Organisational Wisdom

In these times when innocent people are slaughtered for "causing offence" we don't hear much about wisdom. When was the last time you heard a political leader stress the social importance of wisdom or speak about the need for more of it? Yet across time and cultures, wisdom has been viewed as our most reliable guide to action, a key to the advancement and integration of knowledge, and a principle human virtue linked to long-term fulfilment and wellbeing. For me, wisdom is the balanced use of reason, intuition and compassion to make and encourage good decisions that promote human flourishing. How can we cultivate wisdom? Here are six qualities you can practice to become wise. 1. Richness of Knowledge A wise person tends to have what Paul Baltes and colleagues call "an extensive database about life matters". He or she is also likely to have "rich procedural knowledge" - many different ways of thinking about problems and their possible solution...

When we evaluate others' decisions and performance we tend to focus on results. A manager whose project has a good outcome is applauded, while a manager whose project fails might get fired. You can't argue with success! Or can you? When things go well we tend to put it down to skill, and when things go badly we put it down to bad luck. Taking success as a direct indicator of the value of an action is unwise. Why? Every human performance is a combination of skill, and that of outside forces – unpredictable events, uncontrollable conditions, random noise – in short, luck. And luck plays a role, sometimes more sometimes less, in every human endeavour.  We don't naturally consider the contribution of luck when evaluating performance. We have a strong bias to explain behaviour in terms of actions, such as skill. It takes a lot of effort to consider the contribution of external forces such as luck. That means that in many cases we tend to reward people for successf...

Not all decisions are wise. Deciding on that dividend re-investment offer just before the global financial crisis. Setting up a business partnership expecting the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. Believing lycra is slimming. We think we make wise decisions. But that's because we're good at post-facto rationalisation. The truth is we make far more foolish decisions than wise ones, we just don't see it at the time. So, how can you improve your odds of making the "right" decision next time? For the past 4 years my business colleague, Dr Barry Partridge and I have been researching that question. We received funding from the NSW Department of Innovation and Technology in conjunction with the University of Wollongong. And now we think we have an answer.  It turns out that each of us has a preferred style of processing the available information prior to making a decision. This reflects our unconscious bias, and explains why we all believe w...

Can we all just become a little bit wiser? From the outside many of the world's current conflicts seem nonsensical. Even as our planet slides towards irreversible climate change there are groups of us engaged in mutually assured destruction. And all our confected fear and intolerance simply perpetuates the great historical march of folly. Can wisdom be learned without waiting until we are old and sage-like? Can we teach wisdom to our children? Can we train our political, business, and community leaders in the meaning and practice of wisdom and wise decision-making? The scientific study of wisdom is still a very young field, but the mechanisms underlying wise thought and decision making are emerging through the research methods of psychology, economics, and neuroscience. What psychological and social factors contribute to the development of wisdom? Intelligence Wisdom is often confused with intelligence. Of course, many smart decisions are neither wise nor unwise. In...

I attended the inaugural 2-day Mindful Leadership Global Forum in Sydney last week with 400 participants from business and government agency management roles. Mindfulness is in the news as a revolution in leadership. Companies that embrace mindfulness such as Google and Facebook claim reductions in absenteeism, enhanced productivity, and improved business results. Mindfulness is the practice of focused attention, certainly a useful skill for any leader. But there are 5 other practices considered to be equally essential to good leadership - what are they? It seems to me that mindful leadership is becoming a catch-all for practices ranging from decision-making to body awareness. The essence of the transformative leader is embodied in 6 practices, sometimes referred to as "the six perfections". They are - in order: 1. Generosity The act of giving means giving the best of what you have, graciously and unstintingly, without reservations, hesitation, or regret. Generosity...

In spite of the dedication to developing good leaders, bad leadership continues like a plague. Not necessarily corrupt or evil leadership, but the ubiquitous types of bad leadership such as incompetent, rigid, intemperate, and callous leadership. Worse, we seem to be suffering from a crisis of confidence in our political, government, enterprise, and community leaders who are charged with leading wisely and well.  Barbara Kellerman is the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In her book,  "The End of Leadership"  she writes, "the leadership industry is self-satisfied, self-perpetuating, and poorly policed... by and large these are trying times, in which the  leadership class  has not exactly distinguished itself". Kellerman points out that there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between our idea of the leader as a central figure in our collective consciousness and th...

I n October 2008, the world entered into a recession unequaled since the Great Depression of 1929. Many people, including economists, thought that such a recession was no longer even possible. What made the recession particularly odd is that it came after, not before, investment banking started attracting the best and the brightest among the graduates of the top universities in the world. How could such smart people have created so much misery for so many people?   Even more curiously, how could these smart people have then tried to profit from the misery they created, so ignorant of its repercussions that the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, referred to the company as doing "God's work?" This was the same company that later was revealed to be betting its own funds against the funds of clients who paid Goldman Sachs for financial advice. Smart people can be so stupid, or to be exact, foolish, because they are unwise. Having intelligence is not the same as bei...