Open-Mindedness

What Open-Mindedness means in leadership

You have designed a folding display stand with hinges. A colleague proposes a simpler slotted version. Before defending the design you introduced, you try both with the same sample panel and compare how they pack away. You ask the colleague to show the weak point as well as the advantage. This is the first demonstration of the day in which an author has been invited to make their own invention look less impressive.

The proposal deserves a fair examination, not automatic adoption. You ask how it serves the shared requirements and what limitations it has. Giving another design a serious trial allows your judgment to become answerable to more than the effort you already invested.

Open-Mindedness gives…

The group can gain an option that loyalty to the current plan would exclude too early. A reasoned comparison also lets you keep the original proposal when it remains stronger, without making its authorship the deciding reason.

Finding the balance

A serious comparison can justify either changing or retaining a plan; the shared requirements decide which.

In ordinary life

A proposal from outside

Ask what problem the different approach is meant to solve.

A familiar plan retained

Explain the relevant advantage that survived comparison, rather than who first proposed it.

Nearby virtues, different work

Humility

Humility recognizes the limits of your knowledge. Open-Mindedness gives another perspective a fair hearing.

Prudence

Prudence chooses a course after weighing consequences; Open-Mindedness helps ensure the alternatives receive examination.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Indiscriminate receptivity is a counterfeit of Open-Mindedness when every new idea is treated as equally credible regardless of its reasons. An open hearing can end in a justified rejection.

How to cultivate Open-Mindedness

• Ask the proposer to explain the problem their idea addresses.
• Compare alternatives by requirements stated before the result is known.
• Name what evidence would change your preference.

Try it today

Choose a small, reversible decision you control. Compare an unfamiliar suggestion with your preferred option using one relevant requirement. Record what you learned before deciding.

Questions worth returning to

• What would I notice if neither proposal had an author’s name?
• Have I asked what this unfamiliar feature is for?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. The usefulness of an opinion is itself matter of opinion: as disputable, as open to discussion, and requiring discussion as much, as the opinion itself.

   John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
   CHAPTER II. OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION.

   Calling an opinion useful does not exempt it from discussion. The leader’s preferred design needs reasons open to examination.

2. It is of singular use to princes, if they take the opinions of their council both separately and together; for private opinion is more free, but opinion before others is more reverend.

   Francis Bacon, Essays
   ESSAYS.; XX.—OF COUNSEL.

   Bacon notices that the setting changes which opinions people can voice. A fair hearing may need more than a public request for objections.

3. A man should always have these two rules in readiness; the one to do only whatever the reason of the ruling and legislating faculty may suggest for the use of men; the other, to change thy opinion, if there is any one at hand who sets thee right and moves thee from any opinion.

   Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius
   BOOK IV.; section 12

   Marcus places readiness to change an opinion beside acting for others’ benefit. Revising a design can be part of keeping its purpose.

4. Its residents must be emptied of all conceit of opinion and all self-assertion, and ready to arouse and interpret the public opinion of their neighborhood.

   Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House
   CHAPTER VI; SUBJECTIVE NECESSITY FOR SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS

   Addams asks settlement workers to loosen their own conceit of opinion. Influence begins with attending to the neighborhood’s experience.

5. But those prejudices which every mind feels more or less in favour of riches, ought, like other opinions, which only custom and example have impressed upon us, to be in time subjected to reason.

   Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume III: The Rambler
   The Rambler, No. 166

   Johnson calls inherited assumptions about wealth before reason. The prestige surrounding a proposal is not its argument.

6. It undermined the power of prejudice, superstition, and brute force, by habituating men to reliance upon argument, discussion, and persuasion.

   John Dewey, Democracy and Education
   Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the World

   Dewey describes argument and persuasion as alternatives to inherited authority. A comparison lets the unfamiliar proposal make its case.

7. The chief need of society to-day is an enlightened, progressive and organized public opinion, and the first step towards an enlightened and organized public opinion is an enlightened and organized group opinion.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   THE NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP; XXIV NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION VS. PARTY ORGANIZATION The Will of the People

   Follett makes group discussion part of developing public judgment. An idea needs a working conversation in which its reasons can be tested.

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