CHAPTER 21 WISDOM

“Knowing others is intelligence;

Knowing yourself is true wisdom.

Mastering others is strength;

Mastering yourself is true power.”

Lao Tzu¹

Lao Tzu, a mystic philosopher of the Zhou Dynasty, is considered a deity in many religious forms of Taoist philosophy, and traditionally viewed as the author of the Tao Te Ching and the founder of Taoism.² Lao Tzu perhaps emulates all that it is to be wise.

In this book, we are taking a view of wisdom as meaning a quality of a person or people: specifically, of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement in difficult and uncertain matters of life;³ of acting with integrity in challenging environments.⁴

A wise person is viewed as sufficiently detached from the problem at hand to make good judgements. A wise person has a well-balanced coordination of emotion, motivation and thought.⁵ And, through experience, a wise person has created a habit of making the right decision and taking the right action in a particular context.⁶

The idea of the wise person, the sage, the teacher is part of the mythology of creation, and a core entity of any story – modern and ancient.⁷ The search for wisdom reaches back in to the past and forward into millennia yet to come. Philosophy itself means “the love of wisdom”.⁸

Wisdom is a pervasive idea and concept that transcends through time, indicating that we are continuously striving to improve. So what are the qualities of wisdom?

Wisdom isn’t the same thing as knowing a lot of stuff. Knowledge and knowing things, having expertise and being knowledgeable about something are highly valued qualities. In many education systems, gaining knowledge and assessing the ability to share and apply that knowledge is rewarded through accreditation and qualification. This type of learning and this way of developing is valuable. And yet, this form of knowledge is limited, it does not make us wise. It’s a starting point – but it can potentially get in the way of developing the quality of wisdom – as we need to unlearn some of these learned habits in order to allow wisdom to surface.

Wisdom is to do with knowing in different ways – knowing that comes from the experience of life – knowing about the meaning and conduct of life, knowing about uncertainties, knowing what can’t be known and how to deal with limited knowledge.⁹

Wisdom is also about self-knowing and self-insight. In this book, we have explored many aspects of self-knowledge and insight in earlier chapters; in Part 3 in particular, many methods of gaining greater selfknowledge are discussed.

WISDOM IN ORGANIZATIONS

In the context of business and organizations, wisdom is a sought-after quality and part of the teaching in business schools the world over. In an environment of significant ambiguity, rapid change, greater mobility and greater information access and exchange, wise leadership is probably required more than “smart” leadership. And leadership in this context does not necessarily equate to authority or seniority – wise leadership can be demonstrated at any level of the organization.

No matter how smart, a leader cannot know the answer or the way forward in every situation that arises. The qualities of a wise leader are about knowing how to manage your own ego, how to navigate uncertainty and ambiguity and remaining open-minded as to what might emerge.

The qualities of a wise leader we suggest include:

•     Tolerance and open-mindedness – aware of multiple causes and multiple solutions in any given situation, aware of paradoxes and contradictions and ability to deal with uncertainty, inconsistency, imperfection and compromise.¹⁰

•     Comfort with ambiguity (knowing that you don’t know) – maintaining a view of the bigger picture and the implications of different outcomes.¹¹

•     Motivation towards the common good.

•     Knowing about life, human development, interpersonal relationships; how to live life; different systems and contexts of life; tolerance for difference in values between people; and how to manage uncertainty.

How might such a wise person act in an organizational context? A wise leader might:

•     Build with others – understand that the key to long-term success is to intentionally facilitate the success of others.

•     Act with integrity – especially when things are not clear or easy. Looking behind what is immediately in front of them at what else might be going on.

•     Be calm and self-aware, knowing when to keep quiet and consider their impact before responding – or even choosing not to respond.

•     Create a win-win – rather than have the strongest argument make it easier for the other to concede, allow others to exit a debate or discussion with grace.

•     Have humility, listen and change as necessary.

It sounds very appealing.

Organizations are in dire need of greater wisdom as the collective wisdom in groups tends to be lower than that of the constituent parts. Social experiments have again and again demonstrated that people behave less ethically when they are part of organizations or groups. While an individual might do the right thing in many personal situations, they behave differently in groups and when under stress. The reasons given? “I was acting in the company’s best interest”; “I will never be found out”; “I had no other choice”. This wilful blindness¹² should be a concern.

