There was not a cell in his body that doubted his point of view ever. At least, that was how it looked publicly. It didn’t matter the topic, the data, the agreed-upon events, the documentation, or any other hard evidence. He knew he was right, and he would argue until he convinced everyone in the room — or discredited anyone who dared to disagree.

This went on for years. The pattern didn’t change. Even when something failed — he would try to convince everyone why they were looking at it wrong. Long before gaslighting became a popular term. It didn’t fail. They were wrong in their opinion that it was a failure. Over time, everyone adapted their approach, knowing the fight would come no matter what. Some stopped trying and interacted as little as possible. Others fought for a better outcome — but came back from the battlefield exhausted, emotionally scarred, and bitter.

*Details abstracted. The pattern is real; the person is not identifiable to protect confidentiality.*

•     •     •

His outward certainty was so consistent that it tore the team apart. There was no room for collaboration or collective innovation. The spectators wondered how long the organization would allow it to continue. There were probably bets behind the scenes on when it would be stopped. The answer: it lasted far, far too long.

No amount of talent, institutional knowledge, perceived power, coercion, or finger pointing at how everyone else was inept (of course they were inept, he was the only one that could make it right) would make up for the destruction that was left in his wake. And, there was a lot of destruction.

In the end, he was eventually removed from his role. And as you can probably guess, in his telling it wasn’t his fault. Everyone else was difficult to work with, and to this day he claims he was right.

You might be asking yourself after reading that — what kind of organization allows this? What was happening to the leadership? How did it go on for so long? The answer is, this probably happens countless times across all kinds of organizations. Leadership sometimes gravitates to the most confident person in the room, even if they are destructive. Certainty often gets rewarded. Maybe you’ve encountered a similar situation. You might even be wondering if this was describing a co-worker you know.

In the climate today, “being 100% right and willing to tell somebody with gusto how wrong they are” seems to have become a national pastime at epidemic proportions. “In the comments section” has become a verb.

It has become a regular practice to look for anything that can be cause for disagreement or to pick sides. So much so that it drives algorithms. Discourse, debate, fights, and feisty comments sections with a series of loud “clap backs” get the attention. The name Karen will never hold the same meaning (sorry to those with the name Karen out there). Those interactions are far more likely to go viral. They do, and people show up to weigh in with abandon. Because when audiences gather, those platforms serve up more of it for all to see.

I’ve been thinking …

How the heck did we become so
certain that our sole opinion is so darn right?

I’ve always been an extremely curious person. I was notorious for trying to look at both sides, all the sides. I love collecting data, dissecting, challenging, and putting it all back together again. I’m fascinated with finding out why somebody believes what they believe. How did that come to be their truth? How are you so sure? Who told you? What experience convinced you?

I can remember being told as a young child to stop asking so many questions. I’m sure I heard the occasional, “Because …”, or “That’s just the way it is,” retort. It didn’t stop me, I’ve made it my practice to ask better questions. When I entered new team dynamics, if I wasn’t careful with the delivery, those curious questions could come off as challenging. As untrusting. As if I wasn’t on board. In the end, I was insatiably curious.

I always believed, and still do, that multiple perspectives and taking a deeper dive produces better, more qualified answers. I also believe the current answer is only as good as what we know today. Tomorrow we may find out something else that informs the opinion. Cause for a good rethink and a potential adjustment. Not wishy-washy. Informed and current. But this also assumes somebody is not just winning the argument of the moment. Their true goal is to be effective. The leader in the opening was arguing to win in the moment. Period.

I value all the recent discussion about how we've lost the art of constructive debate, and I'm counting down the days to Priya Parker's new book, The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict, out September 8th.

Pause for a moment on that. A master facilitator spent five years writing a book about fighting. The question she set out to answer was how do we fight with those to whom we want to belong.

That's the part that stopped me. Not how to win an argument. How to disagree with people you intend to keep. And she rejects outright the idea that good groups don't fight — which is close to the opposite of what most of us were taught about what a healthy team looks like.

With some fighting so much and so well, is debate really the lost art? Or is the lost art accepting that what we believe may not actually be right? That somebody else might have a healthier or more informed opinion we should consider? The willingness to see the points from all sides (see there I go again) seems to have stopped. So much so that people have stopped even trying.

Think about the conversations that have to be censored if a certain somebody shows up to a family meal. Or worse, the connections that have been completely severed because of differences in beliefs. Families have been distanced. Friends lost. And on extreme levels, some go so far as to be sued for claiming that world events didn’t occur at all.

Not all is lost. It is nice to see a platform like Substack rising right now — one that values opinions, connections, and real experiences. Could it be that we’re opening up to healthy discussions again? I’ve seen so many notes on Substack from people stating that on other platforms they had to turn off the comments or stay out of the comments section altogether. On Substack, they got 10 new friends with similar experiences — some cheering them on, others appreciating the realness, and others just showing up because they like tapping into other points of view. Priya Parker announced The Art of Fighting here first — to her subscribers, before People magazine ran it. That ordering says something.

