Tag: Conventional Wisdom

Leadership

Leaders Worth Following Know When to Go Against Conventional Wisdom

I had seen this TikTok video a few months back and remembered about this again when I saw this LinkedIn post by Dr Paige Williams about the importance of knowing about positive deviance and how leaders worth following know when to apply this concept of positive deviance. In this TikTok video, Arielle Schmitt shares the strategy adopted by the Chinese team in the Youth Olympics. One of the athlete (the gold winner) adopted a unique strategy to win the race. The winner did something that has never been done before in such a race. The runner up (also Chinese athlete) […]

Leadership

Pushing Beyond the Obvious

In a recent blog, advertising legend Dave Trott shares the story of the insight that led the Wright brothers succeed in recording the first human flight in history, while everyone else struggled and failed. The key insight was that they understood that it was not the air under the wings that powered the flight but it was the lack of air above the wings that sucked the aircraft upwards. This was going against all known wisdom of the day. So, there is a time and place for following conventions and there is a time and place when defying conventional thinking […]