Each month, I share three articles that made me stop, think, and sometimes rethink my own assumptions. I hope they stimulate your thinking as much as they did mine.
How the Best Leaders Shape Conversations
Alison Wood Brooks and Andy Atkins argue that team effectiveness depends less on how often they meet than on the quality of their conversations. They introduce the idea of *conversational stewardship*, the deliberate shaping of conversations to help people think, collaborate and make decisions together. I was particularly struck by their description of conversation as the operating system of collaboration. It comes very close to the heart of what I mean by Conversational Leadership. Read the article
Nobody Is a Good Listener
Rod Naquin challenges the familiar idea that listening is an individual skill. Drawing on his research into everyday leadership conversations, he suggests that people create listening together, often without fully realising how they respond to and adapt to one another. I particularly like this shift in perspective. It reminds us that conversation is not simply an exchange between two independent minds, but something that emerges through their interaction. Read the article
Most of Your Intelligence Isn’t Yours
Carlo Iacono questions how much of our intelligence really belongs to us as individuals. Our brains have changed relatively little over thousands of years, yet our knowledge and capabilities have grown enormously through language, culture, tools and the accumulated discoveries of others. His argument resonates with my recent thinking about distributed cognition and our growing dependence on AI. Perhaps intelligence has always been less about what we know individually and more about what we can accomplish together. Read the article
Knowledge Letter: Issue: 317 (Subscribe)
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Image Credits: Midjourney
(Public Domain)
