Coming to Terms with the Limitations in Our Own Thinking

Our colleague Jim Laing, a UK-based consultant, sends along a link to this post with an intriguing story--factual or not--about a WWI-era Royal Flying Corps field near Stonehenge in southern England. As the story goes, it seems the field commander was concerned that the stones themselves would pose an obstacle for planes and so planned to have them destroyed. The decision was subsequently rescinded several levels up the chain of command, if indeed it every really happened, but Laing uses the story to illustrate how locked on leaders can become to a single way of understanding a given problem.

The Stonehenge story echos James Suroweicki's Wisdom of Crowds notion that groups tend to make better decisions than individuals. Maybe the lesson for leaders is that if one's options seem limited to one choice with steep downside consequences, then the time has come to bring other viewpoints into the field.