Learning at the Edge

After con­duct­ing some train­ing last week in Phoenix, I went up to the Grand Canyon with my wife for a cou­ple of days of R & R. The weath­er was per­fect, cool morn­ings warmed grad­u­al­ly by the intense autumn light, and the Canyon did what it has always done for me: grant a sense of per­spec­tive. I only have to look over the edge straight down into its depths thou­sands of feet below to feel that strange com­bi­na­tion of anx­i­ety and stark, mind-blow­ing won­der. I become a third par­ty to myself, for a moment an observ­er and a lis­ten­er to all the inner voic­es warn­ing me to get back from the dan­ger — and then in the next instant let­ting those voic­es all van­ish into the gigan­tic, out­stretched space. The oppo­sites merge. I feel both total­ly insignif­i­cant and total­ly whole in the beauty.

I returned from the Canyon to find this won­der­ful paper by Gian­piero Petriglieri, Jack Den­feld Wood, and Jen­nifer Louise Petriglieri on “per­son­al­iza­tion” of man­age­ment learn­ing. It is about the dis­tinc­tive val­ue of per­son­al reflec­tion when designed to be part of a man­age­ment and lead­er­ship devel­op­ment cur­ricu­lum. I haven’t read any­thing in a long time that so well sum­ma­rizes the ben­e­fits of reflec­tive prac­tice to the growth of lead­er­ship capa­bil­i­ty. These ben­e­fits include self-under­stand­ing and self-man­age­ment, of course, but also the inte­gra­tion and ground­ing of expe­ri­ence as part of a life nar­ra­tive. Review­ing rel­e­vant research the authors note: 

“There is lit­tle debate among lead­er­ship schol­ars about the impor­tance of intrap­er­son­al abil­i­ties for the ongo­ing devel­op­ment of leaders.…Empirical work in this area shows that indi­vid­u­als who con­tin­ue being reflec­tive in con­di­tions of ambi­gu­i­ty and high emo­tion and who can man­age their thoughts, feel­ings, and behav­ior — with the help of oth­ers — are able to access more devel­op­men­tal assign­ments at work and learn more from chal­leng­ing devel­op­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties. [One study sug­gests] that lead­ing well requires the emo­tion­al matu­ri­ty to approach, and even some­times pro­voke, anx­i­ety-arous­ing sit­u­a­tions to learn from them.”

The life nar­ra­tive, the iden­ti­ty of the learn­er, begins to include rather than exclude the anx­i­ety, see­ing it as a valu­able oppor­tu­ni­ty to grow rather than some­thing to per­pet­u­al­ly avoid. And aren’t the times pre­cise­ly ones of “ambi­gu­i­ty and high emo­tion”? Don’t they require pre­cise­ly this courage to exper­i­ment, to “pro­voke” sit­u­a­tions in order to learn from them?

To use the metaphor of the Canyon, reflec­tive lead­ers learn how to approach their inner edges. They become famil­iar with them, touch­ing them in order to learn. They pay atten­tion and find out where and how to step and, with oth­ers, learn to safe­ly nav­i­gate where they are going with­out falling into denial and uncon­scious­ness. The edges, of course, are where stuff comes up for all of us, and where we make the choice to either gain self-knowl­edge or try to wall out an uncom­fort­able sea of data or feel­ings, often by “exter­nal­iz­ing” them in a way that makes them part of “the sys­tem” instead of explor­ing the sources of dis­com­fort within. 

It is real­ly some­thing to sit close to the edge of the Grand Canyon, no guardrails, just grav­el and stone and then empti­ness. It brings mor­tal­i­ty into keen­er focus — the “life nar­ra­tive.” One sits near the edge expe­ri­enc­ing the ener­gies of the earth and its tem­ples, the sky and the sun. It’s no longer an intel­lec­tu­al or pure­ly eval­u­a­tive game. It’s the present and death is poten­tial­ly only a few steps away. What then do you know of your­self that will car­ry you through the next moment, and the one after that?

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