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Insight

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

The genius of leadership lies in the capacity to look beyond the immediate circumstances and imagine the possibilities. Leaders who win high commitment are creative people, open to new experiences and new ways of thinking; they welcome possibility and potential, are able to tolerate the ambiguity of the creative process, and make connections where none seem to exist. This capacity to see beyond what is and to glimpse possibilities acts like radar, scanning the horizon of the leader’s world and exploring the depths of a leader’s experience. This combination of scanning the horizon and exploring the depths draws forth the insights that are the seeds of winning commitment from others. The first kind of scanning—toward the horizon of their world—involves an unquenchable urge to look into the future, to imagine what is possible. Listen closely to any leader, especially when she is speaking personally and informally, and you will consistently hear expressions of hopes and dreams, goals for future projects, the next steps in an ongoing venture, a description of an ideal world or society, or perhaps concerns and plans for her own future. You may hear the word “beyond” often. This capacity, to see beyond the immediate horizon, is usually called vision and is viewed by many as the central characteristic of leadership. Vision is the ability to create a compelling picture of a desirable future. However, there is an important and vastly overlooked precondition for vision. It is insight.

Insight arrives because of the second way in which the genius of leadership stretches a leader’s thinking. Before any of us can see beyond what is, we must faithfully see what is, and then see it in a new way. Leaders peer beneath the surface of things, catching sight of subterranean levels of meaning within ordinary events and circumstances, or seeing the familiar in new and surprising ways. Again, listen carefully to the personal and informal talk of any leader and you will also hear curious and heartfelt examination of the deeper significance of the moment’s important happenings. Insight is not mere observation, but a perception that penetrates beneath the accepted surface, providing a clear and deep understanding of a complex set of circumstances or seemingly disconnected information. It often comes suddenly. A leader’s insight is that kind of clear, and deep, and sometimes sudden perception that is specifically about the needs or aspirations of a group of people. A vision is the culmination of a process that begins with insight.

An insight is not merely a good idea, nor is it a conclusion based on rational analysis. An insight is visceral—in the gut. And it is inspiring—in the spirit. Insights may arrive after intellectual analysis, but they are beyond intellectual analysis. A good idea that arises solely from intellectual analysis may win intellectual commitment, but it takes the compelling force of an insight to win emotional and spiritual commitment.

Bill Strickland is both a leader and an artist who sees clearly the value of insight to the leader’s art. Strickland grew up in Pittsburgh’s North Side. He was much like other teenagers in the predominately African-American neighborhood. He described himself as “walking around in a sixteen-year-old’s haze” until he was enthralled by the sight of a skilled potter working at his wheel and decided that he too would learn the potter’s art. Today, over forty years later, he is still in North Side as president and CEO of Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild and the Bidwell Training Center, and he continues working as a potter. Strickland founded the guild in 1968 to help combat the economic and social ills of the community, and was later asked to take the reins of the training center. Today these two institutions offer model education programs in a 62,000 square foot vocational training and arts center, offering programs in such varied disciplines as chemistry, culinary arts, horticulture, and information sciences. Strickland’s wisdom about the relationship between social change, entrepreneurship, and the arts is much sought after, and he served on the board of the National Endowment for the Arts.¹

Strickland defined insight as, “The ability to perceive relationships that are not obvious or apparent.” He offered the image of a painter as an example: “An artist sits down and looks at a canvas and sees this fabulous painting. Twenty other people say ‘I don’t see anything.’ The painter says, ‘It is right here.’ ” When an insight visits a person, said Strickland, “They see things that other people don’t see. They are right there in front of your face, but are not being observed.”

A Sudden Insight

Some insights seem to arrive suddenly and intact like a blinding flash of lightning. Others seem to grow and mature more slowly like the dawning of day. The experience of Monsignor Dale Fushek provides an illustration of how an insight might arrive suddenly and of the impact such an insight can have on a leader. Fushek is the founder and former President and CEO of Life Teen, Inc., an organization that provides opportunities for teens to develop their Catholic faith. From a small initial gathering in a single church hall, Life Teen has developed into an international organization with chapters in thirteen countries, and was a primary catalyst in the gathering of half a million teenagers for the World Youth Day celebration with Pope John Paul II in Toronto in 2002.

Monsignor Fushek gained the insight that blossomed to become Life Teen while he was in seminary. He received a dinner invitation from the family of a teenager who had decided to leave the Catholic Church. After dessert everybody else at the table vacated the dining room leaving the not-yet-Father Fushek with the teenager.

What’s new?” Fushek asked.

“You know what’s new,” the young man replied, “That’s why you are here.”

“I hear you are not Catholic anymore. Why? Do you have trouble believing in the Pope?”

“No,” the boy replied.

“Do you have trouble believing the moral teachings of the church?”

“Not at all. I am following them.”

“Do you believe in the Eucharist—that it is really the body of Christ in communion?”

“You have to. It is right there in the Bible.”

“Does your new church believe that?”

“I don’t know. They never mentioned it.”

A bewildered and frustrated Fushek then asked, “If you believe in the Pope, and you believe in the moral teachings of the church, and you believe in the Eucharist, what are you doing?”

The young man looked Fushek in the eye and said, “For the sixteen years of my life, never once did I miss mass on Sunday. And never once when I was there did I ever feel loved. I don’t know what these new people believe, but I do know that they love me.”

The now Monsignor Fushek says, “This was a life-changing experience for me. I went home that night and I said: 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.”

