Navigation and Truths
Social Leadership Daily - Day #875
On our walk last week, I was teaching River to use the compass and map. To navigate correctly. Our conversation kept coming around to the idea that the compass is always right, whereas our perception of the landscape can be misleading. Our desire for a particular path to be ‘right’ can mean we discount the truth of the arrow.
Something can feel broadly right, or you see a disparity between the fence line you can see, and the straight line on the map, and just convince yourself that it’s ‘close enough’.
The idea of ‘truths’ is important, because they come in different flavours. And whilst in today’s febrile technological environment we like to talk about the hallucinations and validity of AI, it’s worth remembering that humans excel at hallucinating, and talking ourselves into questionable validation strategies.
Gravity is an absolute, it operates on both you and I in the same way. ‘Trust’ is not absolute, and nor are our understandings, or behaviours, around ethics, kindness, fairness, or safety. Often these things are talked about as absolutes, but deployed as matters of convenience.
We muddle our way through the days, but it’s a core capability of Social Leadership to consider our own actions. To question. To ask ourselves if we are following a compass bearing, or a belief based one. There is nothing wrong with following your instincts, hunches, innate wisdom, or sense of what is ‘right’, but if we delude ourselves that these are absolute truths, we run the risk of failure, or imposing costs upon others.