The Pursuit of Wisdom

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Digested First Pages:

Richard Farson
As I have often pointed out, the main ILF product is wisdom. Surely nothing is more important to communicate to policymakers, even more important than a consensual recommendation on policy. It is what a non-partisan think tank like ours can most usefully offer. But just what is it we are talking about when we use the term wisdom? What does it mean applied to policy formation?

Curiously, we almost never see the word "wisdom" appearing in the same sentence with the word "leadership." We talk about leaders needing courage, optimism, vision, humor, compassion, tenacity, boldness, industry, commitment, sensitivity, humility, and any number of other qualities, but seldom wisdom. Yet, what quality could be more important for leadership?

This conference invites your participation in an examination of that subject, because not only is it our main ILF product, but it is poorly understood, full of myth and mystique, and may not come only from the sources often identified, such as age and experience. Indeed, it may be acquired or released or learnable at any age.

It would be difficult to find a group better able to examine this subject, or to demonstrate it. So day-by-day we will analyze the concept of wisdom, where it comes from, and what kind of thinking characterizes it. All of us would like to be wiser, but what prevents us from reaching that goal, or being able to exercise it in areas where it is most needed? The answers no doubt lie in the combined judgment of you Fellows, and it is that judgment and analysis we are going to tap with this conference.

Let me begin with a question that I will attempt to answer, but only as a way to stimulate your own answers: Why is it that in management training programs, or how to books on leadership, we rarely see wisdom mentioned as a necessary ingredient?

Here's what I think.....most of the more commonly mentioned qualities of leadership, such as courage, optimism, boldness, vision, commitment...etc. seem to be qualities one could demonstrate simply by trying, by practicing, by learning some new behavior. Indeed, one could seemingly just make up his or her mind to try and one could instantly become courageous or optimistic or committed. Wisdom, on the other hand, seems out of reach, inaccessible, revered, and acquired only at old age or through long and challenging experience. To regard it otherwise would be inappropriate, audacious, presumptuous and unseemly. To demonstrate wisdom just by trying to would seem to be impossible. And to think that some young person could be the source of great wisdom seems out of character and somehow disrespectful.

Another explanation is that the mental image of leadership in America is ACTION--decisiveness, boldness, gut reactions, time pressures, efficiency, beating competition to the punch, handling constant change, addressing a new situation every eleven minutes, etc.--while the mental image of wisdom is INACTION---reflection, patience, weighing both sides, taking the long view, etc. In our economic system emphasizing quarterly profits, inaction is heavily penalized. "Indecisive" is one of the most devastating criticisms that employees can make of their bosses. It is well known in business that nobody wants to be caught thinking--hence the paper shuffling when someone comes into the office.

What do you think?

Participant
Richard, I find this a very attractive question. I face it in consulting (and private practice) all the time. With regards to wisdom in institutions, especially business, I've come to the following conclusion. Wisdom requires the whole person looking at what feels like a whole situation. The problem in business right now, for many cases, is that the aim of the business is to get profit out into the hands of a few. High level managers feel this, and feel that this musical chairs approach to economic activity is not good in the overall now or long term for the business. The result is either cynicism or a feeling of betrayal or dismay. Under these conditions wisdom cannot operate. Except of course, either in private, or in the act of leaving.

For this reason I have pretty much limited myself to working with companies that are thinking about "the economy after this one", an economy that creates jobs, rather than destroying existing businesses. A business that meets what employees feel is a really good product or service or society. There are such businesses, and a new group (including some old entrepreneurs) seems interested in exploring how this works, knowing full well that any society must meet needs, that business is a good way of organizing them BUT that participating in a game of profit extraction that is narrowing ownership is not wise.

I'd add another aspect. We have very few wise elders - because very few in middle age are learning the things that would be necessary to turn into a wise elder. Most older managers are narrowing their vision and ideology, not expanding it. How many middle aged manager - leaders are asking, what do I need to know to be a help to the whole of society in five to ten years? While we have extended middle age to sixty, we have reduced maturity to zero in that for most it will never be a phase in their wonderfully extended longevity and vigor...

Participant
Dick asks, "Why is it . . . ." I accept his answer and Doug's response also, as correct.

I do not associate wisdom with leadership. Wisdom resides in the back room, to be consulted by the best leaders, and then put to work using their leadership skills.

Leadership may or may not be incompatible with leadership. I wonder about that.

Richard Farson
Doug, the implication of one of your points is that exercising wisdom (i.e. t the whole person viewing the whole situation) violates the current role of leader, who is expected to function within a narrow framework of contemporary economic theory, and so we have the paradoxical phenomenon that exercising wisdom in that context may be actually counterproductive. It would require a very special leader to be willing and able to take the long view and to explore radically different futures. He is associating wisdom with imagining something beyond the present, and even unlike, perhaps radically unlike, the present.

