, Columnist
Being Sure You're Right Makes You Weaker
If you want to change minds on, say, vaccines or politics, you have to open your own to your opponent's viewpoint.
Not that different -- just more rigid.
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Jennifer Riel, an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, does a lot of teaching and consulting using a practice called "integrative thinking." The idea is to approach difficult decisions or seemingly unresolvable conflicts by closely examining the different mental models involved and seeing if it's possible to assemble a new, better approach out of the available material.
Four years ago, Riel was invited to put these methods to work in a leadership program for health-care practitioners at the Rotman School. She proposed to the participants that they take on the debate over childhood vaccination.