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Learning to Lead: Can Aristotle Help Us Find the Road to Wisdom?

Keith Grint Leadership 2007 3: 231 DOI: 10.1177/1742715007076215 The online version of this article can be found at: http://lea.sagepub.com/content/3/2/231

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Leadership

Learning to Lead: Can Aristotle Help Us Find the Road to Wisdom?

Keith Grint, Craneld University, UK

Introduction
The young man wrote Aristotle (1998: 3), is not a t student of Moral Philosophy, for he has no experience in the actions of life. That Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great for ve years from 343 BC, when the future king was aged 13, might seem an enigma, but Aristotle did not imply that the problem was biological youth as much as the absence of wisdom. As he suggested, I draw no distinction between young in years, and youthful in temper and disposition: the defect to which I allude being no direct result of the time, but of living at the beck and call of passion (p. 3). Anyway, there is little evidence that Alexanders political leadership was signicantly affected by the teachings of his teacher even if the latter did encourage a desire for knowledge in the former (Lane Fox, 2004). So, if one of the greatest teachers in history had trouble teaching leadership to one of the most successful leaders in history, can we, mere mortals, teach leadership? Possibly, but as Doh (2003: 54) reminds us, even if we can learn to lead that does not mean that leadership can be taught: it is possible that the process of learning is simply too complex, unconscious or non-replicable to teach. Yet Dohs review suggests that it can be learned and some aspects of it can be taught. Conger (in Doh 2003: 59) for example, suggests that leadership comprises skills, perspectives and dispositions, hence while many skills and some perspectives can be taught or enhanced many dispositions cannot. That might simply be a self-interested response: if we cannot teach any element of leadership then leadership educators will shortly be looking for employment. Chief among candidates for learning is often experience: the school-of-hardknocks or the university of life as it is conventionally referred to (Davies & Easterby-Smith, 1984; 1988; Yukl, 1998). This was also the critical element missing from Alexanders life when Aristotle rst tutored him. But this is primarily restricted to how leaders can learn from their own super-ordinates, from coaching and observing, not from their own followers (see Collinson, 2005 and Grint, 2005a, on the role of followers as teachers of leadership). Even experience may be of limited value if every experience and every individual is unique so that no model of learning can predict anything of value except that next time everything will be different. Indeed, the critical issue cannot simply be experience but what is learned through
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experience. To some extent this assessment locks into some forms of Complexity Theory in so far as the uniqueness of events and the indeterminacy of the future effectively disable the construction of any signicant pattern learning. It also reects Soren Kierkegaards assumption that Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Or in Walter Benjamins image of the Angel of History, the angel faces the past but is blown backwards into the future. In other words, little of our past experience provides us with the wherewithal to become successful leaders. Despite all the investment in leadership development estimated at 120 million in 2005 in the UK alone (Benchmark Research, 2006), and between US$15 and US$50 billion for the world (Arts Council England, 2006; Rockwood, 2006) and all the information available on leadership, we still seem to be unable to translate ideas about leadership and leadership development into best-practice leadership on the ground (Hirsh et al., 2004). It may be that we confuse and conate leader development with leadership development (Iles & Preece, 2006) or it may be that leadership development actually plays out a cultural ritual that reects society; thus the predilection for scientic measurement of the self in US leadership development programmes mirrors the apparent American obsession with science and the individual (Jones, 2006). It may also be that somewhere between the good intentions of leaders and educators, and the delivery on the ground, the utility of leadership is lost in translation. This may be because the leadership is inadequate, or the leadership development is ineffective, or we lack the metrics to evaluate leadership, or because cultural processes confound the good intent or for a hundred other reasons including the strong possibility that the current zeal for competency frameworks is misleading us because it implies followers and contexts are irrelevant (Bolden & Gosling, 2006). Moreover, competency frameworks often replicate the problem facing drunks who have lost their keys at night they look for them under the lamplight because that is the only place they can see properly. In effect, many competency frameworks are constructed on the basis of assessing existing successful leaders in an organization and assuming that these competencies are the cause of the success. Because the selection of the subjects is already restricted to the successful, the results may be skewed to ignore all those deemed less successful but who may still have these competencies. Thus the unrepresentative nature of the sample undermines the utility of the approach. Traditionally we also seem to pretend that the resultant focus on the selection of leaders (who have the competencies) resolves the problem of delivery, or that organizations are driven by a single form of leader-dominated rationality rather than social and emotional processes, or we ignore the enormously complex and dynamic system that stands between the leader and the delivery. But the criteria for the selection of leaders are often rooted in the theory of leadership not its practice. For example, many promotion systems, including, for example, elements of the British police and the re and rescue services, seem to assume that the mere possession of the required competencies or the ability to answer questions about hypothetical situations correctly (that is, using the appropriate language) in a single formal interview, are better methods of assessing potential than using the record of the ofcers or their annual assessments or prior achievements. This is the equivalent of selecting players for a football team by psychologically assessing them for heading

