multiple sources of societal anxiety. We often seem to be stranded on a boat that is caught up in the “perfect storm” of societal anxiety. Perhaps the easiest way to sum up the multiple sources of anxiety is to evoke the now commonly used acronym: VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). We add two other conditions to this list of anxiety sources. These are turbulence and contradiction—producing what we label a VUCA-Plus environment.
The challenges in a VUCA-Plus environment involve both determining what is “real” (our view of the world) and how one predicts and makes decisions based on an assessment of this elusive reality. Leadership and decision-making in our 21st Century societies has become even more challenging given the big VUCA-Plus waves that have been hitting us: covid, expansion of Internet delivered versions of reality and rapidly expanding role of artificial intelligence. These waves test our ability to trust experts and the information they deliver.
Chapter Five – The Dangerous Influence of Conspiracy Theories
In this chapter we face the issue of conspiracy head on. What has turned a loose collection of people who support an illegitimate expert and his flawed expertise into a tight-knit enclave that found threat, danger and enemies everywhere? What makes many people believe that they must protect that which (they believe) is true, virtuous and life-affirming? What, in other words, creates a conspiracy? If we are to better understand the crises of expertise and belief, we need to appreciate the complex and powerful dynamics associated with how large groups of our population begin to believe conspiracy theories and often take self-defeating action based on these flawed beliefs.
Conspiracy theories result from the basic human orientation as a social animal to detect and explain threats—and specifically from the human tendency to categorize the world into ingroups and outgroups. There is a corresponding desire to protect one’s ingroup from powerful outgroups that might be dangerous. While this process is innate in humans, and has a survival component, it can also yield major negative outcomes for both in-groups and outgroups—particularly when people’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories is manipulated by unscrupulous leaders for their own benefit. A key question is addressed: how do some unscrupulous leaders undermine other leaders and experts in out-groups who put forward apposing ideas?
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