Where Am I?
Many years ago, I keynoted a conference alongside the great Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte. He shared an amusing anecdote about when he was working endless hours in a business and had reached a point of such exhaustion that he heard himself running into a meeting one day and asking everyone in the room
“Has anyone seen David?”
He wasn’t joking. He really was looking for himself. Not in a philosophical sense but in a practical way. He needed David to do something. In his tiredness he’d totally lost himself.
It was a turning point. He realised that the antidote to his exhaustion was not rest but doing something that made his heart sing. He quit to follow his heart.
When was the last time you experienced such clarity or passion. When did you last sit down and really dig into a topic that you’re absolutely enchanted by. I mean really studied that topic.
I don't mean the three articles you skimmed on the train, or the AI summary of a report you were meant to read before the board meeting.
I mean real study. Deliberate, effortful, sustained attention on something that stretches you. That makes you think, hard. A topic that’s endlessly fascinating and enthrals you.
Sadly, for many leaders the honest answer is "I can’t remember". Most simply don’t have time to study. At best they may learn some technical skills to do with their job. They may even share best practice with colleagues on how to drive outcomes.
But I am talking about the thrill of delving deep into a topic and unravelling its complexity. Making sense of something complicated and converting that knowledge into a change in how you show up in the world.
The Great Relief
The word "study" comes from the Latin studium, meaning zeal, eagerness, painstaking application. Even better, the word "school" comes from the Greek scholē, which meant leisure. For the ancient Greeks, free time was what you used for thinking, questioning and growing. We have quietly inverted that. Leisure is now what we use to recover from work, usually horizontally, on a sofa, with a remote control.
Most people leave school or university with an enormous sense of relief. No more exams. No more being tested. No more being told you're not quite good enough yet. They get a job, and the job gets them. Within a few years curiosity has been crushed by the inbox, and they're too tired to think, let alone study.
If you feel your innate curiosity has disappeared under a mountain of work, if your life feels more like an episode of Squid Games than a life, then you’re not alone.
Francesca Gino's research found that only around a quarter of employees report regularly feeling curious at work, and their curiosity tends to drop significantly within the first six months of starting a new job [1]. We hire curious people and then systematically train it out of them.
Now some people do study but mainly to drive career progression. They become subject matter experts. They master finance, or technology, or sales, or marketing, or people operations, and they climb the corporate ladder until they become the Chief of their silo. A few make it all the way to Chief of all the Chiefs. Some attend a business school programme.
Nearly all of this type of study is the pursuit of technical competence.
Two Types of Study
Now being good at your job is incredibly important. Technical knowledge is vital. Becoming a learning organisation, with ‘centres of excellence’ is a good thing.
It’s just there is second type of study. This second type of study will become increasingly important as AI reaches deeper into our lives.
And this type of study is not technical, but it may have a much bigger impact on your career progression and success that any technical course or subject matter expertise. This second type of study is the study of your “Self” and how you relate to others.
Very few leaders study the “Self” as a subject. Despite “self-awareness” being acknowledged as a critical skill for leaders. Few wonder about where the “self” comes from; how it’s built; how does it change over time. What’s the impact of your working environment on your self-perception. What’s the role of beliefs and values on the evolution of the “self”. What’s the relationship between my-“self”, and my identity and ego.
Tasha Eurich's research demonstrated that around 95% of people believe they are self-aware, but only about 10 to 15% actually are [2]. That's a lot of people confidently leading organisations without really understanding themselves.
Uniquely Human
Answering such questions is an exploration of what make us uniquely human.
As most organisations agentify their workforce, and pursue the promise of cost savings and competitive advantages driven by the efficiencies delivered by AI hoovering up technical roles, what makes us uniquely human will become increasingly important. Important for our careers as well as our happiness, fulfilment and success.
The study of the ‘self’ may be one of the most fascinating journeys of discovery you ever embark on. It may also take you right to the core of our success as a species, and that is our ability to collaborate.
We’re social animals, we can’t succeed without each other. But few leaders invest significant time studying relationships and culture, despite the fact that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Many companies spend millions to build a killer strategy but if there’s a fear or blame culture the strategy will never work.
Now here’s the critical point in all this: you can study and acquire knowledge, but what changes your future is your ability to use that knowledge to increase your level of sophistication as a human being.
A Cleverer Six-Year-Old
Imagine the journey of a six-year-old at school. They study, they learn and they acquire knowledge. But such activity doesn’t make them any more sophisticated. It just makes them a more knowledgeable six-year-old.
Havard Professor Robert Kegan uses the example of a beaker of water to illustrate the difference between learning and development. He said most of what goes on when people study is informational learning. This is like filling the container [3].
In contrast, development or what Keegan called transformational learning, changes the shape of the container itself.
What most leaders do and what most leadership interventions focus on is informational learning. This makes an experts more expert. It builds more knowledgeable six-year-olds.
