Organisational Wisdom

Associate Professor of Psychology, Igor Grossmann at  The Wisdom and Culture Lab at The University of Ontario, Canada has been pivotal in establishing a practical framework for wise thinking that lends itself to coaching and mentoring. According to Grossmann and colleagues, “wise thinking is a skill. It is not simply an attribute of a person but rather a property of person-in-context. The potential for wise thinking emerges in the interaction of the person and their environment”. Grossmann and colleagues have established that wise reasoning mediates the effects of age on wellbeing. In other words, just thinking wisely improves life. Wisdom needs to be considered in the context of everyday life according to Grossmann and colleagues. The central characteristics of wisdom have a dynamic component. Just because you are wise in one context does not mean you will be wise in another. Understanding the situational contingencies where wise thinking may lead to wise actions is vital to...

Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, Daniel Kahneman, won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work on system 1 and system 2 thinking in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” .  The idea that much of our thinking and decision-making is subconscious, and automatic (system 1), as opposed to rational and deliberate (system 2). But he missed the observation by Japanese theorists, Professor Emeritus Ikujiro Nonaka at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University, and Professor Hirotaka Takeuchi, of the Management Practice in the Strategy Unit of Harvard Business School that there is a third system . We typically rely on system 1 thinking because it’s automatic, fast, and experience-based. We use our innate or gut feel to quickly arrive at a decision that “feels right”. System 2 thinking is logical, rational, and fact-based. We use system 2 when we need to slow down and analyse the i...