Here are some ideas to challenge belief ...we will add to these periodically. 

...the PRINCE(2) and the emperor’s new clothes

Many projects fail because they get a life of their own and forget what they are there for.  PRINCE2 project methodology says that a project should only continue, so long as the benefit remains. Like the emperor with his new clothes it could take the candid observation of an honest soul to restore sense, but are we robust enough to listen? PRINCE2 The business case: "The existence of a viable Business Case is the main control condition of a PRINCE2 project. The business case is verified by the Project Board before a project begins and at every major decision point throughout the project. The project should be stopped if the viability of the Business Case disappears for any reason." (from PRINCE2 manual p.17). According to a recent economist article “...employees in one part of a company often reject ideas and advice from a different part. Mark Little, GE's head of research, confesses that getting his boffins to kill off unviable projects is the hardest task he faces: “Like a dog with a bone, people don't want to give them up.”” Achieving project success requires not only honesty and humility, but also courage to speak up when the emperor has no clothes.

“the most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones that are being argued, but the ones that are assumed.”...Getting to the heart of our assumptions can be done only by an honest, preferably not  lone, exploration of the bases of our beliefs and their consequences

In every age and every society, there are certain “givens” – truth claims held in common – that allow for that society to exist as it does. In our society, we assume that trees do not have spirits, and so can be felled and milled at will. We assume this because we cannot observe or reason the existence of dryads. But deeper, because we assume that things in the universe which cannot be verified by the testable hypotheses of science, through observation and reason, are not real. This may be a good and right assumption, but it is an assumption. It is a belief, a position of faith, a pre-judgement.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “the most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones that are being argued, but the ones that are assumed.”

Whether we know it or not, each of us carries around a collection of these prior assumptions through which we make sense of the world around us. These may not be consistent, or consistently applied, but they do shape our reactions. We may assume that people are basically good, and that therefore crime and dysfunction are caused by external forces such as poverty or lack of opportunity. We may assume that people are essentially advanced biochemical machines, and that street muggings are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. Or, we may believe that humans are fundamentally autonomous agents – captains of our own destiny. Any one of these assumptions will affect not merely our justice and penal systems, but our instinctive response to discovering that we have been cheated by an employee, or betrayed by our boss.

Getting to the heart of our assumptions is more than a psychological journey. It cannot be done by navel-gazing, but only by an honest, preferably not lone, exploration of the bases of our beliefs and their consequences. It requires questioning and challenging even what we mean by humanness, in order to learn to live well as human beings.

Each of us has a story...

Each of us has a story. It is the narrative that we tell ourselves every second of every day. It lets us know that it’s good to go for a run in the morning, and that it’s bad to eat that third slice of cake. It lets us know that we’re going to graduate from our journalism course and bring the searching glass of truth to bear in the corrupt halls of power, or that we’re going to inherit the family farm and pass it undiminished on to our children.

If we listen carefully, our stories tell us how to live a good life. And, if we’re honest, our stories are littered with assumptions about life, the world and everything. We exercise and refuse to eat cake because we ‘know’ that we are physical beings – complex biochemical machines that need care – and that “we are what we eat.” We stay up late scrutinising editorials and researching the lives of public figures because we ‘know’ that people with power always lie, and that people who expose truth never do. We spend time planting oaks that we will never enjoy because our stories tell us that we are one in a family line that have lived on this land since time immemorial.

Each of us has a story. It is the narrative that shapes our vision of and for the world. It is the thread of meaning that we use to bring together the otherwise disjointed twists and turns of experience and happenstance. Knowing our story: being fully aware of the implicit assumptions and consequences of living as we tell, is an essential part of living well.

The unexamined life is not worth living...

Philosopher Michael Polanyi writes, “we know more than we can tell.” Aside from or underneath our conscious world of decisions and conversations, there is a lot going on. Our daily lives are underpinned by foundational beliefs – about human life and reality – that we cling to, often without question. For example, for most of us in the western world, thinking of ourselves as consumers appears so natural that even when we seek to moderate the impact of our way of life, such as by reducing our carbon imprint, we do so by changing our patterns of consumption. We upgrade to hybrid vehicles, choose to buy produce with low food mileage, and offset our air travel by ‘purchasing’ carbon-sink trees. Most of you reading this article will have arrived here as a discerning shopper of ideas, picking and choosing your reading consumption online.

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It is these assumptions that drive us. It is these assumptions that shape our lives. It is these assumptions that form our worldview, and upon which we pin our hopes and dreams of the good life. The unexamined life, we know from Socrates, is not worth living. It is worthwhile questioning these assumptions.

Taking the time to assess our deeply held beliefs about ourselves as human beings and our place in the world is not merely a life-enriching exercise or a chance to step beyond our comfort zones, it is a pre-requisite for flourishing leadership.