Uncommon Ground

A house built on misinformation has a shoddy foundation

Dec 10, 2021

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A painting depicts rugged mountains on the left and background that reach out to a bright sky with the Sun's rays peeking through the clouds. The mountains look over a calm lake with a group of deer and waterfowl on its edge and is bordered by trees on the right side of the painting — *Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains* by Albert Bierstadt, 1868 (public domain - Wikipedia)

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“The time will come when our successors will wonder how we could have been ignorant of a thing so obvious.”
— Seneca

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Leaders begin with a powerful vision, communicate that vision relentlessly, and then execute on it.

But it starts with setting the vision so that every stakeholder understands what they’re trying to achieve.

Without that common ground—that shared experience—we lack the ability to move at the same pace or in the same direction.

That is, when we inhabit the same space but have a fundamentally different view of reality or of morality, it’s untenable.

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A House Divided

When he accepted the nomination for U.S. Senator for Illinois in 1858, Abraham Lincoln gave his famous House Divided speech. The country was riven by the issue of slavery. Democrats were slave-holding oligarchs, Republicans were the party of the free north that opposed the expansion of slavery.

His opponent, Senator Stephen Dougl…

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