So, how do we move more into a space where we can accept that maybe, just maybe we might not be 100% right?

What’s worth taking a closer look at is how we got here. The certainty that tears teams apart isn’t a personality flaw alone. It’s a response to conditions that reward it.

The algorithms that surface our content reward conflict. Calm reasoning doesn’t go viral. Nuanced takes don’t trend. The platforms have built systems that surface the loudest, most certain voices because those are the ones that produce engagement. Engagement, in the form the platforms measure, means people fighting each other in public.

What gets selected for, gets repeated. What gets repeated, gets normalized. What gets normalized, eventually starts to look like just how things are. I used to think people were horrible to each other in the comments section. Now it seems to be spilling into all aspects of real life.

A theory worth exploring — the certainty epidemic isn’t a moral failing of individuals alone. It’s an emergent property of the systems we’ve built to talk to each other. Most leaders I work with arrived at their high-stakes certainty habits the same way they arrived at their email-checking habits. By being inside a system that rewarded the behavior thousands of times before they could think about it.

That doesn’t excuse the behavior. It does change what the work of changing it requires.

Here is the finding that should have changed the conversation a long time ago, and somehow hasn’t. 

A neurologist named Robert Burton spent years researching how the brain produces the feeling of certainty. His finding, documented in his book On Being Certain, is architectural and unsettling. The feeling of certainty is a separate brain state from the reasoning process that produced the belief. It can attach itself to any belief — accurate or not. People who feel certain are not necessarily reasoning more carefully. They are experiencing a brain state that may or may not correlate with the accuracy of the underlying conclusion.

Read that line again. The feeling of being right is not the same thing as being right. They are two different operations of the brain, and one does not predict the other. 

This finding undoes a lot of how we talk about expertise, confidence, and leadership. The most certain person in the room is not the most likely to be right. The most certain person is the person whose brain has produced the feeling of certainty most strongly — which may correlate with accurate reasoning, or may correlate with bias, or may correlate with experience, or may correlate with nothing at all.

That separation is the whole point. The feeling is one thing. The reasoning is another. The accuracy of the conclusion is a third.

Worth sitting with: the leaders I have watched be the most consistently right over time were not the ones who felt the most certain. They were the ones who treated the feeling of certainty as a signal worth investigating, not as a conclusion worth defending.

The leader at the start of this piece had the feeling. He just never separated it from the rest of the work.

The neuroscience explains what certainty is. The behavioral science explains why we dig in. And what we believe directly shapes what we do next.

Robert Cialdini spent decades researching the principles of persuasion. His book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion documents six core principles, and one of them — commitment and consistency — is the structural explanation for why certainty, once formed, becomes so hard to update.

The principle is this. Once a person has publicly committed to a position, the brain creates an internal pressure to remain consistent with that commitment. The pressure is real and measurable. People will reorganize subsequent evidence, dismiss contradicting information, and rationalize counter-evidence to maintain alignment with what they previously committed to.

The implication for leadership is direct. The certainty itself is one problem. The structural pressure to remain consistent with prior certainty compounds it. Once a leader has publicly stated a position, the brain is now organized to defend that position, often without conscious awareness of doing so.

But the belief doesn’t stay in the leader’s head. It shapes what they do next.

When a leader believes they are right, they stop looking for disconfirming evidence. They don’t go searching for the case they might have missed. They don’t ask the people most likely to disagree with them. Each of these is an action — or more precisely, an absence of action — that flows directly from the belief.

The certainty also shapes who they surround themselves with. People who challenge get pushed to the margins. People who agree get promoted. Over time the room is composed of voices that confirm what the leader already thinks. The team that watches a leader respond to disagreement with hostility learns to stop disagreeing. The team that watches a leader respond to agreement with reward learns to keep agreeing. The leader’s certainty has now reorganized the entire information environment around them.

This is how the loop closes. Belief shapes action. Action shapes environment. Environment reinforces belief. The leader who is certain is not just holding a static opinion. They are running a system designed by default to confirm what they already think and to filter out what might update them.

A theory worth exploring: the destructive certainty in the leader at the start of this piece was not just the feeling of being right. It was the structural pressure to remain consistent with everything he had publicly committed to over years — and the system of actions, hires, decisions, and dismissals that pressure had built around him.

Worth sitting with: how much of what you are currently defending publicly are you actually still convinced of, and how much is the consistency talking?

There is a working leadership model for this that has been around for a couple of decades. Paul Saffo, a futurist at Stanford, named it strong opinions, loosely held.

