There are two people sitting quietly in almost every business meeting. They aren’t on the organization chart, they don’t appear on the agenda, and nobody introduces them: fear and ego.

Both are part of being human, and neither is inherently bad. Ego gives us confidence to act when information is incomplete; fear keeps us from recklessly betting the company. We need some measure of both. The problem comes when we stop recognizing their influence…

Ego Has a Long Memory

Ego particularly likes experience…

I’ve been doing this for 25 years.

I know this customer.

We’ve tried that before.

That’s not how this market works.

Experience is enormously valuable, but it is also backward-looking, and in a world changing before our eyes, accumulated experience can quietly become permission to stop testing what we think we know.

Ask someone of my generation how many planets there are and there’s a decent chance the reflexive answer is nine. That’s what we learned, what was printed in every textbook, and what the experts told us. Today the answer is eight. Pluto didn’t disappear; our understanding and classification changed. Business is filled with our own versions of Pluto:

• things we learned to be true that aren’t quite true anymore,
• constraints we spent decades learning to navigate that technology has weakened or eliminated, and
• processes built around limitations that no longer exist.

AI is accelerating this challenge dramatically. Tasks that recently required teams of people, specialized expertise, considerable money, or weeks of effort can increasingly be accomplished by one person in an afternoon. Problems once considered computationally intractable are becoming approachable, while information that took days to assemble can be gathered and analyzed almost instantly.

If experience taught us that something couldn’t be done, experience itself can become an obstacle to recognizing that it now can.

That raises an uncomfortable question for anyone who has spent decades becoming an expert: does our experience alone still qualify us as one?

I don’t think the answer is automatically yes. Expertise increasingly requires something more difficult than accumulating knowledge. It requires continuously reconsidering which parts of that knowledge remain true.

Experience can accelerate judgment.
It can also give us permission to stop testing our judgment.

Smart People Change Their Minds

Years ago, I was sitting with a fellow department head as we dealt with another leader who had become particularly obstinate about an issue. After another round of getting nowhere, my colleague offered a slightly snide observation: “Smart people change their mind.” It wasn’t intended as a profound leadership lesson. It was frustration talking, but the line stayed with me because there was more truth in it than either of us probably appreciated in the moment.

Changing your mind is often treated as evidence that you were wrong.

Technically, I suppose it is. But that’s an odd standard. If the facts change, the environment changes, or someone presents a better argument, why would we admire the person who remains perfectly consistent? The harder question is why smart, experienced people sometimes resist changing their minds even when the evidence gives them permission to do so.

Ego Feels Productive. Fear Sounds Prudent.

Ego is particularly difficult to manage because it often produces positive sensations. A senior executive hears a problem and immediately supplies the answer. A salesperson skips the preparation because she’s known the customer for years. A company receives an enthusiastic response at a conference and immediately interprets it as validation of the strategy. Things happen, decisions get made, emails get sent, and meetings get scheduled.

Action provides its own little dopamine reward.

Sometimes instinct is exactly what the situation requires. But there is a difference between using experience to accelerate judgment and using experience to avoid discovery. The latter can be particularly expensive when the world around us is changing faster than the experiences upon which our instincts were built. Ego can create speed in the short term while making the company slower over time, because skipped questions and untested assumptions eventually have to be revisited.

Fear is quieter. It rarely announces itself as fear and instead sounds much more professional: we need more data; let’s socialize this first; the customer isn’t ready; let’s see what happens next quarter; we should probably run another pilot. Every one of those statements might be perfectly reasonable.

But sometimes what we’re really saying is: I don’t want my name attached to this if it fails.

That’s why fear may be the more powerful organizational force. Ego frequently creates visible behavior; fear creates invisible boundaries around what people are willing to try. Consider the meeting where everyone agrees, followed by three hallway conversations about why the idea won’t work. Or the successful innovation pilot that somehow requires another pilot before anyone will deploy it. Or the executive who sees the market changing but continues protecting the product, customer, budget, or business model upon which his own success was built. Those decisions can all be defended rationally. That’s what makes fear so effective.

When Ego Is Actually Fear

The more interesting possibility is that these aren’t always two separate forces.

“I know this market” can mean I don’t want to discover that what I know about this market is becoming obsolete.

“We tried that five years ago” can mean I don’t want to reconsider a conclusion upon which I’ve built subsequent decisions.

“I don’t need AI to do my job” can mean I don’t particularly want to find out what AI says about how my job should now be done.

The higher we rise, the more uncomfortable this can become. Our credibility is partly built upon knowing things, so admitting that the environment has changed enough to reconsider what we know can feel like surrendering some of that standing.

Ego tells us that changing our position diminishes our authority; fear whispers that others might notice we didn’t have the answer in the first place. Together they can turn experience from an asset into an anchor.

Maybe my colleague had it right. Smart people change their minds—not casually, and not because the room gets uncomfortable, but because continuing to learn occasionally requires us to abandon something we once knew to be true. The best evidence of expertise may be a willingness to keep testing what we know.

Sometimes ego is simply fear wearing better clothes.

A Short Audit (8 Questions)

You don’t need an offsite or another leadership framework to examine this. Spend fifteen minutes thinking about your own behavior and your team. The questions are less about producing immediate answers than noticing where fear or ego may already be shaping the conversation.

1. What do we believe today (based entirely on our experience)?
2. What have we declared impossible, impractical, or uneconomic that technology may have changed?
3. When we’re moving fast, is experience improving our judgment, or is ego allowing us to skip discovery?
4. When we’re moving slow, are we managing risk, or protecting someone’s position, reputation, budget, or standing?
5. What idea gets discussed differently after the meeting than during it?
6. What would we try if nobody cared who received the credit if it worked (or the blame if it failed)?
7. Who on the team has permission to tell the most experienced person in the room that the world has changed?
8. When was the last time I changed my mind about something important (and did my team see me do it)?

That last question may be the hardest. Leaders don’t merely need the capacity to change their minds; they can demonstrate that changing a position in response to better information is a sign of judgment, not weakness. That gives everyone else permission to do the same.

Experience still matters enormously. Judgment matters even more. But neither gives us permanent ownership of the truth. The world changes before our eyes. Sometimes the number of planets changes. Sometimes an impossible problem becomes solvable. Sometimes the thing that made us successful becomes the very thing preventing us from seeing what comes next. Fear and ego will still attend the meeting. The question is whether we let them vote.