WHAT DO WE KNOW?

Apparently research tells us that our confidence in our opinions flags when we have to explain ourselves. The study looked particularly at public policy and found that people's confidence in their positions on issues like health dropped when asked to explain how their preferred policy direction would actually work, as opposed to just being asked to justify that position. 

If you think about it, this makes sense. We've all had that unsettling feeling of realizing you don't actually understand something as well as you thought you did. For me it happens regularly when my children ask me to explain how some everyday thing works. My familiarity with the thing lulls me into believing I understand it, until I need to explain it. 

Seems to me that organizations and institutions suffer from the same bias. We do something one way for long enough or we work under a well-entrenched policy long enough or we believe something about our own culture or our clients long enough that we all think we understand why things are that way. And we rarely question whether or not we're right until one of two things happens:

1) some truly jarring event or revelation shakes us out of our institutional inertia; or

2) we're asked to try to explain the status quo. Not justify it, but actually explain how it works and why that's better than an alternative.

Then self-doubt and questioning sets in. That doesn't mean the status quo is wrong, mind you. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be confident in our position. But it's probably worth testing our confidence more often. We should explain ourselves more. There are a lot of good reasons to do that, but now add to that list the value of testing our own assumptions and seeing how it feels.