We don't have to like what's alien - but at least try to understand it

In a complex world, it's necessary to have a good grasp of what motivates people whose views are different from ours. This requires a genuine curiosity that transcends our fears and prejudices. By Jon Foster-Pedley

- Jon Foster-Pedley

It is one of the greatest ironies of our times: we have never had as much access to information as we have right now and yet, paradoxically, we have never been so misinformed. Accordingly, the stakes have never been higher for us to separate the wheat from the chaff as different groups skew channels of information to get audiences to drink the Kool-Aid and blindly accept their agendas.

A century ago, we would have called it propaganda. The Soviets then turned it into an art form — disinformation, a word ironically coined from the Russian dezinformatsiya, which was bolstered by agitprop.

The advent of social media with its plethora of platforms merely made this tool available to everyone, from the gullible and gormless to the Machiavellian.

In recent years we've seen this play out across the gamut, from conspiracy theories during Covid-19 to the contestation of narratives in Gaza and Ukraine. It is incumbent upon us all to make sense of it, but the responsibility on business leaders is even greater because what we believe can have a huge influence on how we act and the decisions we take.