Pyrrhonian skeptics in ancient Greece had a practice called suspension of judgment — but their less famous successors, the Academic Skeptics, pushed it further into something more useful: they distinguished between 'what I believe strongly enough to act on' and 'what I actually know.' The gap between those two things is where most leadership failures quietly live. Xunzi — the Confucian thinker often overshadowed by Mencius — argued in the Xunzi that the most dangerous form of ignorance is 'bi,' a kind of one-sidedness where a person becomes so identified with their own vantage point that they cannot see anything outside it. The humble leader, for Xunzi, isn't someone who performs deference; they are someone who has trained themselves to locate their own bi before it locates them. The practical move: before your next significant decision, ask not 'am I right?' but 'what would I need to believe to be wrong?' That question is not comfortable. It is, however, the exercise.

What assumption are you currently treating as settled that, if reversed, would change what you're planning to do this week?

Drawing from Confucian epistemology (Xunzi) combined with Academic Skepticism — Xunzi (Xunzi / 荀子, c. 310–235 BCE)