Spinning the truth is one of the most common ways leaders erode trust. I can’t say this clearly enough: don’t do this. Your people are not stupid. When you try to spin them, they see it, and it makes you look like a fraud. Speak plainly, without trying to make bad situations seem good, and your employees will learn you tell the truth.

Wisdom is a social skill practiced within a relationship or a system of relationships. Wisdom is practiced when people come together to form what Parker Palmer called a “community of truth.” A community of truth can be as simple as a classroom—a teacher and students investigating some problem together. It can be two people at a table in a coffee shop, noodling over some problem.

A funny thing happens to people in a community of truth. Somebody has a thought. The thought is like a little circuit in their brain. When someone shares a thought and others receive it, then suddenly the same circuit is in two brains. When a whole classroom is considering the thought, it’s like the same circuit in twenty-five brains. Our minds are

intermingling. The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls these circuits loops. He argues that when we communicate, and loops are flowing through different brains, we are thinking as one shared organism, anticipating each other, finishing each other’s sentences. “Empathy” is not a strong enough word to describe this intermingling. It is not one person, one body, one brain that marks this condition, Hofstadter argues, but the interpenetration of all minds in ceaseless conversation with each other.

This is a crucial step in connecting with others through curiosity: communicating your new understanding back to them. This is where a lot of the magic happens, where the connection between people becomes solid, visible, and meaningful. Hearing an accurate understanding of our own experience coming from another person, articulated in their words, can be thrilling, especially when we’re feeling alienated in a social setting. Suddenly someone is seeing us as we are, and that experience momentarily breaches the barrier that we feel between us and the world. To be seen is an amazing thing.

It’s easy to take comfort in the fact that other people agree with us. As legendary investor Warren Buffett pointed out, though, “The fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and reasoning are correct.”

The people executing established practices say they want new ideas, but they don’t want the bad ones. And because they so want to avoid the bad ones, they never deviate enough to find good ones.