We Need You To Be Wiser

Monk on beach.
We need you to be wiser. If you’re reading this, you are likely someone who other people depend on as a leader. Someone of influence. Someone whose thoughts impact the world around you.
Mind you, we don’t need you to be smarter –you’re probably smart enough. You know plenty of things. But wisdom isn’t about how much stuff you have on your brain’s hard drive; wisdom is how that stuff is organized. It’s your operating system –your meaning making system. And right now, we’d all really benefit if that system got an upgrade.
Because the world is living through a period of unprecedented volatility. Of massive uncertainty. Of extreme ambiguity. Climate change is causing once-in-a-century weather events to happen twice a year. Artificial intelligence is rewriting job descriptions and obviating professions faster than any workforce retraining program could keep up. Social fragmentation is tearing apart countries and companies alike. All the news you’re hearing about mass immigration is just an early signal of bigger shifts to come. So is government disarray. So is the collapse of global free trade. Those shifts are burning out your leaders and tearing apart your teams.
That’s why we want you to be wiser.
If you can be wiser, you’ll be better equipped to solve the really hard problems that seem to be all around us. Your intelligence and your education are likely good enough to solve the clear but complicated stuff. It’s the ambiguous stuff that’s proving difficult. Playing chess is a complicated problem: it’s hard to learn and takes a lifetime to master. It’s also a very clear problem. There are only sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces on the board, each with very clear rules. At no point do new pieces show up in the middle of the game with behaviors no one understands. An ambiguous problem is like having your in-laws over to dinner for the first time: it’s what you don’t know that you don’t know that can get you into trouble.
Elon Musk is a terrifying example of a leader who’s great at solving complicated problems like launching a rocket but struggles to handle ambiguous challenges like stewarding an online community. Under Musk’s leadership, SpaceX reduced the cost of launching payloads to orbit by a factor of ten. And yet Twitter’s ad revenue has declined by 47% since he bought it.
We want you to be wiser because the challenges we face aren’t so clear anymore and we keep getting hit with one crisis after another.
If you can be wiser, you’ll be able to come up with better solutions that meet the needs of more people. That’s because you’ll have a wider “sphere of concern.” Most of us start out life focused on ourselves. It’s “Me! Me! Me!” for much of our childhood, culminating in the symphony of bad decisions that most of us called our teens. But if we’re lucky, we upgrade our meaning making systems and start to realize that it’s not “all about me.” We start to be concerned about us –whether us is our family, our team, our tribe, our country, or our company. Harvard professor and former Medtronic CEO Bill George has written beautifully about this “me to we” shift. It’s table stakes for any leader. But if we keep growing, some of us even make the next big upgrade. We discover that it’s not just “all about us” it’s actually “all about all of us.” We take on a world-centric mindset.