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competence or by asking them how, hypothetically, they would head a ball from a corner rather than seeing whether they can actually play skilful football under pressure from the opposition. Such approaches can only ever operate in a reality-free world (McDaniel & Driebe, 2001). In other words, leadership is always a complex process of translation from theory to practice and never simply a unilinear act of transmission. Traditionally the translation in military leadership is assessed in battle, and businesses are assessed when the CEO is red or a new one manages a crisis. In effect, we tend to focus on leadership under crisis conditions but ignore the other 95 per cent of times when some form of stability prevails. Thus we often derive a picture of heroic leaders when it may well be that the more successful leader is the one who succeeded in avoiding a crisis (Badaracco, 2002). To circumvent this problem perhaps we need to examine leadership in different contexts to establish whether one of the reasons we appear to fail in translating the lessons of leadership is because the heroic leader is a singularly inappropriate role model in many circumstances. If we assume from the beginning that individual leaders are responsible for success and failure then we inhibit our ability to look more generally at the whole organization including the political and economic environment to establish cause and effect. Indeed, it may well be that organizations that are leader-full, that is, organizations that facilitate leadership at all levels, both for formal and informal leaders, are the ones most likely to succeed in the long run (Raelin, 2003). If this is the case then we need to understand how leadership works in organizations rather than how formal leaders work on organizations (Grint, 2005a; Hunt, 2004). We also need to recognize that learning to lead is itself a social process rather than an individual event (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and that the learning of leadership may be, as Aristotle implied, not just learning a body of theoretical knowledge episteme and not merely captured by replicable skills techn but rather something including practical wisdom phronesis. Here, understanding the potential collective good in a concrete situation is then realized by the practical wisdom of leaders (see Kodish, 2006, on the relationship of leadership to paradox). In effect, we need to stop reducing leadership to a technical issue that can be solved by the more sophisticated application of science; or in Dunnes (1993: 364) more elegant phrase, the cause of the dissatisfaction . . . [is] the assimilation of practical problems to a technical mode of rationality.

Reassessing the problems: techn, episteme and phronesis

Are there simple techniques that leaders can be taught to obviate the problem? Or are leadership problems of such a complex kind that only through reective experience can leaders learn to deal or at least live with them? In effect, people might be able to learn certain elements of leadership but are there some aspects that cannot be directly taught? Is leadership, then, less about what you know what you have already learned and more about the ability to learn (Antonacopoulou & Bento, 2004; Vail, 1996)? If it is the latter then the god-like leaders beloved of heroic, charismatic and many transformational approaches to leadership are counter-productive since they are evaluated on their existing competence and knowledge, not their ability to learn, itself premised upon acknowledged ignorance. Or to drag the other two

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leading Greek philosophers into the debate, this is the equivalent of siding with Socrates rather than Plato. The assumption that we need to differentiate between various forms of decision making and problem solving and provide different forms of personal development for such a typology derives originally from Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics (1998). In this text, written for Aristotles son Nicomachus, precisely how problems and issues might be dealt with depends fundamentally upon how they are interpreted, and the division between techn, episteme and phronesis provides one way of understanding that leadership comprises a whole array of techniques, knowledge and wisdom that may require rather different kinds of resolution.

