Читать книгу Leading Wisely - Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries - Страница 8

The importance of wisdom as a guiding principle led me to reflect on the kind of conceptual schemes that I have been using in trying to make sense of the stories my participants would tell me. This pertains to the question of what kind of lenses I apply to understand the deeper meaning of what my participants are dealing with. Added to this is another question of particular importance: while using these lenses, how can I weave together into a cohesive pattern the emerging thoughts, feelings and behavior patterns that come my way?

To start with, as a management professor, there is my knowledge of organizational life. However, to only use this organizational lens to help understand what the executives in my seminars are trying to present would provide a rather one-sided, two-dimensional picture of their lives. Therefore, I have found another lens to be extremely useful. It came from putting on my hat as a psychoanalyst. Through the use of a more psychodynamic-systemic oriented lens – thus having a more clinical orientation to the making sense of things – I began to pay attention to not only what is happening in people's lives on the surface but also what is happening beneath the surface. After all, as a clinician, I have always been interested not only in conscious phenomena, but also in what happens at an unconscious level. Putting on this more ‘clinical’ hat has always been an important part of my way of making sense of the world. It helped me to deal better with the ‘wisdom equation’, to become more reflective in my decision making.