Coaching for Wisdom: Enabling Wise Decisions

Abstract

This chapter presents that wisdom is the exercise of judgment acting on the experience, common sense, and available information. People with a recognized high level of wisdom might reasonably be expected to have developed positive personality characteristics, such as maturity, integrity, and generativity, and to have overcome negative personality characteristics such as neuroticism or self-centeredness. Business leaders, particularly, must make operational and moral decisions in the face of unprecedented complexity. Expertise, intelligence, and experience are necessary but no longer sufficient to enable the leaders to make far-reaching and potentially catastrophic decisions in a world of permanent incompleteness. The highest purpose for coaching in troubled times must be to make the leaders’ implicit wisdom resources more explicit and to help them shape those resources into a personal compass to make wise decisions in the service of a common good. The emerging field of wisdom in psychology suggests ways in which coaches can rise to that challenge.

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