Techn: know how

Traditionally when organizational problems are perceived to be major inhibitors of organizational effectiveness some investment is made in the leaders to alleviate the problem, but of course this implies a clear understanding of the source of the problem. If this is perceived to be inadequate skill on the part of the leaders then some form of educational experience or training programme is usually called for. In effect, the cause of the problem is the inadequacy of the leaders and, unless the leaders can be replaced, the incumbents have to be improved: their techniques need sharpening. The assumption that the problem is caused by inadequate technique, and therefore can be resolved through the amelioration of that technique is precisely the causal root of compensatory remedial education and resonant of Aristotles notion of techn: know how. Aristotle suggested, in his Nicomachean Ethics, that techn knowing how to was the equivalent of craft knowledge, it was an art (hence the term Artisan) and was manifest in concrete form that was variable and context dependent (Higgins, 2003). Techn refers to things that do not have an inner purpose their purpose is to produce other things art, health, poetry and so on, or in this case productive efciency or effectiveness. However, the problem for many puzzled leaders is that such training courses often seem to be inadequate to the task; being required to be more transformational or emotionally intelligent or charismatic or having a better vision may be easier to write about than to do. Furthermore, such a conventional response to the problems induced by adopting the wrong or inappropriate leadership style, or misunderstanding the situation or the followers, is some kind of remedial action: we try and x the leaders lack of skill through a training course or providing counselling or a coach, or whatever is the current fad or fashion, so they have a greater level of know how. Thus we provide courses in presentation skills or public speaking or nancial management or whatever is presumed to be missing from the tool-box of skills carried by the leader in question. In short, we start with a decit model of leadership: we begin by blaming the leader. This may well be an accurate assessment of the problem, but it may also be an easy route to a convenient scapegoat. Of course, these skill-based programmes might work but the evidence for them generating a qualitative leap in leadership in the long run, rather than a short-term improvement is at best, thin and therein lays another problem that lies outside the remit of this article: the lack of objective measures for leadership improvement.

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Nevertheless, the critical issue is that knowing how may be enough for the current task but may not be enough for the completion of the next raft of tasks because continued completion may require the leader to understand why there is a problem in the rst place. In other words, techn-based approaches are symptom relievers rather than cause removers; if there is no understanding of why leadership is necessary or what skills are required there seems little chance that successful leadership will emerge either spontaneously or through some skill-enhancing training course. This reects the difference between single- and double-loop learning (Argyris & Schn, 1978). The requirement to know why rather than just know how (techn) brings us to Aristotles second category: episteme.

Episteme
If knowing how to x a problem is inadequate because leaders need to know why it is a problem and what kind of a problem it is, then perhaps we should try and x the leaders lack of understanding by providing some educational activity that enables them to develop a greater level of knowledge (know why). The enhancing of a leaders understandings of leadership, an appeal to the intellect, is close to Aristotles notion of episteme what we would now recognize as scientic knowledge which is acquired by intelligence and is context-independent; indeed, it can be codied so that it remains valid without recourse to any specic individual. This know why, in contrast to the know how of techn, does not necessarily embody any prescriptive advice because it is analytic in origin and this reects the current pejorative connotations of academia if something is just academic it may well be an accurate representation or understanding of events but it (allegedly) provides no utility in resolving, transcending or inhibiting those events. Knowing why gravity works does not, in and of itself, stop a brick falling on your head. Knowing why leaders have such difculty in mobilizing their followers does not necessarily help leaders or followers in their attempts to improve their lives though it might. Nevertheless huge investments are made in leadership development that are rooted in this approach; indeed, many undergraduate courses, for example, are wholly analytic in format teaching why leadership failed or succeeded in particular cases, or teaching various leadership theories, but not attempting to provide students with any specic practical skills other than those induced through a greater ability to understand why things happen. This approach, then, reective of some current aspects of debates about Emotional Intelligence, implies that if only followers understood how difcult leadership was then they would have more empathy and perhaps even sympathy for the plight of their leaders. Hence the problem is one of knowledge, or rather ignorance, and the solution is to educate followers to understand the problems of their leaders. There may well be some utility in this approach, though simply knowing what the problems of others are does not necessarily generate a change in ones own behaviour or attitudes. For example, you might understand that the individual who has just mugged you comes from a broken home and has had little education but this does not necessarily ensure that your instant response is one of understanding and empathy rather than the more likely response of anger, seeking revenge or justice. In effect, knowing why somebody does something does not necessarily generate a sympathetic response though it might.

