Today’s business challenges cannot be resolved by logic and knowledge alone. Only wisdom can guide effective decisions when faced with the conditions of what Doug Engelbart calls: "complexity multiplied by urgency" (*)
The Wisdom Council is a process for releasing the collective genius and meets many of the requirements needed to bring the power of collective intelligence, participation, collaboration, co-creation, diversity and innovation to more effective business decision making.
A Wisdom Value Chain
In many businesses today productive conversations are the source of wealth-creation. There is an essential value chain of intangibles: data to information to knowledge to 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 been described in many different ways over the centuries. Here Joseph W. Meeker sums it up in a profound paragraph from his article "Wisdom and Wilderness":
"Wisdom is a state of the human mind characterized by profound understanding and deep insight. It is often, but not necessarily, accompanied by extensive formal knowledge. Unschooled people can acquire wisdom, and wise people can be found among carpenters, fishermen, or housewives.
“Wherever it exists, wisdom shows itself as a perception of the relativity and relationships among things. It is an awareness of wholeness that does not lose sight of particularity or concreteness, or of the intricacies of interrelationships. It is where left and right brain come together in a union of logic and poetry and sensation, and where self-awareness is no longer at odds with awareness of the otherness of the world.
“Wisdom cannot be confined to a specialized field, nor is it an academic discipline; it is the consciousness of wholeness and integrity that transcends both. Wisdom is complexity understood and relationships accepted.”
In other words, Wisdom has to do with intuiting 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.
How do we best decide what is the most effective action?
"In an increasingly dynamic, interdependent and unpredictable world,
it is simply no longer possible for anyone to figure it all out at the top“
Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline
What Senge is describing here as dynamic, interdependent and unpredictable is one way to think about complexity. It was Karl Popper who popularised the distinction between problems that are clock and those that are clouds. Clock problems relate to mechanical systems that are predictable and, if they break down, no matter how complicated, the cause and effect relationships can be understood and the broken parts replaced.
Most problems in business are not ‘clocks’ however, they are more like clouds; they are complex – made up of myriad interconnected parts where the cause and effect relationship are almost impossible to understand (like a weather system) and predicting the outcomes of changes is very difficult and can have disastrous unforeseen consequences.
“Many change programmes fail – and the traditional assessment of failure
is 75% of the attempts – often because they do not take into account that they
are working with a living system and not a machine.”
As Professor Keith Grint suggests here, many decisions fail because they assume that the organisation, market or eco-system is a machine and complicated rather than a living system and complex. Complex systems do not yield to IQ, logic or deduction.
An additional challenge presented by human organisations is that they are also adaptive. They learn from past behaviours and change how they respond to a similar stimulus in the future. This adds to the difficulty in predicting outcomes with any degree of certainty.
What does work in complex situations?
An increasing puzzle facing businesses is how a team of people can often find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone or in a group. In a recent example, “non-scientist (computer) gamers came up with an accurate model of the so-called protease molecule in three weeks. Biochemists had been trying to create such a model for more than a decade.”(*)
It is becoming clearer that complex problems require creativity and innovation, and diverse groups appear to be the best source of these.
“In reality, creativity has always been a highly collaborative, cumulative and
social activityin which people with different skills, points of view and
insight share and develop ideas together.”
Charles Leadbeater, “We-Think”
Research is demonstrating that groups made up of intelligent people who are inwardly diverse—that is, who have different perspectives, mindsets and ways of solving problems—can make more accurate predictions and solve problems more effectively than groups of ‘experts.’
“groups made up of many people who think in different ways can
trump groups of people who are very bright but alike.”
Scott Page, Complex Adaptive Systems
There is even the suggestion that groups do not have to be made up of clever people:
“Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people to be smart.
Even if most of the people within the group are not especially well informed or rational,
it can still reach a collectively wise decision.”
James Surowiecki, Wisdom of Crowds
The Wisdom Council for Resolving Complex Challenges
The Wisdom Council has proven itself as an effective approach for resolving complex issues. It draws on an ancient understanding of living systems and complexity to look into the issues and decisions facing us from eight distinct perspectives that make up a sequence of wholeness. It engages the hearts and minds to provide the diversity of perspectives needed to release creativity and innovation for solving complex problems.
"I am impressed with the Wisdom Council process.
It is simple yet profound."
Bob Johansen, President, Institute for the Future
In the Council process, we learn to see quickly and deeply into: what is needed; what is missing; what we need to remember to act powerfully and what are the likely outcomes of a given plan. It teaches us to think and act systemically.
The Wisdom Council is a process whose simplicity and wholeness are easy to grasp, and yet it is worthy of a lifetime of study. It is capable of holding the enormous complexity of the whole without getting lost in the details. The design of the Council remains visible, accessible and guides us to a place of clarity – a clarity that is in harmony with our highest aspirations.
The Wisdom Council Process
The Wisdom Council is a deep process that enables participants to step back from the pressures and demands of any situation and open their minds and hearts to listen, to consider, and to source wisdom from deep reflection. It begins with a question that the person, group, community, or team surfaces that affects the well-being of the whole.
"Perspective is worth 80 IQ points."
Alan Kay, "imagineer" at Disney
Brainstorming is often too unbounded and it can be difficult to know if all aspects have been covered. At the other extreme, functional analysis (from marketing, production, finance etc perspectives) can often be too limiting with little cross-functional synthesis.
The Wisdom Council enables a diversity of perspective within a large system structure of wholeness where organisation participants are invited to step outside of their narrow job roles and consider the biggest picture.
"The idea of each sub-group speaking from a particular perspective was
a very effective way of allowing consensus to emerge. The end result felt like a
well-considered wise outcome.”
Ian Hall, Head of MBA Programme, Salford University.
The Wisdom Council creates a safe and collaborative group space that encourages deeper connection, insight and more effective communication.
"The atmosphere was one of calm and tranquillity, and everyone commented on
how a complex problem had inroads made with no talking down, no interruption,
and true use of the talents in the room."
Eddie Palmer, Scottish CVO.
The Wisdom Council Process Flow
Benefits of a Wisdom Council
- Avoids duelling egos
- Reveals deep insights
- Addresses deep conflict
- Connects hearts and minds
- Encourages system thinking
- Develops deeper relationships
- Avoids people fighting their corner
- Respects everyone’s contributions
- Releases the collective intelligence
- Generates over 30 recommendations
- Develops more profound understanding
- Heightens energy for progress or completion
Wisdom Council Leaders
Mike and Patricia Bell have extensive international training and experience leading the Wisdom Council with organisations including Texaco, Young and Rubicam, Knight Ridder, Institute for the Future and schools. They have helped organisations address a wide range of challenging issues including corporate strategy, international collaboration, community, leadership, social enterprise and co-creating the future.
For more information contact Mike Bell, tel 0191 241 0236 or mike@mutualinspiration.co.uk
www.mutualinspiration.co.uk/WisdomCouncil/
Grint, K. (2008) ‘Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions’ Clinical Leader 1 (2) 54-68.