The size of organizations means they have the capacity to do significant damage as well as good. Cultivating wise leadership avoids you being pulled unintentionally and without thought into group decisions and actions. Developing wise leadership across an organization avoids some of the unintended and damaging consequences of ill-considered decisions. And, without wishing to labour the point, wisdom is not something that sits at the senior levels of hierarchical organizations. Wisdom and wise leadership exists at every level.

CULTIVATING WISE LEADERSHIP

Wisdom, although it can be a quality of a system, emanates from within the individual. A central pillar of the wise leader is the capacity to selfmanage, know what we carry into situations, understand the impact of those beliefs, ideas and emotions on ourselves and others, and be clear about what we are there to achieve. This learning process doesn’t happen overnight – and you can’t get it from a book. Throughout time, leading thinkers, scholars and teachers have pointed to the necessity of experience and learning through life to become wise. Take Confucius as an example:

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”¹³

Moving west to Europe, and a few centuries forward, we can look to Albert Einstein:¹⁴

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”

Across to Native American wisdom, which points to the challenge and gift of self-mastery. A Native American Prayer includes the words “my greatest enemy – myself”.¹⁵ And a quote from Black Elk which is part of a longer teaching:¹⁶

“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers.”

Wisdom doesn’t develop from the outside-in, it comes from the inside out.

John Chambers, Cisco CEO since 1995, sees that just as individual wisdom develops from the inside out, so does organizational wisdom. John has been transforming Cisco from a top-down command/control structure to one of teamwork and collaboration throughout his term as a leader. He achieved this through connecting communities of distributed leaders across Cisco. The result? Cisco has emerged as a distributed ideas engine where leadership emerges organically as ideas grow. “Leading from the middle” is the biggest change in the management of the company.¹⁷

What a strength! This story is Sir Isaac Newton’s quote in action:

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”¹⁸

In order to be wiser, leaders might consider:

•     Developing greater self-awareness and self-knowledge

•     Developing a clear and compelling purpose

•     Developing a beginner mind

•     Engaging a mentor

Develop greater self-awareness and self-knowledge

More recent thinkers such as Roger Lehman of INSEAD¹⁹ and Prasad Kaipa²⁰ echo the point that self-awareness leads to greater wisdom. So what is self-awareness and how do you develop it?

Rich self-knowledge leading to greater wisdom includes awareness of what you can and can’t do; awareness of your emotions and goals; and awareness of your sense of purpose or meaning in life. There are clear links between current thinking on wisdom and other areas we have covered in this book, notably Chapter 12, Happiness and Chapter 13, Mindfulness.

A wise person understands how they personally grow and develop and how they self-manage. They have developed skills of reflection and have insight into what makes them act and feel in a particular way. A wise person accepts and values themselves as a worthy human being – while holding themselves to critical account. They recognize and manage uncertainties in life, knowing that life is full of uncontrollable and unpredictable events.²¹

To become self-aware means being prepared to look at all the qualities you are happy to admit to and share with others (the “bright side”) AND bringing into the light those qualities you would rather not admit to (the “shadow side”). The starting point to greater awareness is acknowledging what you do (warts and all) to yourself. If you don’t know yourself, you’re more likely to succumb to covering up weaknesses and overplaying strengths instead of practising self-acceptance and being honest.²²

To develop greater self-awareness:

•     Be curious. Research yourself. So today you weren’t exactly honest with your customer when you believe that honesty is an important personal value that you hold. Make a note of it, don’t hide from it. How important to you is honesty really? What impact will developing more honest interactions have? What stopped you from being honest? What will help you to be more honest?

•     Reflect on what you are learning about yourself and what that might mean. Over a week, you notice that you were more honest with those customers you personally liked. How can you be more honest with those customers that you don’t automatically warm to? What do you want to do differently next time?

•     Notice the impact of the environment on you. For example, when you make your phone calls in private, you find it easier to relax and try out a more open style of interacting with your customers. Can you secure a private space for all your calls? If not, what is going to help you have excellent calls in the showroom or the open plan office?

When you start to grow your self-awareness, you realize how much “noise” there is that gets in the way of you responding to a situation in the most effective way. Sorting out this noise – what’s helpful and realistic from what is clearly unhelpful and unrealistic – takes energy and time, so don’t try to do it all at once!

It’s through this reflection on you in practice, in a real working context where true experience can lead to learning and greater wisdom. This testing, reflecting and trying again builds learning – not only about who you are – but also about how you develop, bit by bit, as a person.

