These days the word “wisdom” is disreputable. For most people, it has no precise, definite meaning which makes it a magnet for charlatans and romantics. Its has connotations ranging from the embarrassing to the offensive: it’s quaint, ludicrous, vague, presumptuous, pompous, flaky. But it also has a certain protected status that makes it slightly taboo to attack it directly (however much the attacks are deserved), and that makes it exponentially annoying. Using the word “wisdom” in a business setting is credibility suicide.
So here we go.
When I say wisdom I actually do have a very specific meaning, and it is a meaning that deserves respect, and not only respect. It deserves enthusiastic adoption and action.
Understanding what wisdom is, how to acquire it and how to share it in a business setting is a huge competitive opportunity.
Here is my definition of wisdom: Wisdom is subjective knowledge, standing between tacit experience and explicit fact, and mediating between them. It is knowing how to navigate one’s own experiences and to gain explicit knowledge about these experiences from having been in them — without reducing the experiences to this explicit knowledge, and without accepting the tacit nature of the experience at face value. What wisdom produces are insights, expressions of truth that help people orient themselves to an experiential point of view and to see from the perspective of that view. Wisdom deals with symbols, relations and relevance. Or to put it in the language of anthropology (which is the science of wisdom), it means tacking back and forth between emic and etic modes of understanding — and then synthesizing these modes into effective practical responses, which is politics (the technology of wisdom), or in application to business, management. Politics and management bring together all the modes of intelligence (scientific, technical, theoretical, and every discipline of business) — each with its own characteristic kind of understanding — to address the situation at hand, and form it into something that achieves the desired experiential outcome.
To date, the business world has mirrored the larger culture in exalting the scientific mode of explicit knowledge, and has become very good at observing and measuring things and behaviors. This is important but it is no longer enough to manage people and knowledge. Organizations also need to learn how to manage its wisdom, to continually improve the lives of customers and employees and of our culture.
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