“Each of us is responsible for how we see, and how we see determines what we see. Seeing is not merely a physical act: the heart of the vision is shaped by the state of the soul.”

(John O’Donohue)

I have something to say.

(At last.)

It’s taken me a while to gather the courage to name my work in organisational life as a contribution to ‘wisdom’, but greying hair and a lined face offers the benefit of a little eccentricity.

And it doesn’t take long browsing LinkedIn for me to realise that I don’t fit in there anymore. I’m no longer that kind of leader.

Yet I’m still entirely grateful to those leaders among us who bring intelligence, analysis and the relentless energy needed to get things done. I also fear the risk that comes with stepping away from that role, but it’s not something that I can authentically, soulfully offer. I’ve also come to realise that my work doesn’t need obedient followers and that I don’t need to be heard or, at least, perhaps not as urgently as before.

My offers have become much more optional; they may or may not have immediate value or resonance. And I’ve all but given up trying to predict the difference.

James March, the Stanford academic, began his classes by saying; “I am not now, nor have I ever been, relevant.” Today, this is career suicide for a consultant, coach or academic, but his point was that his students needed to take his ideas and apply them within their work for themselves. He couldn’t do that for them; he saw his job to develop ideas that ‘have some form of grace or surprise.’ Their job was to deploy them in their leadership practice.

So, as I attempt to offer value in #SeeingDifferently, I notice how I am looking for pattern and perspective across our shared experience, trying to discern our emerging questions instead of rapidly delivering answers and prescriptions.

Rather than gazing towards abstract, idealised models of management and leadership, I’m turning towards our real, messy, energetic, embodied experiences of organisational life. I’m focussing in on what is happening rather than what should be happening.

Like James March, I’m hoping to offer ideas that demonstrate an aesthetic; my work aims to be simple, raw, stripped back. Though hopefully no less graceful or surprising as a consequence. I’m also holding out for disciplined, repetitive practice: we need to show up, again and again, if this kind of artful, creative work is to gain impact.

As with much of organisational change, I’m not anticipating any quick wins or overnight successes.

I hope that by maintaining a stance of self-doubt, peering deeply into my interior sensing of events, as well as trying to carefully notice what is happening ‘out there’, I can be alert and competent enough to name and illustrate what I see.

I know that polished images and easy answers are often a feature of organisational life but the stakes are now too high for blind acceptance and fast action is fateful.

So I’m trying to find wisdom in how I show up, how I see things and how I choose to be.

I hope we all will.

We can all be ‘seers’; we all have vision, we all have wisdom and, when our souls speak, we all have something to say.

Notes:

James March sadly died in 2018 age 80. Harvard Business Review says that James was a writer ‘to whom the experts turn when they want to engage new ideas’ and you might enjoy his his 2006 HBR interview, ‘Ideas as Art.’

I’ve been rereading John O’Donhue’s ‘Divine Beauty’ which is becoming increasingly ‘highlighted’ as I go… It’s a lovely, reflective book which advocates grace and reverence as a way of being in the world. As an antidote to our busy, preoccupied lives, I’m particularly struck by his request to: “Take your time and be everywhere you are.”

Finally, I find myself really challenged by David Whyte’s view of the ‘wisdom that comes from maturity.’ In ‘Consolations’, he writes that it ‘is recognised through the disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what only looks as if it is happening now, and what is about to occur.’

Wisdom