Wisdom in fragments

How many CEOs or heads of government agencies have taken the trouble today to say, 'Who are my five most-thoughtful antagonists? How have I reached out to them, and what efforts do I have in place to create a listening community across those antagonists for when I really need it when the crisis hits?'

If you're managing that way in the age of outrage, basically you're saying your organization will be in constant firefighting mode. That's unsustainable. The organization will very quickly wither and die.

Managing in the age of outrage is not the same as managing outrage. Managing outrage is crisis management—you can turn it over to a part of the organization that's pro at it and then get on with your day. It's firefighting.

The idea that you will sit down with someone who's had 30 or 40 years of lived experience in a particular situation, and has been conditioned to analyze the world that way, and then somehow get them to change their mind in one sitting is implausible.

One of the best analogies I've heard in this scenario is that, just as you wouldn't want a surgeon to go from one operating theater to the next without having washed their hands, you don't want a manager to go from one context to the next without being in a position where they can actually do some good—or at least do no harm.

One is: Do I trust you with my feelings? Do I think that you're going to be a listener who is non-judgmental, or do I think you're going to judge me—'Marc is weak because he's anxious,' or 'Marc is a man and he's feeling sad; dudes don't feel sad.' So if I think you're going to judge me for my feelings, I'm going to be much more guarded about whether or not I express them.

Psychologist & Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

Depression is depression. Despair is despair. Disappointment is disappointment, and I think it's important for us to have that emotional granularity. Because if I just walk around like the world is right now, 'I'm anxious, I'm anxious,' but I have a hard time believing that everyone is that anxious. I think it's because we don't have granularity in our understanding of emotions, and so we're not communicating our true experiences accurately.

Psychologist & Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

We tend to go deeper with that in terms of specific facial expressions, body language, and vocal tone. And I think what's important to know there is that we often make a lot of mistakes when we're reading other people's emotions because we bring in our own cultural values, our own belief systems, and we oftentimes project emotions onto people as opposed to really knowing how they're feeling.

Psychologist & Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

Because it's giving us information about how we're feeling and what we need to do about those feelings. When I'm looking at your facial expressions, I get signals—like either you're interested or you're bored. Either you want me to keep going or not. And that's data for me. Because if I notice a shift in the way you're engaging with me while I'm speaking, I could either use that information, or I could keep going and going and going, and then lose my audience.

Psychologist & Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

I think this goes into the history of psychology; for example, 100 years ago, we couldn't even measure what an emotion is. It's something in your head and in your brain, and we were always used to measuring behaviour, not people's psychological experiences. So just from that alone, it became less important because it wasn't observable behaviour, as if what people are thinking and feeling doesn't matter—which is obviously crazy; it does matter.

Psychologist & Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

Have you ever read Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power? One of the laws is 'discover every man's thumbscrew,' which means that every person has something that matters deeply to them. I think you can approach this not from a negative perspective, but a positive one: to understand the 'good guys,' the 'bad guys,' and everyone in between. Why do they do what they do? As a journalist, the best way to uncover that is to listen—authentically.

Fox News Correspondent and International Reporter

When you take a step back and view this from a 30,000-foot perspective, I try to highlight the role of civilians in conflict. Officials, especially those in power controlling militaries or governments, often want to shape the narrative, to spin you to their story. But when you speak to civilians in the midst of war, they share more about the personal impact on their lives, and I think my audience and readers can connect more deeply with those voices.

Fox News Correspondent and International Reporter

I've learned that people exist on a spectrum, and that's something many observers don't like to acknowledge. But it's a reality across all the wars we cover, on all sides of every conflict. No one thinks exactly the same; some people hold very hawkish views on certain issues while being less so on others.

Fox News Correspondent and International Reporter

I want to set an example for this generation of war reporters, and for my generation as a whole, that you don't have to rely on drugs or alcohol to cope with traumatic experiences. Cold exposure, like an ice bath or cold shower, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, getting outside for a walk in the sun—ideally, a combination of all these things—can make a huge difference. You'd be surprised how your brain starts to adjust after just a few days, making you feel lighter, healthier, and more capable of handling whatever life throws at you.

Fox News Correspondent and International Reporter

I've always been interested in foreign coverage. When I first got into journalism as a student at American University, my goal was to change people's minds about others by helping them understand different perspectives. I didn't necessarily aim to make them feel one way or another, but rather to foster a sense of connection with people they might not know or might even disagree with.

Fox News Correspondent and International Reporter

Part of the reason I'm arguing the time is right is because unlike back in the 60s when these ideas about complexity economics were first floated by people like Herbert Simon, we now have all the tools to do it. Computers are a billion times more powerful, the data is vastly better, our understanding of psychology is vastly better, we know a lot more about how to program models like this.

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program