Leadership and the Wisdom Value Chain

Leadership and the Wisdom Value Chain

By Mike W Bell

In many businesses today productive conversations are the source of wealth-creation. There is an essential value chain of intangibles: from data to information to knowledge and then to wisdom. Leadership and the wisdom value chain must be explored if organizations are to thrive.

Knowledge and Wisdom

Knowledge we can think of as contextualized information that moves to action. Peter Drucker in The New Realities said "Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody - either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different of more effective action."

An older unknown Chinese sage said "To know and not to do is not to know".

Wisdom has to do with intuition and the long-view through understanding systems in the context of their larger whole. Wisdom is also to do with acting in resonance with what is known to be true and lasting.

Wisdom and Culture

Wisdom requires that we move beyond the limits of logical linear thinking. It is likely that the organizational culture has many conscious and unconscious protocols that make it a challenge for wisdom to come forward. It is necessary for people to speak from their heart, their emotions, their body and their spirit if wisdom is to emerge. Many organizations do not acknowledge emotions are part of a human that is acceptable at work.

By limiting conversations and decision-making to our logical brain, organizations cut off their access to the collective genius of their people. A friend, Heather Campbell, writes that businessmen wear ties as a symbol of the separation of their head from their heart!

Wisdom and Environment

We also need to consider wisdom in the context of the organization in its environment. Wisdom has to do with understanding the relationships among things and therefore seeing the whole system.

It is in this area of interrelationships that organizations show themselves to be particularly short of wisdom. In the development continuum that moves from egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric, most organizations are stuck at the equivalent of the ethnocentric level. They will do anything to ensure their survival even if it means ignoring and ultimately destroying the world on which they totally depend for their survival.

For many leaders, their previous experience and success is a handicap. It limits them to an out-dated way of thinking. It limits the information they are able to take into their awareness. It leaves them only half conscious. And we cannot expect half conscious leaders to create a wise organization, or a wise world.

As RD Laing, the Scottish psychiatrist, said in his own inimitable style:

"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little that we can do to change, until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."

Lets hope that leadership does not fail to notice the wisdom value chain.

Mike W Bell has been a senior executive, leadership coach and organizational development consultant for over 30 years. For the last 15 or more of these I have been weaving an old wisdom tradition with the latest science and research to find more whole and balanced approaches to leadership and organization. My latest eBook, a modern fable entitled Leadership Intelligences in Action can be previewed at http://mutualinspiration.co.uk/leadershipintelligences/liaebook/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_W_Bell


http://EzineArticles.com/?Leadership-and-the-Wisdom-Value-Chain&id=6766316