Organisational Wisdom

Wisdom is inherently hard to pin down and even harder to justify as a practical consideration for complex decision making. But three things have emerged in recent years to put wisdom centre stage. Firstly, we are facing unprecedented threats to our very survival as a species and the standard political, economic and social decision-making frameworks are proving to be ineffective. Secondly, two decades of research into wisdom has revealed credible ways to understand, measure, and enhance wise reasoning in decision making. And thirdly, the rise of evidence-based coaching and mentoring over the last 20 years has legitimized the role of coaching and mentoring as the primary intervention for developing wise reasoning. Now, more than ever we need to deliberately coach for the development of wisdom in our leaders, before it is perhaps too late. The problems with measuring wisdom through self-report scales arise from the inherent limits to introspection and the processes of impress...

How wisdom contributes to decision-making has been attracting a lot of research interest lately. Professor of Human Development at Cornell University, Robert Sternberg defines wisdom as “the search for a moderate course between extremes, a dynamic between knowledge and doubt, a sufficient detachment from the problem at hand, and a well-balanced coordination of emotion, motivation, and thought". For the past two decades the Berlin Wisdom paradigm has served to operationalize wisdom as a scientifically grounded psychological construct. Wisdom is defined as “good judgement and advice in difficult and uncertain matters of life”. The five criteria used for assessing individual wisdom-related performance are intended to reflect a balance between intellect and character: 1.      Rich factual knowledge about human nature and the life course, 2.      Rich procedural knowledge about ways of dealing with life problems, 3.    ...

It seems self-evident that decision-making has gotten more complex and tricky in the first quarter of the Twenty-first Century. Being smart is certainly necessary but it’s no longer sufficient for the wicked problems we must solve if life on our planet is to be sustainable.  We are facing the early impacts of runaway climate change, political discourse is becoming increasingly authoritarian, social media algorithms are polarizing opinion and creating “artificial ignorance”, enraged religious and political criminals strike indiscriminately, walls are being built to keep out ‘the other’, new technologies leapfrog each other in breathless utopian anticipation, government and community institutions implode through loss of trust, and business institutions seem more riven by greed than at any time since the fall of the Roman Empire. We may well be on the way to the collapse of civilization, even though we all agree on what to do, and yet we seem incapable of taking action ( Oreskes...