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But if the cause of the problem is one of followers ignorance then such an educative approach may indeed ameliorate the problem. In contrast, leaders have often been unable or unwilling to provide the necessary knowledge that contextualizes their decisions; thus many followers are asked to make sacrices to achieve the pressing task without being told all the information that has generated the decision by the leaders the leaders would like to tell you but unfortunately for reasons of nancial or political or military security (which you cannot question) they cannot (cf. Semler, 2001, 2003). A further limit to this approach is the common assumption that the problem still lies with the leaders or their followers; it is someones ignorance that has stymied the leaders in the same way that the lack of skills exhibited under the issue of techn is what undermined the leaders in the previous approach. In both cases the response is to x the people. However, following the arguments of collaborative leadership (Huxham, 2000, 2003) and Appreciative Enquiry (Chrislip & Larson, 1994; Cooperrider et al., 2003; Whitney & Trosten-Bloom, 2003) and Future Search (Weisbord & Janoff, 2000) the problem with xing the people is that it is again a decit model it immediately locates the problem within those deemed responsible for solving the problem and thus begins by blaming the followers or leaders. A contrary argument is that the solution is not simply to generate a better relationship between leader and followers by, for instance, pursuing the mandate of positive psychology and focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses (Linley, 2004). Beyond this or even instead of this the critical aspect is to get people to focus on a compelling task, because only a common and compelling task is sufcient to mobilize the learning to achieve the task (Abrashoff, 2002, 2005).1 Yet if providing the techniques to facilitate leadership without the reason to deploy it seems self-evidently contradictory, do the skills and reasons supply enough resource to generate more successful leaders? Indeed, if there is no opportunity to practise leadership does not all the development seem pointless? Perhaps the issue is that improving ones leadership requires more than either understanding how it works (episteme) or being able to practice an array of techniques (techn) designed to ensure task completion rather better. These are both necessary, but not sufcient, for the generation of wisdom and perhaps we should concentrate on developing these as quickly as possible and then turn to see what else is necessary.2 In pursuit of this we might turn to Aristotles third term: phronesis.

Phronesis
Phronesis, or practical or prudential wisdom or even political wisdom, is a reasoned and true state of capacity to act with regard to human goods (Artistotle, 1998: 1140), and it is essentially rooted in action rather than simply reection. It is something intimately bound up with lived experience rather than abstract reason (episteme) but it is not a set of techniques to be deployed (techn). As Aristotle states in the Nicomachean Ethics, It is for this reason that we think Pericles and men like him have practical wisdom, viz. because they can see what is good for themselves and what is good for men in general; we consider that those can do this who are good at

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managing households or states (p. 1140). Thus wisdom is moral knowledge, or rather ethically practical action, and is entirely context dependent in contrast to science or episteme which is context-free and invariable in space and time. In short, and here we might turn to Cicero rather than Aristotle, it is concerned with establishing the collective good (not the personal good) in the particular context by using situated expertise (Deutsch, 2002). The focus on the practical aspects of wisdom in phronesis is also worth examining in the light of its distinction from Aristotles alternative form of wisdom: sophia. For Aristotle sophia is much closer to what we would probably recognize as general academic intelligence the ability to deploy logic and analytic skills and is general in application as opposed to episteme, which is knowledge limited to a particular eld of expertise. Hence while sophia might enable an individual to understand general principles of cause and effect, it is phronesis which enables an individual to act upon the world for the common good. This also implies that phronesis exists in a world of uncertainty and ambiguity where cause and effect may not be clear cut and where the result of an act or decision cannot be predicted with any certainty. Moreover, phronesis may exist where rational decision making is precluded or occluded by the depth of emotion involved in the decision or situation. It is perhaps for these reasons that academic intelligence (sophia) does not necessarily ensure academics make great leaders! It may also be that our conventional methods of teaching business leaders suffer from the same problem (Mintzberg, 2004). In effect, as Gabriel (2002) insists, the world of phronesis is closer to LeviStrausss (1966) bricoleur than it is to the rational calculating machine. Bricoleurs make progress by stitching together whatever is at hand, whatever needs to be stitched together, to ensure practical success. This is not, then, the clean world of analytic models and rational plans for progress to perfection, this is the world where Gabriels (2002: 139) wise leaders are opportunistic, ad hoc, devious, creative and original. The assumption that wise leadership can be reduced to this might strike the reader as rather inglorious, even mundane, a reection also captured in Lindbloms ground-breaking claim in 1959 that most decision-making mechanisms were little more than muddling through, and as he noted in 1983, Incrementalism is a common, though not universal, obvious feature and useful method of policy-making, as well as personal decision making. Only a careless at the same time overly tidy and pretentious social science could have developed a conventional view of decision making so naive that incrementalism could strike many as a great clarication of decision strategies. I believe that none of my children saw anything noteworthy in the article or in the concept of incrementalism until their education had confused their earlier commonsense insights. (Lindblom, 1983) Thus our wise leader is essentially pragmatic in means, if not in ends. Determining precisely what phronesis consists of might also be represented by these elemental questions:
I I

