The humility of change
Sally McNamara, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and development partners Pete Cohen, Inder Singh, Kate Spencer, Daniel Bluzer-Fry and Courtney Guilliat on the humility required for real change.
It’s often said that the first step to meaningful change is awareness — the awareness that there really could be a better way, if only we’re willing to free ourselves from the baggage of our past experiences and assumptions and see things through a new lens.
In recent conversations I’ve had with professionals from many industries about the challenges of building change resilience, something surprising has emerged — a call for a return to timeless qualities that seem to have been misplaced in our rush for progress. A call to treat others how you’d like to be treated and to care about people at least as much as achieving objectives, through decency, kindness and respect — and humility.
Could a greater sense of humility help us to make the leap from the mindset of ‘all-knowing expert’ to finding a delicious freedom in not knowing all the answers — allowing openness to curiosity, learning and growth?
Humility is freedom from pride or arrogance. As one of my co-conversationalists, Catherine Mudford, Director, Capability Development Asialink Business, recently said:
“…humility is critical, because it gives you the freedom and permission to learn. It’s the ability to let go of the need to always be the “expert”, to be able to design a better shared future in collaboration with others.”
In the (not so distant) past, where information and knowledge were contained within the tight grasp of the elite, experts were all-powerful. Owning, and keeping, knowledge and information, and so having all the answers — was the way to get to the top and stay there.
Now, when it’s estimated the average person encounters 74GB of information every day, it’s impossible to own any significant amount of knowledge and information — most things (to a reasonable degree of accuracy) are only one search away. And of course, knowledge is fragile: you can be an expert one day and out of date tomorrow, an outcome of being enmeshed in networks that themselves create vast amounts of new knowledge and information.
So, perhaps, building one’s identity and sense of self-worth in expertise is a thing of the past. It’s a recipe for misplaced pride, arrogance and a stubborn resistance to change. When an event or circumstance doesn’t fit within our known reality (an ever growing occurrence, it seems) we go to the place of fear: “this shouldn’t be happening”, we tell ourselves.
The benefits of humility as a skill
Humility allows us the freedom instead to open up and learn something new. The concept of shoshin (or ‘beginner’s mind’) captures the essence of this way of being. It encourages us to see every situation as if for the first time — and here’s the catch — regardless of prior knowledge or expertise.
Researchers at Duke University suggest that intellectual humility is a quality that’s been underrated and understudied compared with qualities like arrogance and conceit.
They suggest that we’d do well to encourage — and teach — intellectual humility if we are going to stand any chance of achieving higher quality debate and decision-making, something necessary in a time of extreme polarisation where complex global problems like runaway inflation, geopolitical tensions, the climate emergency and the yawning skills gaps, show no sign of abating.
Intellectual humility is essential, says Mark Leary, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, because:
“…intellectually humble people can have strong beliefs, but recognise their fallibility and are willing to be proven wrong on matters large and small.”
Humility brings openness to other perspectives and the ability to hear different opinions and beliefs. This is essential not only for solving complex problems but for building our own wellbeing and resilience.
Humility is also profoundly connective — it brings us into deeper relationships with other people as we appreciate their perspectives. Trying to solve things in isolation is a lonely and stressful place to be, and excessive individualism is connected to rising anxiety and depression rates.
And perhaps we need to redefine the skills of ‘success’. Doing this would be profound, and difficult, of course. In organisations it starts with selection criteria and flows all the way through leadership, objective setting, and performance assessment ecosystems. And similarly in education, where we are starting to (slowly) question traditional measures of success in terms of qualifications.
Maybe time is finally up for arrogance and conceit — both as effective ways to be, or even to be tolerated. As has been repeatedly observed, when organisations tolerate (and sometimes reward) ‘brilliant jerks’, those organisations become toxic and low-performing.
Sometimes progress is not always about the new. Sometimes it’s about returning to essential wisdom. Perhaps we need the courage and self-awareness now to refocus on timeless qualities like humility — in order to meet the challenges of tomorrow?
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
Contact us at forward@rmit.edu.au
