One of my clients recently attended a course urging him to listen for and be attentive to “disconfirming information.” He was struck by that phrase, probably because the head of his organization operates at the other end of the continuum: she only wants to hear evidence that supports her current point of view.
I first learned about disconfirming evidence from Meg Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science, who talks about how living systems grow and change as a result of disequilibrium, not equilibrium. Think about it. When are you more likely to grow: when everything you encounter is just mirroring what you already know, like the woman my client reports to, or when something new and different drops into your world?
