Insight occurs when the data of the conscious mind meets the content of the unconscious. It is a phenomenon of the human creative urge. Although it cannot be manufactured, and its arrival is unpredictable, there are five activities any leader or prospective leader can engage in to stimulate insight: asking a vital question, gathering information, pondering, reflecting, and trusting intuition.
Asking a Vital Question
Dale Fushek is in seminary, and is asking himself, ‘‘What kind of priest will I be?’’ John Dryden asks himself something like, ‘‘How shall I earn a living and do good work at the same time?’’ Zalman Schachter-Shalomi asks himself, ‘‘What remains incomplete in my life?’’ The process that allows insight to emerge begins by filling the mind with information about a question. Such a question must be of the kind that occupies the mind and remains there, perhaps taking on the aspect of compulsion or worry. The question may make us—in Reb Zalman’s words—‘‘anxious and out of sorts.’’
Gathering and Pondering
It is not enough to merely gather information in order to stimulate insight. The information ought to be, metaphorically speaking, chewed and digested. It ought to be thought about—manipulated by the mind. It is said that the unconscious has no direct contact with reality, so perhaps this chewing and digesting of information allows it to seep into the place within us where our deeper selves have access, and can produce surprising and seemingly magical results. As we consciously mull the question, and the information that it attracts, the unconscious is also doing its own hidden work.
One of the more well-known stories about the effect of this mental activity involves physicist Werner Heisenberg. In 1926, Heisenberg and his fellow physicist Niels Bohr spent many long nights in Copenhagen arguing and puzzling over newly born theories of quantum mechanics. In February of 1927, Bohr left Copenhagen and Heisenberg was left behind to think alone about the exciting but disturbing questions they had been discussing.
In his writing about this period of solitude, Heisenberg described the obstacles before him as insurmountable. He wondered if he and Bohr had been asking the wrong questions. He tried to make connections between seemingly mutually exclusive facts. He recalled something that Einstein had told him, ‘‘It is the theory which decides what we can observe.’’ Heisenberg was convinced that the key to the puzzle he had been trying to put together lay in Einstein’s words. Clearly, Heisenberg was chewing and digesting. Struggling with his thoughts, he decided on a nocturnal walk in a nearby park.
It was on this walk that Heisenberg formulated what is now called the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. It was a breakthrough that changed the world of physics. His great insight did not happen all by itself. It happened only after a long and intense period of gathering and pondering information.
Reflecting
Heisenberg’s walk in the park might stand as a symbol for the reflection needed in order to allow insight to emerge. Reflection, as I am using the term here, does not mean more thinking about whatever the object of all the prior gathering and pondering might be. It means, rather, a cessation of gathering and pondering; taking a walk in the park on a dark cold winter night in Copenhagen.
Bonnie Wright now understands the need for reflecting after six months of retirement from her distinguished thirty-two-year career in a variety of leadership roles in the Red Cross, including coordinating the Red Cross response to the Loma Prieta earthquake which devastated the San Francisco and Monterey Bay areas in 1989. When asked what she wished she had done differently during her career, she said, ‘‘I would have spent some amount of time every day in reflection, getting my Godgiven to-do list.’’ The quieter voice that comes from within usually emerges only during such periods of reflection; periods in which we move the switch that keeps the mind racing into the off position. Of course, there is no guarantee that insight will come. But when that voice does emerge, it seems to come from nowhere that we have recently inhabited.
Leaders must avoid considering periods of reflection as time away from their jobs. Leadership is about the big picture that does not yet exist. Since it does not yet exist it can only be reflected upon. Reflection is not time away from a leader’s job; it is the leader’s job. Bill Strickland said, ‘‘You have to reflect on why you are doing what you are doing. Ask those kinds of questions and hopefully answer them. Or you are lost.’’
Unearthing a Passion
It is within the depths of what we care about most deeply that compelling insight, the very seed of leadership, is found. A compelling insight, one that stirs passion, in the hands of someone who can win commitment at all levels—intellectual, emotional, and spiritual—is a powerful force.
You already know what it is you care most deeply about. It may be buried, however, beneath those things that you must pay attention to, those things that others have told you to care about, and those things you pretend to care about for acceptance or approval or perhaps even survival. So—you already know, but you may not know that you know.
You can bring this knowledge to the surface by watching for the thing that you are most drawn to. Michael Jones is a pianist who has also been an organizational consultant and teacher for almost thirty years. He works to draw from his experience as a creator of music to discover how that experience translates into leadership. Jones put it this way: ‘‘There is something that each of us is very uniquely attracted to. Sometimes those attractions are not things that we fully understand, and they are often hard to explain.’’ Jones suggests a way to spot what that something is. ‘‘When you can be engaged in something and three hours pass by and you think it is only fifteen minutes,’’ he said. ‘‘That is the quality of attention that is a signal that you are probably really onto your own path.’’ This is the thing that you think about or do, not because you must, but because you want to, or because you simply cannot help yourself— you are compelled. This is your bliss. Jones said, ‘‘We bring our heart to that.’’ The compelling insight that can drive your leadership lies within it.
Trusting Intuition
Trusting intuition is more challenging for some people than for others. In particular, those raised in Western societies often have difficulty trusting intuition because it is not as highly prized as are rationality and analysis, and less attention is paid to developing it. We tend to mistrust that which is immeasurable. JimWold became superintendent of the New Richmond School District in Wisconsin in the mid-1990s. He is now executive director of the School of Education at Capella University. He has invested his work life in the field of education, and so wrestles constantly with questions about measurement. Wold said, ‘‘If you make the assumption that everything is measurable, then you are limiting all of these things that are not measurable. You are probably limiting love and emotions and passion. Because you can not measure it, does not mean it is not happening.’’ The list of immeasurable marvels referred to by Wold also includes intuition.
Anyone can develop their intuition, and learn to trust it, by paying close attention to their responses, by relaxation, by attending to their own emotional and spiritual worlds, and by acknowledging, or at least allowing for the possibility, that there are forces at work in humankind beyond intellectual understanding. When all of this is done or is in progress, it becomes possible for a miraculous thing to occur—an insight.
Insight happens in one of two ways. We may find a piece of information-that causes all of the data we have been consciously gathering to crystallize, to form a new perception. Dale Fushek’s new perception was, ‘‘If I become a priest I will do everything I can to make sure that no kid walks away because they don’t feel loved.’’ John Dryden’s was, ‘‘Those providing life insurance services should be Missionaries of Love.’’ And Bill Strickland says of the students at his training center, echoing his own experience as a teenager in a socially and economically deprived neighborhood, ‘‘There is nothing wrong with the kids that come here except they don’t have an opportunity to show that they are world-class citizens. Treat them that way and they will.’’
We may also withdraw to a place where the small voice of the unconscious can emerge from beneath the clutter of the mind. For example, Reb Zalman says that his ‘‘vision of elderhood’’ emerged from his retreat.