Foundational Humility

There has been a lot of ink spilled, including by me about the importance of humility.  Let’s start with a related famous quote I rather like:

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

 — Bertrand Russell

I recently read a very long essay on several leadership failures, mostly, but not all military.  The TLDR of the essay is that these failures were rooted in the leaders’ unwillingness to really listen to or process information that contradicted long held assumptions.  These long held assumptions had been held for so long that they were taken as dogmas or truths.

What I am writing about today is epistemic humility which I think is the actual fountain from which all other real humility flows.  Epistemology is the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge.  It is about the search for truth through evidence, reason and logic.  Epistemic humility, in short, is a mental posture where one recognizes that their understanding of the truth may be incomplete or incorrect.  Epistemic humility is fundamentally important to the advancement of science, and to wisdom itself.

I’m going to tie this back to first year Chemical Engineering school, and probably my all time favourite Chemical Engineering course: ChE100, taught by Jim Ford, who many remember as a kind and wonderful educator.  Near the start of this course we were taught the idea of a BASIS.  After defining and understanding a problem we are trying to solve we set about explicitly stating our assumptions and simplifications.  Thus, we go into the solving of the problem with a full understanding that the solution is limited by the basis holding true.  Should the assumptions not hold, neither does the solution.

I think this idea of an explicitly stated basis, the foundation upon which your problem solving rests, is transferrable especially to judgement and decision-making of leaders and is a practical application of epistemic humility.

Back to the essay I read on leadership failures.  The examples in the essay followed a pattern: subordinates had observations in the field that contradicted the long held assumption, and communicated this information to their superiors.  In the superior’s eyes the information could be discounted and in some cases the subordinates were ridiculed for passing on such obviously silly information.  The results were disastrous.  For those who want to go down an interesting rabbit holes one of the cited examples in the essay was the Maginot Line failure at the start of WWII.

The failure was far greater than epistemic humility alone.  Another aggravating factor was certainly groupthink, which can effectively disable epistemic humility.

I’ll end the note today with a nod to stoicism’s virtues: courage and wisdom.  Socrates was famously declared by the oracles to be the wisest man alive, and after initially objecting and looking into the matter he reasoned that it was largely because of his epistemic humility.  Courage is the ability to act in the face of fear.  A posture of epistemic humility introduces doubt.  Action in the face of doubt requires courage, a necessary counterbalance to epistemic humility in the wise leader.  Perhaps Kipling put it best in IF:

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;  

I challenge us all to ask ourselves a simple question, especially when we know we are right:  “What if I am wrong?”.

I recently had the pleasure to work with a team of business leaders at a planning retreat.  They combined epistemic humility, with the ability to make decisions and the courage to continue getting after it.  Impressive.

With gratitude for your readership and thoughts,

Nik