Given disruptive technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, this 2020 book is even more important now. Humility is the key to improving interpersonal and organizational trust and supercharging continuous performance improvement in the age of gen AI. I was fortunate to discover Professor Edward Hess’ book “Humility is the New Smart: Rethinking human excellence in the smart machine age.”1 This book is a practical and inspiring way to introduce humility to your team and organization. Hess’ book can be read over a weekend, and it has many tools, a self-assessment, and an organizational assessment.
Redefining what it means to be “smart”
Our world is changing fast! Automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence — the Smart Machine Age (SMA) — are disrupting and displacing the workforce. Transdisciplinary teamwork is the new norm. People skills, creative and critical thinking, innovation, and improvement are more important now than ever!
Our native cognitive abilities have not evolved at the same pace.2 Our brains are wired to sense and react to real or perceived threats and emotions. Our brain is also wired for efficiency: it defaults to personality traits, fast decisions via nonconscious schemas or learned mindsets. We resist new ideas that demand new cognitive effort. Our decisions are suboptimal due to cognitive biases: (a) protection of mindset, (b) personality and habits, (c) faulty reasoning, (d) automatic associations, (e) relative thinking, and (f) social influences.3
Humans are prone to defensiveness from our innate drive to protect our ego4 and to avoid our fears (humiliation, vulnerability, uncertainty, risk, intellectual or emotional exposure, uninvited scrutiny). Science shows these behaviors impede creativity, critical and innovative thinking, reflective listening, and emotionally engaging others. We can mitigate these biases using modern cognitive neuroscience. We can start with a new definition of “being smart” (“NewSmart”). We should embrace intellectual humility, honesty, and courage and redesign organizations for this new age. Professor Edward Hess’ NewSmart Humility has four interdependent components:
NewSmart principles,
Humility mindset,
NewSmart behaviors, and
NewSmart organization
The “NewSmart” principles
“To change our mental model for the SMA,” Hess writes, “we first need to accept a quality-based definition of ‘being smart’ — a NewSmart — that we define as excelling at the highest level of thinking, learning, and emotionally engaging with others that one is capable of doing. NewSmart is a measure not of what you know or how much you know but of
the quality of your thinking, listening, collaborating, and learning;
how good you are at “not” knowing and decoupling your beliefs (not values) from your ego;
how good you are at being open to continually stress-testing your beliefs about how the world works;
how good you are at trying out new ideas and ways to accomplish your objectives and learning from those experiments.”
“So what does the high-quality thinking, learning, and emotional engagement underlying NewSmart look like in practice?” The NewSmart principles are worth committing to memory:
“I’m defined not by what I know or how much I know, but by the quality of my thinking, listening, relating, and collaborating.”
“My mental models are not reality—they are only my generalized stories of how my world works.”
“I’m not my ideas, and I must decouple my beliefs (not values) from my ego.”
“I must be open-minded and treat my beliefs (not values) as hypotheses to be constantly tested and subject to modification by better data.”
“My mistakes and failures are opportunities to learn.”
In Table 1 the “old smart” is compared to the NewSmart.
The Humility mindset
We embrace two definitions of humility:
“Humility is the noble choice to forgo your status and to use your influence for the good of others before yourself.” In other words, “Humility is to hold power in service of others.” (John Dickson5) and
“Humility as a mindset about oneself that is open-minded, self-accurate, and ‘not all about me,’ and that enables one to embrace the world as it ‘is’ in the pursuit of human excellence.” (Edward Hess, 2020)
Hess: “Humility is a mindset that results in not being so self-centered, ego defensive, self-enhancing, self-promotional, and closed-minded—all of which the science of learning and cognition shows inhibit excellence at higher-order thinking and emotionally engaging with others.”
The NewSmart behaviors
The NewSmart and Humility mindsets drive behaviors that are supported and improved with evidence-based skills. Hess clusters them into four behavioral categories:
Quieting Ego,
Managing Self (one’s thinking and emotions),
Reflective Listening, and
Otherness (emotionally connecting and relating).
(1) Quieting Ego
Hess writes: “Quieting Ego is how we can deliberately work to reduce our reflexive emotional defensiveness; have empathy and open-mindedness; engage in Reflective Listening; and proactively seek other people’s feedback and perspectives to stress-test our own thinking. Quieting Ego is a way of practicing and operationalizing Humility. To quiet our ego is to perceive others and the world without filtering everything through a self-focused lens and to tamp down on negative or self-protective”inner talk” that is driven consciously or subconsciously by our fears and insecurities.” Quieting Ego starts with four evidence-based behaviors:
mindfulness,
mindfulness meditation,
daily Quiet Ego reminders, and
practicing gratitude.
(2) Managing Self (one’s thinking and emotions)
Hess writes: “Managing Self—our emotions and thinking—aids us in engaging in the higher-level thinking and behavior required … . It’s necessary to remain open-minded and be willing to test our beliefs and modify our points of view if presented with better data. It’s also how we’re able to overcome our fear of mistakes in order to take ownership of them and learn from them, and helps us more effectively relate to and collaborate with others.”
“Managing Self comes from the science of ‘self-regulation’ and ‘self-control,’ which are broad psychological concepts that mean to monitor and manage one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors” and start with these practices:
slowing down,
managing thoughts,
managing emotions, and
emotional intelligence.
For managing thoughts, Hess’ “thinking toolbox” starts with familiar concepts from lean (PDSA problem-solving, root cause analysis, etc.).