Ray underscores this view by his wondering if Wisdom is actually incompatible with leadership. If practiced by a CEO, for example, might wisdom get in the way of exercising the necessary leadership skills to manage a large organization? He tends to think that any wisdom must be explored in the back rooms, not by the leaders themselves...

Wisdom, in those analyses, seems a rather questionable, even dangerous quality to for a leader to apply.

We often associate wisdom with Asian leadership (also with Eastern philosophy), and indeed the CEOs of major Japanese and Chinese corporations have been known to plan with timelines of a hundred years or more. Organization theorist Elliott Jacques (remember his participation in our School of Management and Strategic Studies?) determined that the ability to function with longer and longer timelines characterized the better leadership, with the top Americans adopting about a twenty year time horizon. He tended to view it sort of characterologically, associating it almost with fixed, genetically determined abilities. Perhaps, if Doug is any example, wisdom is associated with the willingness to seriously examine scenarios of the future, as far away as the next economy. My guess is that there are few among even the top organizations willing, or perhaps able, to adopt such a posture.

Ray's point about having the wise people working in the back rooms, to be consulted by the leaders, reminds me that we have joked in the other conference going on now about military and corporate leaders wanting their information in bullet points, not detailed or complex or paradoxical or nuanced or otherwise evidencing the kind of communication that one would expect from a coterie of wise persons huddled in the back rooms.

President Eisenhower insisted that his daily briefing be presented to him on no more than one page, in bullets, with a black stripe printed around the edge of the page, reinforcing the idea that everything he would consider that day needed to fit into that framework.

The idea that wisdom and leadership don't mix, that wisdom could be dysfunctional when coupled with leadership, cannot help but raise the question as to which is dysfunctional, the wisdom or the leadership. Or, as Doug's explorations suggest, are we asking leaders to function in a system that cannot withstand the presence or assistance of wisdom. Do we really want leaders who are not wise? The evidence so far in this discussion appears to suggest that the question could be answered in the affirmative.

Or, as Ray's description might suggest, is wisdom a professional specialty, providing advice when asked in more or less the same way that a leader might consult an accountant or technologist? That is, might we regard wisdom not as a necessary personal quality of leaders, as we regard courage or compassion or commitment, whose presence we do not seem to question as beneficial for leaders, but rather as an available commodity? Wisdom as a commodity? Or do we question those other qualities also as possibly dysfunctional?

As I have occasionally throughout my life sought professional help from a psychotherapist, it is clear to me now that I prefer a wise counselor to a skilled one. Would I make the same choice in working for a leader? I think so.

Perhaps one way that leaders give evidence of their own wisdom is by not assuming they have it, and are open enough to be willing to consult with those whom they feel do.

Participant
One thing worth mentioning: the value of wisdom to the wise. I get hints that it is very pleasurable, calming, vital, and is altogether healthy. Being wise is the fruit of lots of practice mixing experience with reflection. What could be more attractive? While looking at reality square in the face for the good of our fellow humans is painful, it just feels like it uses the right capacities to make us feel most truly ourselves.

I notice that "wisdom" feels like "kingdom", it is a place, a realm, in which to be as much as an activity.

I think leaders can be wise, and the wise can be leaders - providing the context supports it.

Dick, on psychotherapy and wisdom vs. skill. Better a skilled surgeon or a wise one? The choice is harder. And I am not sure about wisdom without skill. Is it possible?

I have often felt that discussions about leadership shy away from discussing the issues leadership should engage, preferring to stick to style. The same with wisdom: what do we want wisdom about? Right now—

dealing with the bio-tech revolution

facing squarely the impact of money in the US, media and politics.

a complete rethinking our approach to parents and children

—Notice that most leaders are not even interesting on most of these issues, but just regurgitate the ed page of the WSJ.

Participant
Some leaders are wise; some wise people are able to display and use the skills of leadership. It is rare to find great achievement in both wisdom and leadership in the same person. We should be willing to accept and use great leadership on the part of a person who recognizes the need for and virtues of wisdom, and has the patience to seek out what he or she does not have.

Participant
I'm delighted both with the subject of this conference, and with Richard's decision to "moderate" it -- hopefully not so moderately as to drain it of interest and controversy.

I'm afraid I do have to demur on one item in Richard's introductory comment -- unless we can stipulate that my writings are among the "almost" in his judgment that "we almost never see the word 'wisdom' appearing in the same sentence with the word 'leadership'." I think I could find quite a number of exceptions to that comment.

In my earlier writings about leadership I tended to define "wisdom" as in the following paragraph (from The Knowledge Executive, 1985, p. 23):

"Most knowledge is expertise--in a field, a subject, a science, a technology, a system of values, a form of social organization and authority. Wisdom is integrated knowledge, information made super-useful by theory, which relates bits and fields of knowledge to each other, which in turn enables me to use the knowledge to do something. That's why wisdom is bound to cross the disciplinary barriers we set up to make the fields of knowledge manageable by the use of scientific method."

This conference is available in its entirety as a downloadable MS Word document. CLICK HERE to transfer the entire transcript to your own system.

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