You know, as a facilitator, I read this and want to believe that it could never happen to me. I facilitated this exercise many times myself, and try to keep careful count of who’s spoken and who hasn’t. However, since I know you and your values, and know it’s almost impossible to be more respectful and egalitarian than you, I must accept that this could happen to me, too. In our innovation work, we realize that the human mind uses various kinds of cognitive fixedness to increase its efficiency, but that we pay a price for it, and the fixedness can prevent us from seeing some aspects of reality. (This creates “why didn’t I think of that?” innovations, usually because nobody saw something that was always there but hidden by cognitive fixedness.) It’s scary to realize that it not only prevents us from inventing a cool new gadget, but actually also from creating a just and moral society, and probably affects many other aspects of life that we are unknowingly blind to.

Thank you for bringing this up, even though it’s a tough issue to deal with.

Shlomit