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Lilah Shapiro

Professor, Northwestern University
 

What We Know, and How We Know It

You know the Earth is round, that exercise is good for you, and that your best customer is happy. But how do you know? Most of what we hold as fact we have never checked for ourselves. We borrow it from experts, colleagues, and the general sense that “everyone knows.” Organizations work the same way. Every company runs on knowledge about its customers, its markets, and its own people, yet few examine where that knowledge comes from. Some of it rests on evidence, some on experience, and some on assumptions repeated until they feel like fact. How a company sorts these, and who gets to do the sorting, shapes its strategy, its culture, and whose voices carry weight. With information now abundant and instantly available, the ability to tell well-founded knowledge from confident assumption has become a core leadership skill.

Lilah Shapiro, a sociologist at Northwestern University, is an expert in how knowledge is created, shared, and trusted. In this keynote she brings that work into the business setting. What separates fact from opinion and belief, and how often do teams blur the three in a single meeting? How does an idea gain traction inside a company, and why do the best-supported ideas sometimes lose? Whose knowledge counts most: the analyst’s data, the salesperson’s instinct, or the customer’s lived experience? How do hierarchy and authority amplify some perspectives while muting others? Participants leave with a practical framework for recognizing the kinds of knowledge their organization depends on, surfacing expertise that often goes unheard, and grounding decisions in what they truly know.