For managing emotions, Hess writes: “We’ve discussed how ego and fear are the two big learning inhibitors and explored our reflexive tendency as humans to be emotionally defensive and self-protective. We’ve discussed how negative emotions can undermine our behavior and thinking and how positive emotions can improve them. Stress, anger, and anxiety can cause narrow-mindedness and the fight-flee-or-freeze syndrome. … Positive emotions, on the other hand, have been scientifically linked not just to higher health and well-being but also to broader attention, open-mindedness, deeper focus, and more flexible thinking, all of which underlie creativity and innovative thinking. Positive emotions also improve decision making and general cognitive processing.”
Hess’ “managing emotions toolbox” includes effective techniques such as
psychological distancing,
reframing,
positive memories,
positive self-talk, and
if-then implementation plans.
See Hess book for illustrative examples.
Emotional intelligence (EI)6 is “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions. … Sensitivity to other people’s emotions has been found to be a key to effective collaboration.” The EI model includes these abilities:
Perceive and differentiate emotions in self and others.
Use emotions to facilitate reasoning, aid judgment and memory processes, problem solve, communicate with others, and facilitate open-mindedness.
Understand emotions by analyzing the emotions of yourself and others.
Manage emotions in self and others.
(3) Reflective Listening
Hess writes: “Reflective Listening is so important because it underlies all [other skills]. Why? Because your thinking and learning are limited by cognitive biases, emotional defensiveness, ego, and fear. You need, then, to truly listen to others to open your mind, push past your biases and mental models, and mitigate self-absorption in order to collaborate and build better relationships. [We know from] evidence that it’s hard for any of us to critique our own thinking and truly think critically. We’re just too wired to confirm what we already believe, and we feel too comfortable having a cohesive simple story of how our world works. We need to have thinking ‘partners’ who force us to confront those biases, and we need to listen to them.”
Reflective Listening includes these practices:
preparing to listen reflectively,
listening with a Quiet Ego and an open mind, and
inquiring with genuine curiosity, humility, and respect (humble inquiry).
Here’s a preparation checklist for Reflective Listening:
Is my mind clear? If not, take several deep, slow breaths.
Am I calm emotionally? If not, take a few more deep breaths, focusing on breathing in for four seconds and very, very slowly breathing out for four seconds.
Say to yourself a couple of times:
“I am not my ideas.”
“It’s not all about me.”
“Don’t be defensive.”
“Ask questions before telling.”
“Don’t interrupt.”
“Stay focused.”
“Critique ideas, not people.”
“Listen to understand, not to confirm.”
(4) Otherness (emotionally connecting and relating)
Hess writes “We need others because we can’t think, innovate, or relate at our best alone. To relate to other people you first have to make a connection with them. It is by building a relationship over time that you build trust, and when you have caring trust, you have set the stage for the highest level of human engagement. … So how do you get better at connecting and relating? It’s quite obvious that connecting and relating to people is inhibited by arrogance, self-absorption, self-centeredness, not listening, closed-mindedness, lack of empathy, emotional defensiveness, and the ego protection and fear that flow from the Old Smart mental model. Accepting NewSmart and Humility as well as practicing Quieting Ego, Managing Self, and Reflective Listening lays the groundwork for relationship building with others.”
Otherness behaviors include:
using the fives keys to connecting,
building trust and conveying caring,
preparing for meetings,
choosing words wisely.
The five keys to connecting are
be present,
be genuine,
communicate affirmation,
listen effectively, and
communicate support.
Prepare for meetings with this checklist:
be really present,
genuinely smile — a big smile,
make eye contact,
be positive,
listen reflectively,
stay fully present, and
do no harm.
Choose your words wisely: use “Yes, and” instead of “Yes, but” to build on the ideas of others; use “I believe” instead of “I think” to acknowledge your ideas are hypotheses open to critique and testing; use “I want to” instead of “I have to” and “I won’t” instead of “I can’t” to emphasize the power of choice.
NewSmart organization
Finally, design your organizational culture and environment for learning, adaptation, innovation, and improvement leveraging established psychological concepts:
positivity (promote positive emotions, minimize negative emotions);
self-determination theory (promote intrinsic motivation by supporting innate human drives for autonomy, relatedness, and competence); and
psychological safety (feeling safe to speak freely; to experiment, fail, and learn; to seek and give constructive feedback; to challenge others’ thinking, including the “boss”).
Summarized in Table 2 are the new cultural ways of a NewSmart organization compared to the old cultural ways.
Appendix - LaTeX tables
One cannot generate tables in Substack (eg, using markdown). Therefore I generated a LaTeX PDF table and converted it to a PNG image. Here is an image of LaTeX code in my Emacs text editor.
After generating PDF table (ie, testtable.pdf) I ran the following commands in the Mac OS terminal to create Table 2 above:
pdfcrop testtable.pdf
magick -density 300x300 -quality 100 testtable-crop.pdf testtable-crop.png
pdfcrop
command crops the document to standalone PDF tablemagick
command converts PDF table in an PNG image
I used Homebrew to install pdfcrop program (to run pdfcrop
command) and imagemagick program (to run magick
command)
Footnotes
Hess, Edward D. Humility is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age. Berrett-Koehler, 2020.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. 1st pbk. ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Spetzler, Carl S. Decision Quality: Value Creation from Better Business Decisions. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2016.
Ego is best understood as “self-concept” which is a collection of beliefs about oneself, including our many identities (gender, racial, professional, etc.). “Self-concept is made up of one’s self-schemas, and interacts with self-esteem, self-knowledge, and the social self to form the self as whole. … The temporal self-appraisal theory argues that people have a tendency to maintain a positive self-evaluation by distancing themselves from their negative self and paying more attention to their positive one.” (source: Wikipedia. Self-concept; 2017. Online. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-concept.)
John Dickson (2011). WCA Summit Sunday - John Dickson - Humilitas (YouTube). This is an inspiring talk on humility.
Most information on emotional intelligence on the internet is wrong. To really learn and understand emotions, study the works of Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett.