Practically wise leadership: toward an integral understanding

Abstract

This paper presents a model of practical wisdom that integrates various dimensions of experience and multiple levels of analysis, providing a meta‐theoretical framework through which to understand wise leadership practice in contemporary organizations. Drawing on phenomenological accounts of embodiment and emotion, we seek to overcome limitations in organizational research due to methodological individualism, exclusively cognitivist assumptions about human knowledge, and a lack of sensitivity to the complexity and dynamism associated with wisdom as it unfolds in organizations. In an effort to enact the processual aspect of wisdom in relation to the community of leadership scholars and practitioners, we additionally discuss various stages and lines of development relevant to wise leadership practice in organizations.

Keywords:

• leadership
• wisdom
• integral
• embodiment
• emotion
• practice

Notes

1. As Macmurray (1957) pointed out, the concept of ‘action’ is inclusive: ‘most of our knowledge, and all our primary knowledge, arises as an aspect of activities that have practical, not theoretical objectives; and it is this knowledge, itself an aspect of action, to which all reflective theory must refer’ (12) … ‘In acting the body indeed is in action, but also the mind. Action is not blind … Action, then, is a full concrete activity of the self in which all our capacities are employed’ (86).

2. This link to action and understanding of ‘praxis’ corresponds to the ‘practice turn’ in contemporary theory (Schatzki et al. 2001), and practice‐based theorizing on knowing‐ and learning‐in‐organizing (Gherardi 1999, 2001, 2006). For such practice‐oriented approaches of knowing (Nicolini, Gherardi, and Yanow 2003; Gherardi, 2001), organizing, knowing, learning, action and practice are all mutually constitutive processes. They are all part of the micro dynamics of a ‘knowledge‐in‐use’ embedded in human action and inter‐action as well as ‘inter‐passion’ by which meanings of events are continually created, re‐created, put in question and re‐negotiated through a weaved network of emotional inter‐relations. As an on‐going ‘individual’ and ‘social’ accomplishment and dynamic process, knowing is not a static embedded capability or stable disposition of actors, but constituted and reconstituted in the dynamics of everyday practice, hence being a ‘knowing‐in‐practice’ or ‘knowing‐as‐doing’ (Orlikowski 2002, 252, 271). As capacity to act, knowing is the ability of actors to intervene (or to let go) in an ongoing flow of action, or to change the course of events in situated contexts. Such contexts consist of historical, social, and cultural and material con‐+‐Texts, in which knowing take place in a variety of forms, and by use of different media. Therefore, the meaning as an experience of everyday practices of knowing are related to local ways of knowing and that, which and how is to be known correspondingly. Meanings of knowing and a knowing of meanings are both ‘found in’ the world and ‘created’ by human (‘subjects’) active dealings with ‘objects’. Thus, ultimately we do not experience our practice as knowledge. Rather we experience our practice as experience, and ‘experience is knowing’ (Levinas 1969, 62; 1998).

3. Organizations create an emotional ecology where care and human connection are enabled or disabled. That emotional ecology can facilitate or retard compassionate action (Frost et al. 2000: 26, 35). Many factors either are influencing either a supportive or alienating emotional climate. Some of these factors included an environment characterised by high versus low levels of trust; optimism versus cynicism and fear; acceptance versus threat and judgementalism; co‐operation and mutual problem solving versus coercion and destructive competition; authenticity versus deception and hidden agenda; empathy and warmth versus cold detachment; valuing and respecting versus humiliating people; democracy versus authoritarianism; appreciation of diversity and divergent views versus intolerance; encouragement for experimentation versus blame for failure; engendering versus stifling creativity and innovation; motivating versus demotivating; and empowering versus disempowering. The experienced emotional climate triggers self‐reinforcing behaviour cycles, with stark differences between behaviour patterns engendered in supportive and alienating emotional climates. In supportive emotional climates, behaviours encouraged and reinforced include: ethical conduct and practice; open communication; co‐operative team‐building; willing sharing of knowledge and resources; authentic/emotionally honest patterns of behaving and relating to others; care and concern for others; a focus on action and goal achievement, active experimentation and exploring creative solutions; assertive communication and constructive negotiation. In contrast, negative emotional climates engender active politicking – manipulative, deceitful and intimidating patterns of behaviour and unethical practices. Individual effort is focused on enhancing personal position and influence in a fiercely competitive environment, rather than on achieving organizational performance goals. Inevitably this process of personal aggrandisement involves undermining and destroying the perceived competition, assigning blame and discrediting others whilst concealing one's own agenda and mistakes. In the resultant ‘survival‐of‐the‐fittest’ battleground, sabotage, retaliation, aggressive, abusive and threatening behaviour patterns, intimidatory tactics, and deceptive practices are rife. To survive in this hostile climate, people engage in a variety of self‐protective behaviours. Trust vanishes and fear reigns supreme.

4. The underlying integral methodological pluralism is a set of principles that guides the theory building process for all integral approaches. These principles are non‐exclusion, enfoldment/unfoldment and enactment. The principle of non‐exclusion is the acknowledgment that truth is not the province of any one scientific or cultural approach to knowledge acquisition and that valid insights come from a plurality of research and inquiry perspectives. The second principle, enfoldment/unfoldment, refers to the patterns that emerge over time when multiple truths and perspectives are included within one meta‐theoretical framework. The unfoldment/enfoldment principle refers to the holistic and developmental nature of knowledge and methods. The principle proposes that all types of knowledge are connected and can illuminate each other. The third principle, the enactment principle, is all about practice and the methods that enable researchers to engage with and disclose the central realities of the subject of interest (see also Torbert 2004).

5. According to Finlay (2005), in this kind of research there are three inter‐penetrating layers of reflexivity implied, each involving different but co‐existing dimensions of embodied intersubjectivity: (A) connecting‐of the Other's embodiment to our own, (B) acting‐into the Other's bodily experience and (C) merging‐with the Other's bodily experience. The first layer – connecting‐of – demonstrates how people can tune into another's bodily way of being through using their own embodied reactions. The second layer – acting‐into – focuses on empathy as imaginative self‐transposal and calls attention to the way existences (beings) are intertwined in a dynamic of doubling and mirroring. The third layer – merging‐with – involves a ‘reciprocal insertion and intertwining’ of others in oneself and of one in them, where self‐understanding and other‐understanding unite in mutual transformation.