Dare to disagree | Margaret Heffernan

576,454 views ・ 2012-08-06

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Translator: Thu-Huong Ha Reviewer: Morton Bast
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In Oxford in the 1950s,
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there was a fantastic doctor, who was very unusual,
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named Alice Stewart.
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And Alice was unusual partly because, of course,
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she was a woman, which was pretty rare in the 1950s.
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And she was brilliant, she was one of the,
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at the time, the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of Physicians.
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She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married,
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after she had kids,
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and even after she got divorced and was a single parent,
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she continued her medical work.
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And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science,
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the emerging field of epidemiology,
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the study of patterns in disease.
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But like every scientist, she appreciated
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that to make her mark, what she needed to do
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was find a hard problem and solve it.
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The hard problem that Alice chose
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was the rising incidence of childhood cancers.
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Most disease is correlated with poverty,
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but in the case of childhood cancers,
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the children who were dying seemed mostly to come
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from affluent families.
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So, what, she wanted to know,
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could explain this anomaly?
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Now, Alice had trouble getting funding for her research.
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In the end, she got just 1,000 pounds
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from the Lady Tata Memorial prize.
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And that meant she knew she only had one shot
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at collecting her data.
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Now, she had no idea what to look for.
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This really was a needle in a haystack sort of search,
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so she asked everything she could think of.
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Had the children eaten boiled sweets?
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Had they consumed colored drinks?
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Did they eat fish and chips?
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Did they have indoor or outdoor plumbing?
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What time of life had they started school?
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And when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come back,
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one thing and one thing only jumped out
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with the statistical clarity of a kind that
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most scientists can only dream of.
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By a rate of two to one,
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the children who had died
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had had mothers who had been X-rayed when pregnant.
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Now that finding flew in the face of conventional wisdom.
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Conventional wisdom held
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that everything was safe up to a point, a threshold.
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It flew in the face of conventional wisdom,
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which was huge enthusiasm for the cool new technology
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of that age, which was the X-ray machine.
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And it flew in the face of doctors' idea of themselves,
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which was as people who helped patients,
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they didn't harm them.
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Nevertheless, Alice Stewart rushed to publish
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her preliminary findings in The Lancet in 1956.
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People got very excited, there was talk of the Nobel Prize,
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and Alice really was in a big hurry
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to try to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find
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before they disappeared.
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In fact, she need not have hurried.
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It was fully 25 years before the British and medical --
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British and American medical establishments
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abandoned the practice of X-raying pregnant women.
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The data was out there, it was open, it was freely available,
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but nobody wanted to know.
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A child a week was dying,
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but nothing changed.
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Openness alone can't drive change.
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So for 25 years Alice Stewart had a very big fight on her hands.
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So, how did she know that she was right?
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Well, she had a fantastic model for thinking.
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She worked with a statistician named George Kneale,
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and George was pretty much everything that Alice wasn't.
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So, Alice was very outgoing and sociable,
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and George was a recluse.
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Alice was very warm, very empathetic with her patients.
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George frankly preferred numbers to people.
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But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship.
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He said, "My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong."
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He actively sought disconfirmation.
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Different ways of looking at her models,
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at her statistics, different ways of crunching the data
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in order to disprove her.
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He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories.
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Because it was only by not being able to prove
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that she was wrong,
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that George could give Alice the confidence she needed
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to know that she was right.
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It's a fantastic model of collaboration --
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thinking partners who aren't echo chambers.
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I wonder how many of us have,
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or dare to have, such collaborators.
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Alice and George were very good at conflict.
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They saw it as thinking.
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So what does that kind of constructive conflict require?
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Well, first of all, it requires that we find people
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who are very different from ourselves.
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That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive,
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which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves,
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and it means we have to seek out people
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with different backgrounds, different disciplines,
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different ways of thinking and different experience,
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and find ways to engage with them.
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That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy.
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And the more I've thought about this,
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the more I think, really, that that's a kind of love.