Where are we going? Is this desirable?

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I I

What should be done? (and adding a concern for power that eludes Aristotle) Who gains and who loses? (Flyvbjerg, 2001).

Or in Gadamers (1993: 355) terms, The goal is not realized through discussion, investigation or planning. It is realized and made possible by exposure to experience itself. Thus, the attainment of justice requires phronesis, the wisdom to understand what needs to be done in a particular situation, not just the skills and techniques to arrest the offender (techn), nor even just the knowledge of the law which is universal and requires episteme (Kessels & Korthagen, 1996). But note that wisdom without knowledge or techniques is pointless and this is important because Aristotle is clear that all three elements are critical; the problem is that we often only resort to episteme and techn, omitting the role of phronesis which is the only one that can tell us in which direction to head. This is crucial because the etymological roots of the Norse word for Leadership Laed imply exactly this direction setting (for a ship). It is also worth considering the extent to which justice, for example, is a consequence of a wise judge or a wise system. Aristotles writings imply the former since he focuses on individual character, but it seems logical to extrapolate from this because a wise judge in a corrupt or absent legal system cannot dispense justice (see Halverson & Gomez, 2001). Phronesis, then, is a medium that helps us get out bearings direction setting it is concerned with action that has no immanent purpose; it is about value-judgements not the production of things or the completion of tasks (as in techn) nor the knowledge that facilitates our understanding of the world (episteme). Aristotle implies that phronesis is always related to the good, but this is only because he severs any connection with the issue of power; once this is introduced it can be adapted for good or ill (Flvbjerg, 2001). The problem for our perplexed leader is that Aristotle suggests that phronesis cannot be directly learned because there is no formulaic element to moral discernment or prudence. Or, as Stanlis (2002: 66) puts it, Prudence is not intellectual calculation but moral discretion. Moreover, this also explains why science (episteme) and technique (techn) are unable to help they have no mechanism for establishing what is good; they can only establish what is true and how something should be done or made. It should also be apparent that the Prudential Leader cannot function outside of a social context because not only do leaders need followers, but what counts as leadership and what counts as the collective good in any particular circumstances depends upon the local social context. Indeed, what counts as the context is often a contested issue (Grint, 2005b). Perhaps two short examples will clarify the difference between episteme (theorists who know why things happen), techn (practitioners who make things happen) and phronesis (the wise who know what to do in a particular situation) (Svenaeus, 2003). Case 1. Medical problem: A patient arrives with a terrible stomach pain and the doctor takes three alternative approaches:
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Episteme (The Theorist who knows why): explains to her that she is suffering from cancer;

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Techn (The Practitioner who makes things happen): gives her a dose of chemotherapy because it may inhibit the growth of cancer; Phronesis (The Wise One who knows how to get to the good end): discusses with the patient what she wants from this situation what would be best in the circumstances? In this particular case it might be to allow the patient to live out her life without chemotherapy because the local community values quality of life over the sanctity of life; in other communities such advice might be considered evil or cruel rather than wise.

Case 2. Fire Service problem: the re service in the local area is losing one member of the public per month to house res. The chief re ofcer takes three alternative approaches:
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Episteme (The Theorist who knows why): the rst ve minutes are critical and the re service is too slow to respond to 999 calls; Techn (The Practitioner who make things happen): replaces the communications system so as to speed up the response rate; Phronesis (The Wise One who knows how to get to the good end): asks what is the good end here? This is not rural Cumbria where the station could be miles from the re; in this city no house is more than ve minutes from a station so do we need to respond faster or stop res in the rst place? Should we organize a public meeting to rethink what we want from the re service? It might be better to resource the provision of free smoke alarms than to invest in a better communications system, and it might be better to close down re stations for the same purpose.3 In a different locale such a leadership decision might be considered wantonly reckless.

