We have never had more access to knowledge.
It is abundant now: instant, overflowing know how. Ask any question and something intelligent answers back within seconds, faster than any of us could manage alone. What do we do with all this knowlege? My brain aches at times. Does yours?
I understand why answers are so seductive under pressure, particularly quick ones. And yet they cut against my thirty years of training in sitting with uncertainty with leaders, and embracing the messy middle, what Fritz Perls called ‘the fertile void’. But I admit that this takes a little longer, and we are all time-poor these days.
At the comma we coach at depth. We are a small team of psychologically minded coaches, many of whom are also psychologists or, like me, psychotherapists. Our strapline even says ‘where wise leaders are made’. So what does this mean?
First, let me make a distinction between wisdom and knowledge, and for that I am going to turn to Aristotle, who drew it more precisely than most of what has been written since. He separated sophia (theoretical wisdom, the capacity to grasp universal truths) from phronesis (practical wisdom, the capacity to judge rightly in this particular situation, with these particular people, on this day, right now).
Knowledge sits closer to sophia: it can be looked up. Phronesis cannot. It has to be lived into, over years, through decisions that did not work, relationships that were misjudged, and moments where the right answer on paper turned out to be the wrong one in the room. Wisdom is a process, whereas knowledge can be an event; wisdom draws on a whole experience of what is inside and outside of us, rather than solely on cognitive know-how. In short, I like to put it like this:
Knowledge answers the question you asked.
Wisdom knows which question you should have asked in the first place.
Knowledge comes to us from the outside in: from books, experts and now, machines. Wisdom is grown from the inside out, through the slower work of getting to know ourselves. In my work with leaders, one of the patterns I keep meeting has little to do with intelligence or knowledge. In fact, quite the opposite: these leaders are rarely short of information, but they are short of time. And so what they struggle with, like so many of us these days, is finding that time for the slower capacity to sit with a decision long enough to feel its full weight, and to come into their own wisdom.
Pausing, literally inserting the comma, is where our name comes from.
We also chose it because it expresses our belief that wisdom lies at the heart of transformational work, and that it is made slowly, through the kind of paying attention that a search result can’t substitute for. Wisdom is a deliberate choice of word in our brand, but it is not a feature you install. It is a way of being with experience that develops a person from the inside, over time, in the company of someone willing to stay with them while it happens and ask the wiser questions.
So, how slow is slow?
Well certainly Erik Erikson, writing on the stages of adult psychological development, placed wisdom at the very end of the life cycle: the culminating virtue of late adulthood, arrived at only after decades of contending honestly with one’s own limitations. So that’s a pretty slow burn, and i suspect a deeply unfashionable idea in a culture that prizes speed and instant fluency, but it rings true. Wisdom is not a faster form of cleverness; it is what remains after cleverness has been tested, repeatedly, against reality, and found wanting. But we don’t have to wait for it until we are old, we can cultivate wisdom all through our lives whatever age and stage we are at.
You might be wondering if wisdom therefore is just experience? This is where self awareness comes in, and that inside out growth, because experience alone doesn’t make anyone wise. Many of us simply repeat the same patterns with more authority, but not necessarily with more wisdom.
Experience only becomes wisdom when we turn towards it, getting curious about what in us reacted, what we were protecting, or what we couldn’t bear to feel.
This means understanding our own patterns and habitual ways of showing up in the world, and it matters more, not less, in an age of cognitive acceleration. When an answer can be produced in seconds, the temptation is to mistake the speed of the answer for the quality of the judgement behind it.
I see the cost of this weekly: leaders who are cognitively busy and well resourced with frameworks and data, yet struggle to make the one decision that requires them to know something about themselves, not just about the situation in front of them. To notice which part of them is speaking, which part of them is making the decision. Maybe it is a part of them that needs to be liked, or to be in control, or that can’t tolerate not knowing; or an old loyalty that quietly steers their behaviour. We all have these parts, only inner work brings these to the surface, so that we can begin to soften the old patterns that get in the way of our greater capacity for wisdom.
So here is where I would ask you to pause, if you are reading this in the middle of a demanding day.
How much of your day do you spend looking outward for answers, and how much looking inward? And who, which part of you, is doing the answering?
Becoming wise is a process of inner development. Our wisdom resides at the junction of the familiar and the unknown. It is an incredibly potent place of vitality, where, if we can pause and insert the comma, we can genuinely ‘begin again’. We can choose differently and wisely, and learn to reflect on, embrace, reconcile and release what no longer serves us in our leadership.
None of this is an argument against knowledge, or against the tools now delivering it to us faster than ever. It is an argument for not confusing the two. Knowledge can be produced on demand. Wisdom, as far as I have seen in thirty years of this work, still has to be grown from within. It still, I think, needs a companion for that journey inward: someone with the skills to guide you towards your own wisdom, whether that be us, or a trusted partner.
Rumi said it best:
“Yesterday I was clever
so I wanted to change the world.
Today I am wise,
so I am changing myself.”
