Skepticism and Evaluation in Forming The Ideas From Which We Lead

‍Benjamin Easley has worked for 10+ years in public affairs and media relations for the public works and energy sectors in Central Indiana. He currently serves on the Corporate & Public Affairs team at Citizens Energy Group. Ben also co-founded Southside United for Indianapolis Trails in 2024, working to implement safer pedestrian amenities throughout southern Marion County. Ben is a cheerleader for his adopted hometown of Beech Grove, Indiana.

What’s it like having fully formed opinions that you can act upon? I ask with real curiosity!

I have met a lot of people throughout my career and in various volunteer roles, and they’re often self-organized by their opinions on any given issue. I’ve met angry people; people who are very sure of their opinions; and, to their credit, some people who are willing to change their opinions when presented with more context.

Skepticism

Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen so much full-throated enthusiasm built on only partial information that I’ve become skeptical of nearly anyone who seems to have a fully baked opinion about anything. Perhaps it’s my personality type: I’m more tuned in to how people interact with each other than with the rigors of how right or wrong an idea presents itself.

Perhaps I took too close to heart a reading from a college class that later became a popular Internet article, No One Knows What the F*** They’re Doing (or “The 3 Types of Knowledge”). Using that paradigm, there’s a lot of folks with plenty that they know, but also plenty that they don’t know they don’t know.

Only half-kidding here: Where is the self-doubt in one’s own knowledge? I remain dubious about anyone who comes in too hot with a tightly held opinion on how to address a problem.

What I observe is that a greater amount of context generally levels out a discussion about the issue at hand. As a communicator, adding history, comparison, and perspective to whatever issue is being considered can bring down the temperature in a room that is tense with conflict over a proposed change. But as I witness that more contextual information often breaks down listeners’ rigidity about the right or wrong way to approach an issue, I am also self-confirming that people who do express strong opinions must be way off base.

However, what I have found in these first few sessions with the Mitch Daniels Leadership Fellowship is a group of leaders who are both well-informed in their areas of expertise and directly connecting their study to solution-making. This kind of leader usually emerges with less blustery talk and more direct line-drawing between the theories they’re reading and the actions they’re proposing.

Observation and Reflection

MDLF Class IX has now wrapped up our Economy module: three distinct classes comprising lectures, Socratic-style conversations, panel discussions, a case study, and a collaborative proposal challenge, all with the throughline of examining Indiana’s economy and who builds and rebuilds our state. We’ve read how multiple agencies are putting forward strategic plans and success roadmaps, and we’ve heard from leaders who are taking steps down those roads to address our state’s issues, sometimes literally building roads along the way.

We’ve also been introduced—or reintroduced—to the idea of trade-offs for any given issue: how to identify them, why and how we must measure them, and how the knowledge people possess shapes the way leaders, including public officials, evaluate trade-offs in their decision-making.

Where I have stepped into leadership roles in my own community, I find that I’m generally led by my notions of how things should work and what solutions I believe are most beneficial. This motivation is rooted in my own experience, of course, but I’m observing that it has often lacked reading or reflecting to ensure that there are common threads between what I think I believe and how that belief shapes the work I put into the world.

An additional layer to all this skepticism is that I would never claim that the steps I’m taking are the final, or even the best, direction for others. And this position may indeed put limits on how effective I am as a leader. Even self-direction and leadership have their trade-offs.

Evaluation and Belief-Awareness

The people I’ve met so far through MDLF seem to have an impressive sense of self-awareness—or maybe belief-awareness is the better phrase. They point back to the well-developed ideas of others as grounding principles for themselves, even as they continue to feel their way forward in their own endeavors. I’m meeting people who seem to have truly formed opinions on the issues they’re addressing, and I can appreciate that this is because of careful evaluation both intellectually and, when needed, morally.

A quote introduced during our MDLF orientation overnight experience was: “Identify the why without the I.” It may be popular in business or management circles, but it was new to me. In one sense, it can encourage leaders to understand the root cause of an issue without pinning responsibility for gaps on a specific person within an organization. But I’m also reflecting on what this sentiment might mean for how I can and should take greater pains to understand why my community-focused decisions are the right ones, even despite the “I” making those decisions.

I feel myself wanting to greet fellow community members with the encouragement that they all retain a capacity to approach issues with this kind of belief-aware evaluation.

MDLF is helping me see that the more deliberate process is—as it often is—the one worth pursuing. It’s a process that can move quickly, but not without a tight connection to one’s foundational ideas. It is a process of acting and reading, acting and revising, acting and reviewing with a mentor, then reading some more and acting again. It is the process of fully forming an idea or belief from which one can act—and from which one can lead.