Time.
My father was deaf in one ear.
For as long as I can remember he would frequently say ‘What?…’ and lean forward and cup his ear.
It drove us mad.
We pleaded with him to get a hearing aid or have a specialist check if there was something to be done.
He reckoned the damage was caused by a virus in his youth, and there was nothing to be done.
So ‘What?…’. ‘What?…’ ‘What?…’ was the refrain in our household and at restaurants and footy games - day in and day out.
Today is the first time I’ve thought of this aspect of my beautiful Dad in over a decade since he died.
Integrity.
It’s easy to gain a reputation for integrity.
Never allow yourself to be in the position to test it.
Earning it demands the exact opposite.
Each Morning.
Each morning at the beginning of the school day, students walk through their school gate carrying all of society’s brokenness, failures, short-cuts, compromises, quick-fixes, short-term gratifications, wilful blindnesses, intergenerational trauma, neglect, secrets, unspoken grief, digital addictions, family conflict, loneliness, and quiet shame …
And Principals, teachers, staff, and fellow students receive it all, as a daily vocation to turn that hurt into healing, that confusion into learning, that loneliness and isolation into community, and that despair into hope.
Books.
At each stage of my life when I”ve stood at a crossroads - a book has appeared to move me forward.
Keith Miller’s biography ‘Cricket Crossfire’ as a boy taught me sportsmanship and camaraderie among men.
‘Reach for the Sky’ in my early teens taught me triumph over adversary and chivalry in war.
‘Emerson’s Essays’ in my mid-teens taught me about the divinity of loving someone who doesn’t love me back.
‘The History of Philosophy’ in my late teens taught me the riches of thought and that we stand on the shoulders of giants.
‘Jonathon Livingston Seagull’ in my late teens taught me that I was connected in my alone thoughts with others.
‘The Road Less Travelled’ in my early twenties taught me from its opening sentence: ‘Life is difficult’.
And the Bible has taught me different things at each stage of my life I've opened it.
Won’t They?
We speak of ‘leadership’ in such hallowed terms.
We don’t have the same reverence for ‘takes very good meeting minutes’ or ‘formats letters well’ or ‘prepares appropriate risk assessments’.
No.
‘Leadership’, like all those jobs, is simply a term used to describe a set of skills that others’ need to do those jobs.
Like taking minutes, typing, or administration.
The leader is given power and we allow them to wield it in the expectation they will use it to allow us to get on with our jobs.
Won’t they?…
Uh-oh…
Who’s to Say?
Who’s to say that if you hadn’t sacrificed time with your child to work hard or build your business to provide for your child so that they would be happy - that your child may not have felt the security of your reliable presence to feel confident that they are loved and grow up with the courage to persevere beyond failure to eventually find the cure for cancer?
Someone Rings Someone.
You study hard.
Apply for many jobs.
Land one.
Work hard.
Grow your expertise and wisdom.
Act with integrity and pay the price.
Work hard.
Someone rings someone recommended to them by someone.
They get the gig.
Dressed in Pearls.
They prioritise preparing excuses, alibis, defences, explanations, and indignation above the thing they are expected to do.
They expend time and energy into masking why they weren’t competent or committed enough to do the thing - instead of doing it.
They dress themselves in pearls, ready to clutch them.
The Clever Idiot.
‘You lied,’ you say to the clever idiot.
‘I lied?’ the clever idiot deflects.
‘Yes. Lied,’ you repeat, patience listing to starboard.
‘Who are you to accuse?…’
‘By whose standard?…’
‘Lying is subjective and a complicated thing…’
‘Why are you yelling at me…?
The clever tactic of the Clever Idiot.
Strategic Vacuity.
“Tactical ingenuity in the service of strategic vacuity.’ - Alan Allport
The historian’s description of the German approach to warfare is equally applicable in the workplace.
Of Mice and Men.
Scientists have recorded decision-making activity across nearly the entire mouse brain at single-neuron resolution.
Researchers monitored more than 620,000 neurons in 139 mice while the animals performed a simple visual task: turning a wheel to align a faint grating that appeared on the left or right of a screen. As the grating became harder to detect, mice increasingly relied on prior expectations rather than sensory evidence.
The recordings revealed that decision-making is not a linear process where sensory areas pass clean signals to higher decision centers.
Instead, “priors” from memory and expectation influenced even early sensory activity.
Neural signals moved in waves across the brain, integrating perception, past experience, emotional input, and motor preparation.
This distributed activity shows that decision-making is a whole-brain process, not confined to isolated modules.
The findings challenge traditional models of sequential decision-making and highlight how bias and prior knowledge shape even the earliest stages of perception.
Step 1: Step back
Your heuristic: Pause, create distance, avoid rushing.
Study link: The mice’s brains didn’t instantly “react.” Neural activity propagated through waves across different brain regions, suggesting a natural pause as information and expectations are weighed before committing to action. This “step back” is built into the way brains integrate multiple sources of input.
Step 2: Define the Issue
Your heuristic: Clarify what decision is really about.
Study link: The mice had to interpret: “Is the grating on the left or right?” That’s the core decision. Brain activity first concentrated in sensory areas to represent the immediate issue — but interestingly, even here, expectations (priors) already shaped perception. So “defining the issue” was never purely objective; it was influenced by what the brain expected to see.
Step 3: Assess the Information
Your heuristic: Weigh available evidence.
Study link: Neurons across sensory, memory, and decision regions pooled together the faint visual evidence plus prior knowledge of probability. This parallels how humans assess not just facts but also context, history, and likelihoods.
Step 4: Give a Hearing
Your heuristic: Consider different perspectives, listen to alternatives.
Study link: The study shows decision-making is distributed, not one brain area dictating the outcome. Multiple regions — vision, memory, emotion, motor — all “had their say.” That’s a biological “hearing” process, where diverse inputs contribute before an action is chosen.
Step 5: Check for Bias
Your heuristic: Be aware of distortions or blind spots.
Study link: The role of priors is essentially bias. When the stimulus was faint, the mice leaned heavily on expectation — a “shortcut” that was sometimes wrong. The researchers note that bias permeates even early sensory processing, not just later rational stages. That reinforces the importance of consciously checking bias in human decision-making, since our brains automatically lean on prior experience.
Your heuristic is deliberate and structured, while the study shows the brain’s process is messy and parallel. But the overlap is striking: both involve pausing, framing the issue, integrating evidence with context, hearing multiple “voices,” and managing bias.
The study actually validates your framework by showing it mirrors what the brain is doing — just at an unconscious, distributed level. The difference is that your heuristic makes those steps explicit, so you can manage them more wisely.