These examples might seem to imply that experience alone is the critical ingredient of wisdom and there are precious few examples of leaders without much experience who have managed to generate sustained success. Of course, there have been precociously talented individuals Newton developed calculus at 18, Mozart wrote his rst symphony at 8 and Einstein had developed his theory of relativity by 26 but these are not examples of organizational leadership, even if they are examples of intellectual leadership. Indeed, even a young organizational leader such as William Pitt the Younger who became the British Prime Minister at the age of 24 had already been the leader of the Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Moreover, his exceptional case seems to prove the rule: wisdom is associated with experience (Lawson, 2006). But mere experience is in itself inadequate for two different reasons. First, because this implies that wisdom emanates from a true analysis of the situational facts a positivist approach that belies the role of interpretation and persuasion in the construction of the situation (see Grint, 2005b). In fact, even Edmund Burke rejected such an approach, insisting that normative ideals rather than mere facts were critical to wisdom. The latter, therefore, was a moral virtue not an intellectual virtue (manifest in Burkes support for the incremental basis of the British constitution compared to a theory of ideal government such as had spawned the French Revolution, Stanlis, 2002). In short, neither political idealism nor political

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pragmatism provide a wise foundation for leadership; instead they require the adherence to moral virtue but its application has to be in particular circumstances. To put it another way, prudential leadership is not ckle or changeable because decisions are rooted in collective good, but neither is it stubborn because that smacks of an inexible ideological schema (Moskop, 2002). The second reason that mere experience is inadequate is because oftentimes what we face is novel and thus what is important is not just regurgitating formulaic lessons of the past but reecting on what our experience might and might not have to say about the present, including that the present has not been experienced in the past. As Aristotle (1998) suggests, The most characteristic function of a man of practical wisdom is to deliberate well: no one deliberates about things that cannot be other than they are, not about things that cannot be directed to some end, an end that is a good attainable by action. In an unqualied sense, that man is good at deliberating who, by reasoning, can aim at and hit the best thing attainable to man by action. (p. 114) Of course, practical wisdom cannot determine successful decision making if it could predict such effects then it would be a science, an aspect of episteme. Thus practical wisdom is necessarily indeterminate and we cannot assume that a correct outcome differentiates between a wise and an unwise decision. Indeed, recognizing the limits of human understanding, skill and prudential leadership is itself a manifestation of that very same practical wisdom. In many ways, then, the ability to live with paradox and uncertainty is a prerequisite for leadership (Wilkinson, 2006). That, perhaps, is why Xenophon suggested that those unsettled by the indeterminacy of human wisdom should seek the advice of the omniscient and omnipotent gods (Glenn, 2002). Intriguingly, Aristotle avoids the issue of power between mortals and immortals, or followers and leaders and the absence of a dialogue on power in Aristotles work leaves us with two alternative approaches since the question of who benets from the results of practical wisdom cannot be safely tucked away under the label of the good. On the one hand, Habermass (1987) Communicative Rationality proposes a non-coercive consensus enacted through free and egalitarian dialogue and grounded in what he calls discourse ethics. Discourse ethics does not set up substantive orientations. Instead it establishes a procedure an ideal speech situation based on presuppositions and designed to guarantee the impartiality of the process of judging (quoted in Flyvbjerg, 2001: 91). In short, who argues best wins but it is the process rules the constitutional procedures that guarantee this. The problem, of course, is that constitutions do not guarantee what they have inscribed because constitutions are not context-free, and these contexts very often embody signicant inequalities of power. In short, there are no ideal speech situations because communication is not power-neutral; on the contrary, it is soaked through with power. If it were not so then we could always assume that leaders would be swayed by any superior logic of their followers, rather than recognizing that this seldom happens. Some of these aspects are visible in the critical incidents illustrated by Steins (2004) comparison of decision making in Apollo 13 and at Three Mile Island. Adapting Weicks (1993, 1995) concept of sense making, Stein suggests that experience can provide differential help in stressful situations (cosmology

