The recently concluded Pittsburgh Summit at which world leaders called for better global governance over financial trading and the preceding UN climate summit at which Ban Ki-moon warned that failure to agree on fighting global warming would be morally inexcusable might be seen optimistically as the world finally coming together to solve global problems. More realistically, however, Goldman Sach's chief financial officer stated recently that their “model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same”. As well, we know as world leaders talk 20% of Bangladesh’s land mass that is a metre or less above sea level with about 20 million human inhabitants is slowly disappearing or becoming uninhabitable.
Globally we seem to retain an unfathomable capacity for selfishness, denial, and greed. But this is simply a macrocosmic outcome of microcosmic decisions in our daily lives. Here, we consider only the microcosm of organizations.
Like these grim global issues, an abundance of knowledge in organisations has led many to savant-like rather than sagacious behaviour. In other words, knowing more and having ‘better’ knowledge is insufficient for individual or collective wisdom (Rooney, McKenna, & Liesch, 2010). Because of our experience as business school academics where we encountered not just naïve models of knowledge, but also heroic leadership models, management fads, and isomorphism, we began our search for a useful notion of wisdom. Pleasingly, we encountered many others who were similarly motivated to search. Our search was essentially in two parts: locating a western philosophical tradition (there are, of course, outstanding “eastern” models that we later dealt with) and then looking at the psychology of wisdom. We separately distilled principles of “ancient” wisdom and principles of contemporary psychological wisdom. Wisdom psychology broadly divides into two major strands: Sternberg’s Balance Approach and the Berlin School . Central to Sternberg’s Balance Theory of Wisdom (Sternberg, 1998) is values. Although his theory has a cognitive element, wisdom involves applying intelligence, creativity, and knowledge to the common good. The Berlin School takes a more cognitive approach defining wisdom as “expert knowledge in the fundamental pragmatics of life that permits exceptional insight, judgment, and advice about complex and uncertain matters” (Pasupathi, Staudinger, & Baltes, 2001, p. 351). Other theorists such as Csikszentmihalyi have moved these studies to intersect with such areas as positive psychology (e.g. Barbara Fredrickson). The strong alignment of philosophical and psychological sets of principles gives us considerable optimism about the validity of our wisdom principles.
Briefly, our five wisdom principles are:
• Wisdom is based on reason and careful observation. They establish ‘facts’ and their logical deductions incorporate salience and truth-value of propositions.
• Wise people appropriately allow for non-rational and subjective elements when making decisions. They acknowledge their senses and gut instinct; they respect and draw on tradition. They accept contingency and look to the long-term.
• Wisdom is directed to humane and virtuous outcomes.
• Wise people are practical.
• Wisdom is articulate, aesthetic, and intrinsically rewarding.
However, when it came to analysing wisdom in contemporary organisations, we found 18th century philosopher, Vico, and the ancient Greek philosophers provided the most useful concepts. Of the five intellectual types that Vico identifies, two seemed to describe much contemporary management. The savant moves “in a straight line from general to particular truths” in order to “burst through the tortuous curves of life”; sometimes successful, they more often fail. The astute ignoramus knows how to succeed in worldly affairs, but lacks phronesis.
The ancient Greek notions of episteme, technē, Sophia, phronesis, and aesthetics provide the foundations for wise organisational practice. Let us take as given that good organisations dynamically adapt to (often rapidly) changing circumstances, and that they have communities of practice that reflectively learn through praxis and structuration. But adopting Jennifer Rowley and Paul Gibbs’ simple definition of wise organisations as “the ability to make right judgements”, then we need to incorporate a teleology, ethics, and sophia, collectively understood as phronesis.
The teleology is provided by the Hellenistic notion of eudaimonia, the good life, a state of happiness provided not only by physical comfort but also by psychological balance (Nussbaum, 1994, p. 82). Essential to the eudaimonic existence is that “virtue is expressed not merely in fine action but in fine emotions as well” (Sherman, 1997, p. 24). Thus ethical virtue (although Aristotle spoke also of intellectual virtues) is intrinsic to the eudaimonic existence. Although such wisdom requires reflection, organisations need to get on with the day-to-day jobs by a degree of “mindlessness”. In other words, the technē requires a degree of instrumental rationality (Flyvbjerg, 2004, p. 287). Underlying this rationality is the episteme, which, from a discourse point of view, means the underlying tacit and explicit knowledge upon which the surface processes, practices, and relationships are based. To continually tinker with this episteme produces unnecessary uncertainty and anxiety for organizational members, clients, and stakeholders. However, a wise leader, we argue, must have ontological acuity: the capacity to step out of the rationality of daily practice and collective isomorphism to question the knowledge and rationality underlying normal practice (McKenna & Rooney, 2008). This capacity most closely matches the notion of sophia.
Two other elements of organizational wisdom complete the picture. Wise people must have an aesthetic disposition. We use this term broadly to encompass what is currently understood as emotional intelligence, a capacity to understand and respect the role of emotion and intuition in forming judgments rather than eschewing it as inappropriately irrational. It also encompasses a capacity to articulate understandings and judgments to others, as Aristotle outlined in The Rhetoric. Finally because organizational wisdom works best as distributed wisdom, we need to apprehend the sociology of wise institutions by considering culture, communication, social networks, power and agency.
As we emerge from the strictures of neo-liberalism, perhaps there is reason to hope that we will recognize our “social interdependency” as the Hellenistic philosophers did (Rawls, 1971, p. 424). As Aristotle said in his Nicomachean Ethics (1097b10):
By self-sufficient we mean not what is sufficient for oneself alone living a solitary life, but something that includes parents, wife and children, friends and fellow citizens in general; for man is by nature a social being.
by Bernard McKenna & David Rooney, University of Queensland Business School
References
Flyvbjerg, B. (2004). Phronetic planning research: Theoretical and methodological reflections. Planning Theory & Practice, 5(3), 283-306.
McKenna, B., & Rooney, D. (2008). Wise Leadership and the Capacity for Ontological Acuity. Management Communication Quarterly, 21(4), 537-546.
Nussbaum, M. (1994). The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pasupathi, M., Staudinger, U. M., & Baltes, P. B. (2001). Seeds of wisdom: Adolescents' knowledge and judgement about difficult life problems. Developmental Psychology, 37, 351-361.
Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Rooney, D., McKenna, B., & Liesch, P. (2010). Wisdom and management in the knowledge economy. London: Routledge.
Sherman, N. (1997). Making a necessity of virtue: Aristotle and Kant on virtue. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R. J. (1998). A Balance Theory of Wisdom. Review of General Psychology, 2(4), 347-365.
Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.
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