You should have grown wise before you grew old!
This is a paraphrase of King Lear’s fool admonishing him for being naïve.
Lear had come to the threshold of a grand transformation, and he assumed the skills and vision that got him there would serve him once he crossed it. Worse, he expected the old leadership paradigms to carry his kingdom through, that he didn’t have to think differently on behalf of others. He failed to see the limits of his seeing, and the entire kingdom was decimated because of it.
Being smart and being wise are similar but different things. Smart implies technical acumen, the ability to take in, process, and express data. Wisdom, on the other hand, has to do with adaptive development; the ability to hold multiple truths, to witness your own cognitive-emotional process, and the maturity to sacrifice the immediate gratification of control for the delayed reward of nurturing potential. And more.
Most organizational development programs ignore adaptive development, focusing entirely on making people smarter, more technically sound, more efficient, and so on. Of course, these forms of development are essential, but they are often relied upon exclusively.
To function competently in complex situations, your physicians, executives, and other workers must develop both technically and adaptively. This is especially true of your leaders.
Your world is unlikely to come apart like Lear’s if you ignore your own adaptive development or if you ignore the adaptive development of your people. You may, however, experience an insidious slog toward dysfunction or mediocrity.
Since your most valuable resource is the cognitive and emotional energies of your people, a dearth of adaptive development can deliver the biggest waste of resources any organization can suffer. Rather than tragedy, you’re more likely to look up one day and find yourself immersed in power struggles, avoidance behaviors, and fear-based decision making.
Through Lear, the staggering genius of William Shakespeare teaches us to avoid hubris and naivete. Let it also teach us the value of adaptive development.
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Fern EPC is an adaptive development fast track for physicians, physician leaders, and healthcare executives. Using a series of exercises created by Harvard University professors, we trend people toward the higher levels of adult development required to face complexity.