A Playful reminder for our time
Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is a play I've always loved for its wit, and as a satire on duplicity that feels uncomfortably relevant today. Jack Worthing masks his double life behind the name “Ernest” — hoping it conveys more gravitas than he feels he naturally has. But this duplicity, while perhaps initially mildly intentioned has social complications. It made me reflect: in a world where mistruths, half-truths and convenient duplicity are common currency, what does it mean to be earnest, especially in leadership roles and on boards?
As a board member I’m constantly learning that my role isn’t about supplying answers but about asking insightful questions. I'm still on that learning journey, but part of what I know is that good questioning requires clarity in communication, discernment in judgment, and integrity in how we weigh evidence.
Communication choices: The Earnest Channel Some years ago I co-authored a communications guide with a colleague that emphasised one simple truth: the channel shapes the message. Do you remember the "Medium is the Massage" by Marshall McLune and Quentin Fiore? (and yes - it's NOT a typo - it really is "massage" - that's both pun and double meaning): if you want a refresher then see: The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan | Goodreads As others have noted, and I have directly found, when conversations are emotionally charged such as during performance feedback, or difficult conversations the “earnest” choice is face-to- face or video and definitely not text, emojis or email. You need direct, sincere, human to human channels for this sort of thing. And so it is with leadership. There's an efficiency score for email, blogs, texting. But face to face is needed to discern truths, obfuscations and sincerity - key aspects in evaluating performance. Worth thinking about as more and more meetings progress to online-only.
But when the work is complex and needs reflective thinking time to allow the testing of assumptions, considering of evidence then slower, more reflective channels such as shared documents, wikis, and asynchronous notes create space for deeper insight.
Insisting on face to face immediacy for everything often favours the loudest voice who are often the HIPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) I think it may have been Avinash Kaushik who first coined that term HIPPO. See: You searched for hippo - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik )
He used it to describe the problem in organisations where decisions default to the most senior or best-paid executive, regardless of data or evidence.
Earnestness sometimes means slowing down, providing space and time for the quieter voices to be heard through the noise of the HIPPOS - they might just have the insights and truths that you really seek.
Culture and context: when “now” isn’t now Earnestness is also partly about cultural fluency. A South African colleague once told me that “now” in their culture really just meant “soonish”. You had to say “now, now” to mean
"immediately." Without context, even the most earnest intent can be confusing or just plain wrong. Boards face the same risk, especially in healthcare which is full of professional cultures, clinicians, administrators, community voices, technologists. Each voice has different context for their communication. If we want to govern well, then we have to understand the context of the voice being used, the profession it represents and listen with THAT context in mind.
Ernest Rutherford and critical thinking SO yes - science. It's my background after all. Physicist Ernest Rutherford once quipped, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” There are multiple interpretations of what he meant, but what resonates for me is that his statement champions the idea that the ultimate goal of science is to uncover the fundamental laws that govern the universe. That mindset applies to leadership and for boards. We are directly seeing today how assumptions based on poor research, or inability to deduce real cause from effect rather than correlative conclusion based on "common sense" is now shaping public health policy in a way likely to harm millions.
Critical thinking isn’t just an academic skill that I was very fortunate to be grounded in at an early age, it's a life skill for everyone to learn and apply continuously.
For Board members and leaders, being earnest means probing beneath the surface:
- What are we assuming?
- What data underpins our decisions? (how much of that is mere correlation - what's our real evidence of causation?)
- What voices are missing from the room? How can we tune down the HIPPO and provide space for the emerging voices of dissent and different views to be heard?
AI and the Age of Doubletalk and Mistruths Generative AI is a new test of earnestness. These models reflect the clarity (or fuzziness) of the prompts we give them. While they are powerful amplifiers of human communication, they should not become arbiters of truth that amplify mistruths and downright falsehoods as we are currently seeing on a world stage.
It's vital that we don't as leaders outsource discernment to algorithms. In an AI-mediated world, earnestness means being intentional: asking the fundamental why questions, not just what happened. As a continuous user of AI tools, this is a lesson I particularly need to keep applying, to make sure I don't overly rely on the AI tools as a crutch. The Earnest Path Forward At the close of Wilde’s play, Jack Worthing learns that being “Ernest” is not about appearances but is actually about integrity. The same lesson holds for leadership today.
In uncertain times, for me earnestness is a an on-going life discipline with these key aspects:
- Choosing channels with care
- Weighing culture and context
- Questioning assumptions relentlessly without relying just on "gut feel" or "commonsense" that often feel good in the immediate, but can mislead or harm in the longer term
- Using technology (particularly AI) without surrendering judgment (this is a key note to self for me)
So that’s what I’m learning in my on-going shift from trusted advisor to Non-Executive Director: earnestness isn’t optional. It’s the work.
Here's my question in closing: What’s the most powerful earnest question you asked in a boardroom or team meeting? Perhaps you'd like to share it? And yes Ernest Stabek I had you in mind when I wrote this article - you have a gentle perceptive style that made me recollect the play and why I have always enjoyed it. You and many others are the voices of reason - and we need those voices amplified NOW more than ever.
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