Rooke and Torbert's research, published in Harvard Business Review, found that the majority of leaders they assessed operated as subject matter experts. Or experts focused on outcomes, which is slightly more sophisticated. These are level 5 and 6 of 12 levels of development. They found only 15% operated developed beyond this level, despite the fact that operating at a more sophisticated levels enables leaders to drive genuine organisational transformation [4].
Should We Really “Ask the Experts”?
Even those leaders who do study and acquire knowledge tend to do so within the confines of their existing knowledge base. Erik Dane's work on "cognitive entrenchment" shows that as expertise deepens within a domain, flexibility of thinking tends to decline [5]. An expert knows more and more about less and less. They become very good at solving yesterday's problems and increasingly blind to tomorrow's.
Philip Tetlock's twenty-year study of expert forecasting found that specialists were frequently beaten by people who drew on many sources and held their views lightly [6]. And Robert Root-Bernstein's study of Nobel laureates found they were far more likely to be polymathic than their peers and have serious interests in the arts, music, crafts or writing [7]. Breadth isn't a distraction from brilliance. It seems to be one of its ingredients [8].
From Learning Organisation to DDO
For thirty years organisations have been proudly declaring themselves to be "Learning Organisations". They encouraged their people up the "learning curve". But learning is just a necessary first step. In a world that’s accelerating and increasingly more complex, learning is not enough.
Companies must become Deliberately Developmental Organisations [9]. DDOs treat the sophistication of their people as a core strategic asset. They design their entire operating environment so that work itself becomes the curriculum and the maturity of their people the differentiator. Sophisticated people study, continually and not just in areas of their own expertise they explore far and wide, as a habit.
From a Knowledge Economy to a Meaning Economy
Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" in 1959. It served us well. But with AI, knowledge is now a commodity. We’re beyond the knowledge economy. We are in a meaning economy, where the competitive advantage is uniquely human. The edge organisations seek is determined by what has meaning to us.
In a meaning economy three things become more important. Firstly, ethics. AI won’t kill us but bad actors using AI for immoral purposes might. Secondly, in world is awash with lies, corruption and deceit, the truth becomes more valuable. And thirdly, human-generated art. This is what Ken Wilber calls the Good, the True and the Beautiful.
AI can describe moral frameworks brilliantly, but it can't decide what is right. Its ethical weightings are set by humans. Moral judgement sits with us, and only sentient humans can be held accountable for acting ethically.
AI can't validate anything. It has no internal truth architecture. It has no direct contact with reality. It only interacts with what’s been written about it [10]. A human must decide what’s actually true.
And beauty is shaped by culture, history and is in the eye of the beholder. It requires human perception. What moves a person in Kyoto to tears may leave a person in Lagos baffled, and vice versa. Discerning beauty is irreducibly human.
So, What Are You Studying?
Lifelong learning is a fine aspiration. Lifelong development is the real game.
This means diarising time, not just to study, but to study yourself. Not as a slogan about self-awareness, but as a serious inquiry into who you are and who you're capable of becoming. Moving from a reader to a leader.
Curiosity about your-self will take you into studying who you are in relationship to everyone and everything else.
Knowing yourself is not selfish, narcissistic or self-indulgent. It is an act of development. Down this path awaits some of the most amazing discoveries about what it means to be uniquely human.
The world doesn’t need more knowledgeable six-year-olds. It needs leaders who have grown up. Leaders who are wiser, more compassionate, more ethical, and who, as a result, cause far less suffering.
So, I'll ask you again - what are you studying?
References
[1] Gino, F. (2018) ‘The Business Case for Curiosity’, Harvard Business Review, September–October.
[2] Eurich, T. (2018) ‘What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It)’, Harvard Business Review, January.
[3] Kegan, R. (1994) In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; and Kegan, R. (2000) ‘What “Form” Transforms? A Constructive-Developmental Approach to Transformative Learning’, in Mezirow, J. (ed.) Learning as Transformation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
[4] Rooke, D. and Torbert, W.R. (2005) ‘Seven Transformations of Leadership’, Harvard Business Review, 83(4), pp. 66–76.
[5] Dane, E. (2010) ‘Reconsidering the Trade-off Between Expertise and Flexibility: A Cognitive Entrenchment Perspective’, Academy of Management Review, 35(4), pp. 579–603.
[6] Tetlock, P.E. (2005) Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[7] Root-Bernstein, R. et al. (2008) ‘Arts Foster Scientific Success: Avocations of Nobel, National Academy, Royal Society, and Sigma Xi Members’, Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology, 1(2), pp. 51–63.
[8] Epstein, D. (2019) Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York: Riverhead Books; and Munger, C. (1994) ‘A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom’, address to USC Marshall School of Business.
[9] Kegan, R. and Lahey, L.L. (2016) An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
[10] Harnad, S. (1990) ‘The Symbol Grounding Problem’, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 42(1–3), pp. 335–346.