Develop a clear and compelling purpose

Kaipa sees that wise leaders root themselves in a noble purpose, align it with a compelling vision, and then take action for the rest of their lives. The noble purpose gives direction when the path ahead is hazy.²³ Takeuchi and Nonaka share a similar view.²⁴ With a clear and compelling purpose, you can act with greater integrity – and be less easily swayed by a situation, context or colleague’s agenda.

Who are you and what do you stand for? What is core and important to you? What is the impression you want others to have of you? For more on this, see Chapter 5, Purpose.

Develop a beginner mind

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

Shunryu Suzuki²⁵

Imagine for a moment: you are faced with a situation where one of your team members has expressed dissatisfaction with the way that team meetings are run as there never seems to be any progress. As the leader of that team, you’ve been following a particular method for running the team meeting. After this feedback – you’re going to try out the other two ways of structuring things you know in turn and see what works best. The result – you stumble around testing things out, and the likelihood of one of the solutions you apply improving things is not much better than chance.

This is the “expert mind” in practice. You are the expert and you will find a way to run the meeting that is the right one.

Let’s look at the situation again from the perspective of a “beginner mind”. As a beginner, you would not be expected to have the answer as to how to run an effective meeting, so you might rightly take a different approach, one with more curiosity. You might ask the member of your team, what would progress look like to them? What suggestions do they have for the way that the meetings need to run? Building on this, you might realize that you each have different expectations of the meeting. Before concluding with a view of how to proceed, you might dedicate the next team meeting to finding out more. What do the other four team members need or want to get out of the meeting, what would the organization see as a successful team meeting? – and what suggestions might the team have as to how the meeting might be run?

The result is that you now know what each of you needs from the meeting and how best to work together to deliver this at this point in time. Your team meetings have a different energetic quality about them, and the “team” feels like a “team” rather than simply a group of people who have a requirement to meet together.

Which scenario suggests greater wisdom?

The beginner mind can lead to the display of greater wisdom. In the second scenario, as the leader of the team you are tolerant of different perspectives, and are demonstrating that you are not concerned about your own brilliance; rather, you have an eye on the bigger picture. What is best for the group here? You accept that you don’t know everything and are keen to pool the shared knowledge so that a better solution can be engineered. You know that getting everyone’s buy-in will lead to greater motivation for successful team meetings and greater shared responsibility to making sure that that is exactly what happens.

The “don’t know” mind advocated by Mary Jaksch²⁶ may be particularly useful. Rather than prejudging situations by what you do know, keep your mind open and tell yourself that “I don’t know” and allow yourself to learn. When you cease to have a fixed idea of people, things, and situations surrounding you, you grow in wisdom because you soak up changes, new ideas, and don’t set any person above or beneath you. This is known as the wisdom of the warrior.

From acknowledging that we know very little, to adopting the beginner mind, and starting with “I don’t know”, we immediately have access to some perspectives and methods that may support the development of wise responses to what is happening.

This idea of the beginner mind chimes with the teachings of the Greek philosopher, Socrates²⁷. Rather than demonstrating how much he knew, Socrates was known for his work exposing how little we actually know. To him, questioning what we and others really know was a mark of excellence.

We might know that we don’t know – but we are so well programmed to value “being right”, being seen as knowing and in control – there’s an almost ingrained fear about not knowing. Clearly, placing too much emphasis on what we know and how much we know gets in the way of the curiosity that leads to greater wisdom.

When we accept that every human being in fact knows very little, it is much easier to ask curious questions about the right way forward, rather than to assume that one person (you) is expected to have the answer for every situation that arises.

Engage a mentor

Harnessing the support of a trusted mentor, who in your view displays the qualities of wisdom, may help you on the journey to wise leadership. Many, if not all, of the sages in mythology, philosophy and other stories had students or apprentices with them. Things are no different today.

Engage a mentor who challenges you, but who is not there to show off how great they are. Engage someone whom you respect and like!

When you look across your organization, what are you doing to support your leaders to develop greater wisdom?

WISDOM AND 31PRACTICES

The 31Practices methodology, we hope, will build greater individual and organizational wisdom. The approach, aligning employees behind a compelling organizational vision and providing the guiding principles or values that will lead to success, contains components of wisdom. That each employee is required to take responsibility to practise the organizational habits that will lead to success, and notice the impact of those habits, supports individual learning and awareness.

However, 31Practices on its own won’t build wisdom – the attention to enabling people to grow, learn and develop through the systems and environment created using 31Practices will be important in the development of greater wisdom.