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Because you simply won't commit that kind of energy
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and time if you don't really care.
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And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds.
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Alice's daughter told me
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that every time Alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist,
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they made her think and think and think again.
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"My mother," she said, "My mother didn't enjoy a fight,
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but she was really good at them."
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So it's one thing to do that in a one-to-one relationship.
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But it strikes me that the biggest problems we face,
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many of the biggest disasters that we've experienced,
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mostly haven't come from individuals,
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they've come from organizations,
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some of them bigger than countries,
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many of them capable of affecting hundreds,
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thousands, even millions of lives.
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So how do organizations think?
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Well, for the most part, they don't.
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And that isn't because they don't want to,
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it's really because they can't.
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And they can't because the people inside of them
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are too afraid of conflict.
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In surveys of European and American executives,
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fully 85 percent of them acknowledged
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that they had issues or concerns at work
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that they were afraid to raise.
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Afraid of the conflict that that would provoke,
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afraid to get embroiled in arguments
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that they did not know how to manage,
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and felt that they were bound to lose.
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Eighty-five percent is a really big number.
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It means that organizations mostly can't do
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what George and Alice so triumphantly did.
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They can't think together.
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And it means that people like many of us,
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who have run organizations,
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and gone out of our way to try to find the very best people we can,
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mostly fail to get the best out of them.
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So how do we develop the skills that we need?
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Because it does take skill and practice, too.
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If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict,
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we have to see it as thinking,
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and then we have to get really good at it.
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So, recently, I worked with an executive named Joe,
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and Joe worked for a medical device company.
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And Joe was very worried about the device that he was working on.
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He thought that it was too complicated
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and he thought that its complexity
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created margins of error that could really hurt people.
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He was afraid of doing damage to the patients he was trying to help.
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But when he looked around his organization,
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nobody else seemed to be at all worried.
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So, he didn't really want to say anything.
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After all, maybe they knew something he didn't.
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Maybe he'd look stupid.
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But he kept worrying about it,
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and he worried about it so much that he got to the point
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where he thought the only thing he could do
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was leave a job he loved.
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In the end, Joe and I found a way
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for him to raise his concerns.
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And what happened then is what almost always
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happens in this situation.
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It turned out everybody had exactly the same
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questions and doubts.
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So now Joe had allies. They could think together.
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And yes, there was a lot of conflict and debate
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and argument, but that allowed everyone around the table
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to be creative, to solve the problem,
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and to change the device.
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Joe was what a lot of people might think of
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as a whistle-blower,
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except that like almost all whistle-blowers,
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he wasn't a crank at all,
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he was passionately devoted to the organization
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and the higher purposes that that organization served.
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But he had been so afraid of conflict,
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until finally he became more afraid of the silence.
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And when he dared to speak,
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he discovered much more inside himself
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and much more give in the system than he had ever imagined.
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And his colleagues don't think of him as a crank.
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They think of him as a leader.
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So, how do we have these conversations more easily
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and more often?
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Well, the University of Delft
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requires that its PhD students
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have to submit five statements that they're prepared to defend.
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It doesn't really matter what the statements are about,
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what matters is that the candidates are willing and able
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to stand up to authority.
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I think it's a fantastic system,
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but I think leaving it to PhD candidates
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is far too few people, and way too late in life.
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I think we need to be teaching these skills
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to kids and adults at every stage of their development,
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if we want to have thinking organizations
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and a thinking society.
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The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed
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rarely come from information that is secret or hidden.
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It comes from information that is freely available and out there,
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but that we are willfully blind to,
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because we can't handle, don't want to handle,
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the conflict that it provokes.
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But when we dare to break that silence,
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or when we dare to see,
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and we create conflict,
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we enable ourselves and the people around us
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to do our very best thinking.
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Open information is fantastic,
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open networks are essential.
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But the truth won't set us free
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until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent
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and the moral courage to use it.
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Openness isn't the end.
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It's the beginning.
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(Applause)
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