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episodes) where the world no longer seems a rational, orderly system and sense making implies trying to impose a framework of understanding upon a literally senseless world (see also Useem et al., 2005). This occurred 55 hours into the 1970 Apollo 13 ight when the cosmology episode that generated this senselessness is a loud explosion that subsequently left the astronauts short of food, oxygen, power, water and hope. However, by avoiding the temptation to jump to conclusions, and thus by painfully slow, careful and methodological analysis, the problems were explained, compensated for and Apollo 13 returned safely. In contrast, the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear disaster begins with an equivalent cosmology episode of a loud bang but the actions taken by various people unwittingly made the situation worse, rather than better, by taking instant actions and then denying any evidence which suggested the problem had not been resolved. Stein (2004) suggests that this differential negative capability4 the ability to remain comfortable with uncertainty exhibited by those in Apollo 13 but not those at Three Mile Island is crucial in understanding decision making (see also French & Simpson, 2006). That is, their ability to tolerate anxiety and to ensure it does not become excessive (leading to panic) or be denied (leading to inaction) as occurred after the initial remedial actions at Three Mile Island generated different sensemaking actions. In the Apollo 13 case that sense-making facilitated anxiety toleration while action was taken to resolve the problem; at Three Mile Island that sense, making subverted the anxiety and ensured inaction which compounded the problem. In effect, when experience is insufcient to illuminate the path to follow, the wise act is not to eliminate the anxiety that this uncertainty and danger generates but to work through it. This is nicely captured in the movie Thirteen Days where J. F. Kennedy (played by Bruce Greenwood) resists the advice of his military advisers to remove the anxiety by immediately ordering the bombing of Cuba; instead Kennedy decides not to decide and spends an extra 24 hours trying to nd a way through the problem without eliminating the anxiety rst. The humility implied by phronesis the wisdom of knowing that there may not be a right answer, let alone a quick answer, to a problem also suggests that prudential leadership is seldom associated with Utopian thought. Indeed, the appropriation of episteme and/or techn to develop the Utopian order are precise examples of the problem Marxism, fascism, religious fundamentalism of all varieties because they do not start with the question about what would be good in the situation, they begin with a blank piece of paper and with an attempt to force society towards a scientically derived and technically executed Utopia rooted in political or religious ideals. Social engineering towards a pre-dened Utopia seems therefore predestined to failure. We should not start with a blank paper and say what would be ideal but see what we have and ask, how can we improve this? In this sense Aristotles insistence in his Politics that the prudential leader or the politician is like a master-builder (architekton) is somewhat misleading: it is the case that a wise leader needs to understand all the sub-interests that comprise the collective good but it is not the case that the wise leader starts with a blue-print for Utopia, which often leads to hell. Indeed, Aristotle acknowledges that the political good is often irregular and imprecise and cannot be ascertained with any certainty (Lord, 2002: 80), implying that a better metaphor than an architect would be a craftworker someone who retains what is good and improves it, not someone who works de novo. On the contrary, it seems

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that decision making is likely to be far more overcondent when the decision makers are faced with a novel situation or product, rather than when faced with something of which they have some prior experience (Useem et al., 2005). Phronesis, then, is not a method, and it cannot be reduced to a set of rules because it is dependent upon the situation and there is, therefore, no meta-narrative to guide the process. As Gadamer (1981: 121) insists, There are no rules governing the reasonable use of rules. The good cannot be discerned by enquiring whether the action agreed upon is aligned with religious principles or the party line or the latest pronouncements of the monarch or president or any other higher authority because there is no higher authority to appeal to. For this reason, phronesis cannot be taught in any lecture theatre but must be lived through; in fact it is rather closer to an apprenticeship or mentoring relationship in which the wisdom of the mentor is embedded in the novice over time, but only indirectly through guided practice or engagement, not directly through formal teaching (Halverson & Gomez, 2001).

