Society's epitome of credibility is John Wayne, who sizes up a situation and says, "Here's what I'm going to do" - and you follow him.

It is instructive to see how organizations pursue their goal of reducing errors and uncertainty. They impose standards, employ checklists, demand that knowledge workers list assumptions for their conclusions and document all sources. These actions either directly interfere with forming insights or create an environment where insights and discoveries are treated with suspicion because they might lead to errors. They signal to knowledge workers that their job is not to make mistakes. Even if they don't make discoveries, no one can blame them as long as they don't make mistakes.

If you are committed to the change, you're going to have to sideline the skeptics, or at least keep them under control. There may be a temptation to move them out but skeptics have a value - flagging weaknesses in the plan. Ideally, you will enlist their critical stance by challenging them to find ways to improve the plan as you go forward.

If you mean, "My gut feeling is telling me this; therefore I can act on it and I don't have to worry," we say you should never trust your gut.

The ability to help others gain insights seems very important to me, and I think one of the most effective, but most difficult, ways is to listen sympathetically when people seem to be saying stupid things or thinking in confused ways. Rather than write them off, we can try to diagnose what is wrong with their thinking - what flawed belief they might be holding. And then search for ways that enables them to discover the flawed belief for themselves.

Many change initiatives are poorly thought out, and rolled out prematurely. Others are genuinely good ideas but the proponents underestimate the amount of time needed to make the change. And, I agree, true change usually requires people giving something up and so resistance is pretty well guaranteed for any meaningful change.

I worry about leaders in complex situations who don't have enough experience, who are just going with their intuition and not monitoring it, not thinking about it.