The discipline is twofold. You hold your views with conviction. You make decisions. You take positions. You commit to the action the position requires. But you also hold those views loosely. You remain open to being persuaded otherwise. You actively look for evidence that might change your mind. You update the position when the evidence warrants it.

It is harder than it sounds. Most people default to one side or the other. The person who holds opinions strongly tends to dig in when challenged. The person who holds opinions loosely tends to default to perpetual openness — which can look like wisdom but often functions as a way to avoid taking any position at all.

The practice requires both. The conviction to act. The humility to update. Neither without the other.

What I’ve watched in coaching for years: the leaders who run this practice well share something specific. They have built the habit of asking themselves a single question before locking a position. The question is, what would change my mind?

Not what would change someone else’s mind. Not what would change the room’s mind. What would change mine?

If they cannot name what evidence would update their position, they are not holding a strong opinion. They are holding a fixed belief dressed up as an opinion. The two are different. The first one is a working tool. The second one is the thing that tore the team apart at the start of this piece.

One nuance before the practice.

People process at different rates, and that’s worth saying out loud.

Some leaders arrive at conclusions quickly. They take in information, weigh it, decide. This is not the same as being certain without thinking. It can be — but it doesn’t have to be.

Others process more slowly. They sit with information. They sleep on decisions. They want to weigh implications, consider perspectives, see what shows up after the first reaction passes.

Taking time to think is not weakness. It is a different processing rate, and it has its own kind of integrity.

What is weakness — or at least, what is costly — is the opposite end of the spectrum from the leader at the start of this piece. The leader who cannot decide because they are afraid of being wrong. The team that waits for direction that never comes. The decision that gets deferred so many times the conditions change before it lands.

Both failure modes share a root. The certain leader believes the feeling of being right. The paralyzed leader believes the feeling of being wrong. Both have made the same mistake — treating the feeling as the answer rather than the question.

A theory worth exploring — the question isn’t how fast you arrive. It’s whether you can name where you are in your own process, whether you can commit when commitment is required, and whether you can update when update is warranted.

The pace varies by person. The practice doesn’t.

So what does the practice actually look like in a regular week?

A few things have worked for the leaders I coach. None of them is a transformation. All of them are small built-in habits that, repeated, change the brain’s relationship to its own certainty.

The first is the question already named. Before locking a position on anything that matters, ask what would change my mind? If you cannot answer specifically, the position is not earned yet. It’s a feeling masquerading as a conclusion.

The second is the steelman habit. Before arguing against a view you disagree with, write out the strongest version of that view — the version that would persuade you if you didn’t already hold the opposing position. Most people argue against the weakest version of the opposing view because it is easier. The leaders who reason well argue against the strongest version, because that’s where the actual weakness of their own position usually reveals itself.

The third is the twenty-four-hour rule on strong reactions. When you find yourself certain about something with a strong emotional charge, wait twenty-four hours before acting or publishing. The strong reaction is information. It is rarely the whole picture. Twenty-four hours later, you can decide whether the reaction held up or whether it shifted once you slept on it. In my experience, it shifts more often than people predict it will.

The fourth is the truth-tellers. Who in your life will tell you when you’re wrong? Not the people who agree with you. Not the people who avoid conflict. The people who care about you enough to disagree with you when they have reason to. If you cannot name three of them, you are missing the most important built-in protection against your own certainty. This is the most dangerous part of algorithms today. They feed you what you will agree with over and over again. That is not a well-informed position.

The fifth is the pre-mortem. Before a decision, ask: if this fails in eighteen months, why would it have failed? The question forces the mind to imagine the failure modes that the current certainty is obscuring. The leaders I have coached through this practice almost always identify risks they hadn’t named before the question. Sometimes the risks are enough to change the decision. Sometimes they aren’t. Either way, the decision is better informed.

The sixth, and the one most often missed, is the willingness to say I was wrong, in public, when you were. Not as performance. Not as humility theater. As a discipline that teaches the people around you that updating is allowed, and that you do it yourself. You’re modeling the behavior for the rest of the team to follow. The team that watches the leader update will start updating. The team that watches the leader dig in will learn to dig in too.

The leader at the start of this piece had none of these practices. Not because he was a bad person. Because nothing in his environment had ever asked him to develop them. The certainty was rewarded for a long time before it was punished. By the time the bill came due, the patterns were so embedded that even the loss of the role didn’t shake them.

What’s worth a closer look: the patterns we are running right now, with the conditions of the current moment, are likely to compound the same way. The algorithm-fed certainty. The comments-section combat. The performance of being right. None of it is being challenged in the systems we spend our days inside. We are training ourselves into the same brain state, every day, without noticing.

The discipline of doubting yourself well is not a feeling. It is a practice. And like every practice that matters, it requires building before it is needed, not after.

What would change your mind?

Sit with the question. The answer is information about whether you are running a working tool or defending a fixed belief. Both have their uses. Only one of them is leadership.