The science of humility

Research over the past few decades, particularly studies in business and management, has shown, that humility works. It is a powerful force for good and increases the chance of success in a range of human endeavors. Surprisingly to some, the meek do inherit the earth! John Dickson summarizes some of this social science research in his book, Humilitas: A Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership. Dickson defines humility as follows: “Humility is the noble choice to forgo your status, deploy your resources or use your influence for the good of others before yourself. More simply, you could say the humble person is marked by a willingness to hold power in service of others. Humility presupposes your dignity…Humility is willing. It is a choice. Otherwise, it is humiliation…Humility is social. It is not a private act of self-depreciation…Humility is more about how I treat others than how I think about myself.” 

Jim Collins, was a Professor at Stanford University when he led a large team who studied the characteristics of eleven highly successful companies with the findings reported in his book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't. They discovered that each of these companies was led by distinct individuals, who he characterized as a Level 5 Executive who “builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will”. 

In a Harvard Business Review article, Changing the Mind of the Corporation, Roger Martin, a Professor of Management at the University of Toronto argues that the decline of a successful business is characterized by “the deterioration of necessary feedback” and then by a “proliferation of organization defensive routines”. Managers “become impervious to learning of any kind.” The antidote is listening and learning because “people are naturally scientific: they make hypotheses, collect information, criticize each other’s demonstrated conclusions. The challenge is to channel this energy into an open discourse on the fate of the company, not into an underground discourse on the prejudices of the CEO.”

The value of making decisions based on a range of opinions is described by a concept in statistics and the social sciences, known as “the wisdom of the crowd.’’ It was first proposed in 1906 by the statistician Francis Galton after he observed a contest at a county fair to guess the weight of a slaughtered ox. The median guess from eight hundred participants was accurate within one percent of the true weight. Web resources such as Wikipedia, Quora, and Stack Exchange rely on collective human knowledge. The errors associated with individual human judgments are averaged out, provided the participants are truly diverse. There are well defined mathematical theorems to quantify and justify this perspective. Scott E. Page uses these to partially justify the many-models approach that he advocates in the social sciences and mentioned in a previous post. Furthermore, Page has used a range of mathematical models and empirical studies to argue the merits of decision making in teams being based on the consideration of diverse opinions.

In summary, it appears that research in the social sciences has shown that humility is a key to success in life. The meek do inherit the earth.