Conclusion
The implication of Aristotles work is that leadership cannot be achieved simply through remedial action that provides greater knowledge and skills for all those involved. Leadership is not just a technical problem requiring greater skills what Aristotle referred to as techn if it was we would presumably have found the appropriate training system some time ago. Nor is it just a problem of understanding, requiring greater knowledge, what Aristotle called episteme; again, if it was we should be less at its mercy today than we were 100 years ago, but it seems we are not. In addition, it may also require greater wisdom Aristotles phronesis through which leaders develop the wisdom to see what the good might be in the particular situation and then enact the processes that generate the good. In other words, it requires a form of action that focuses directly on xing the problem itself, not a form of re-education or reskilling that xes the people. For Aristotle this kind of wisdom the ability to see the good and realize it in each specic situation was not a set of universal rules to be learned or a pocket guide to be drawn upon for the correct solution but something only achieved through experience and reection. Partly this was because phronesis relates to the skill of what we now call apperception, that is, the ability to relate new experiences to previous experiences, in other words to recognize patterns in situations that facilitate understanding and resolution. By denition, this is something that we can only acquire through experience but experience alone is insufcient to ensure apperception because some level of reective learning needs to have occurred if patterns are to be understood (Schn, 1987). In effect, apperception is the ability to frame or reframe situations (Fairhurst, 2005) so that what appeared to be one thing might actually be another or, more often, what appeared to be senseless could be made sense of, often retrospectively (Weick, 1995). Thus only by doing leadership can we achieve the wisdom of leaders. That implies rethinking the education of leaders so that we do not confuse and conate knowledge, skills and wisdom but provide different frameworks for their pursuit. In other words, all three are necessary and mutually supportive: knowledge can be taught in lectures but skills must be honed through practice while wisdom can only be secured through experiencing leadership itself.

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Learning to Lead Grint

We may already have a good idea on how to impart knowledge and skill but if Aristotle is right then how do we provide the opportunities to learn wisdom from experience? Perhaps the rst step is for those involved in the education of leaders to acquire more humility concerning the limits of their expertise. The second step might be to congure learning opportunities for leaders to learn wisdom through experience not just through case studies with correct or preferred solutions (episteme), not just through articial tasks that require leaders to get barrels across imaginary rivers using two logs and a rope, or give an inspiring speech in a lecture theatre (techn), but by giving opportunities for leaders to lead in real situations that require decisions where uncertainty, anxiety and risk generate the opportunity to learn wisdom through phronesis including the opportunity to fail. That, of course, requires leadership developers to assess the risks involved in failure. Or, as the saying goes, good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. So do we have to design more opportunities for failure into learning to lead?5 Perhaps Piet Hein captures this approach best with his marvellous poem, from which the subtitle of this article is drawn: The Road to Wisdom:6

Acknowledgements
Thanks to David Collinson, Rhys Cowslip, Yiannis Gabriel, Peter Gray and Gillian Stamp for their discussions on this article.

Notes
1. Thanks to Anne Murphy, Patrick Leonard and Zoe van Zwanenberg for many enlightening discussions on this topic. 2. Thanks to Peter Gray for this. 3. Thanks to Kenny McKim of the Lothian and Borders Fire and Rescue Service for this example. 4. In a letter (dated 21 December 1817) to George and Thomas Keats, John Keats explained Negative Capability thus, I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

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3(2) Leading Questions 5. Attributed to various people, including Mark Twain and Frederick P. Brooks (thanks to Gillian Stamp for alerting me to this quotation). 6. Thanks to Hugo P. Hein for permission to quote from Piet Heins poems and to use the poets original artwork. His other writings and designs can be seen at the company website: http://www.piethein.com/usr/piethein/HomepagUK.nsf

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Keith Grint is Professor of Defence Leadership at Craneld University and teaches at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham, UK. Previously he was Professor of Leadership Studies and Director of the Lancaster Leadership Centre at Lancaster University Management School. Before that he was Director of Research at the Sad Business School and Fellow in Organizational Behaviour, Templeton College, University of Oxford. He spent 10 years in industry before switching to an academic career. He is a founding co-organizer of the International Conference in Leadership Research. He remains a Visiting Professor at Lancaster, a Fellow of the Sad Business School, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Sunningdale Institute, a research arm of the UKs National School of Government. He wrote the literature review for Strengthening Leadership in the Public Sector (2000) a project of the Performance and Innovation Unit (Cabinet Ofce), see http://www.number-10.gov.uk/su/leadership/08/default. htm. His books include The Sociology of Work (2005); Management: A Sociological Introduction (1995); Leadership (1997); Fuzzy Management (1997); The Machine at Work: Technology, Work and Society (with Steve Woolgar, 1997); The Arts of Leadership (2000); Organizational Leadership (with John Bratton and Debra Nelson); and Leadership: Limits and Possibilities (2005). [email: k.grint@craneld.ac.uk]

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