Rising at five thirty to write a thousand or more words before beginning the day’s labor became an entrenched habit, unbroken to this day. Each day’s writing ended with four or five short reflections on subjects then occupying my mind. By the late ’90s, my writing had grown to five thousand pages containing several thousand of the short reflections

This question eventually led O’Brien to Chris Argyris, whose writings resonated with Hanover’s managers’ experience. Argyris’s “action science,” offered theory and method for examining “the reasoning that underlies our actions.”9 Teams and organizations trap themselves, he says, in “defensive routines” that insulate our mental models from examinati

over a long period of time, we have got into the habit of doing the opposite of what we have learned, and the opinions that we hold and apply are the opposite of the correct ones. So unless we put the opposite opinions into use, we’ll be nothing more than interpreters of other people’s judgements.