Dale Fushek did not—could not—envision the scope of Life Teen at that dinner table, or at any time soon afterward. It can be reasonably argued that he has never envisioned it, even in the years since that fateful dinner. He began with an insight, not a vision, and started a movement that just kept growing. “When I did become a priest,” he says, “I asked: How do you create an environment where kids feel loved?” He held a meeting in a church hall, then subsequent meetings attracted more teens, and soon other parishes were calling to ask, “How did you do that?” At the end of 2002, Life Teen had over 800 programs worldwide, reaching over 100,000 teens weekly.

Less Sudden Insight

Not every leader’s insight is as sudden as Dale Fushek’s. Some arise out of study and reflection. In 1875, when Mark Twain was busy writing Tom Sawyer and the first useful electric light was just an idea in Thomas Edison’s mind, John Fairfield Dryden and a few partners began what would come to be known as Prudential Insurance Company (now Prudential Financial) in a basement in downtown Newark, New Jersey. It was the first company in the United States to make insurance available to working-class people.

Dryden’s insight about the need for affordable insurance to mitigate the financial problems of the poor came as the result of his studies of the Prudential Assurance Company of London while he was a student at Yale. Dryden’s first product was low-cost burial insurance for factory workers. One biographer speculates that Dryden’s insight was influenced by his own ill health, which caused him to abandon his studies.² Whether his own physical difficulties were a source of his insight or not, Dryden did, like Fushek, view his enterprise in the clear and deep way that characterizes insight. He once said, “Those providing life insurance services should be Missionaries of Love.”³

Insight from Within

Not all insights spring from experience of the outer world, as did Fushek’s and Dryden’s; some stem from deep self-reflection. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi is a preeminent rabbi and teacher. He is professor emeritus at Temple University, and is well known for his work to ecumenize Western religion. Nearing the age of sixty, Reb Zalman felt “anxious and out of sorts” whenever he was alone, realizing that he was growing old. He had many unanswered questions about what to do with his later years. He went on a forty-day retreat in a rustic cabin in the Southwest to pray, meditate, write, and study. He also took many long walks. During his retreat Rabbi Zalman began “harvesting his life”—enjoying his past contributions and asking what legacy he wanted to leave. He asked himself, “If I had to die now, what would I most regret not having done? What remains incomplete in my life?”⁴ He recognized these questions as those that might be, and perhaps ought to be, asked and answered by anyone his age who wished to pursue a new vision of their later years. One result of Reb Zalman’s insight is the Spiritual Eldering Institute that “envisions a society in which elders make a difference as active contributors in their families and communities, and in the healing of our planet.”⁵

Intuition

Insights such as those of Fushek and Schachter-Shalomi are the product of intuition—a nonrational (but not irrational) way of knowing. Because intuition is nonrational it is difficult to describe in the rational language of formal definitions; one must intuit any understanding of intuition. Webster’s Dictionary defines intuition as the immediate knowing or learning of something without the conscious use of reasoning. This definition is somewhat unsatisfying because it tells us only what intuition is without, not what intuition is with.

Intuition can be thought of as a perception from within that integrates sensory data, thoughts, feelings, and unconscious information into a single object of awareness. It is the source of hunches, inspiration, creativity, gut-feelings, and surprising possibilities, and is sometimes described as the ability to see around corners. It also often comes with a compelling impulse that something is obviously the right thing to do, and so insight might give new direction to a life, and then, through a leader’s efforts, to an institution, or to a society.

Some people trust intuition more than others do, and because they trust it, it develops more highly in them. Robert Sternberg, Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University and a foremost expert on intelligence, wrote, “Successfully intelligent people recognize the limits of their rationality and are also aware of the traps into which they can fall in their thinking.”⁶ Such people utilize both intuition and reason when making decisions and forming solutions to problems. Joseph Chilton Pearce, a renowned expert on intelligence, creativity, and learning, says that human intuition begins to fade at about age seven if it is not purposefully developed. He wrote, “Without this intuition, we develop an intellect compulsively trying to compensate by engineering our environment and each other.”⁷ We thus behave as if we were living in a world we cannot trust rather than one in which our intuitive powers would naturally keep our environment fine-tuned to support our own well-being.

Pearce believes that the predominance of rationality over intuition has a steep price: We have become alienated from our ability to thrive in a system—our universe—that is infinitely open and creative. In other words, human development is not keeping pace with our awareness of the complexity of our world. Using the term reptilian to describe primitive brain function, Pearce says, “In this alienated state we develop intellect as an ally with the physical sensory system and its primitive defense postures, producing brilliant thought in reptilian personalities. And the more brilliant the human reptile, the more precarious our situation.”⁸ In such an alienated posture, intuition can be seen as highly suspect, rather than as a natural form of intelligence designed to help us respond to the world according to our own well-being.

But intuition is a primary tool of leadership, and leaders, like other artists, must not be afraid of their tools. Leaders who operate in incredibly complex environments cannot engineer success, and therefore cannot rely solely on intellect. They must trust the world in which they operate, and they must trust their intuition. In organizations that worship intellect and that require change, the more successful leaders will be those who can rise beyond intellect and employ a fusion of rationality and intuition.

Bill Strickland sees that leaders, and especially entrepreneurs, routinely rely on their intuition. “The act of taking a piece of clay that has no shape and forming it into a vessel is a pretty dramatic process,” he said. “A lot of it relies on a kind of intuitive understanding of the material and a visual understanding of what is possible. I think leadership, when it is done right, is a combination of that because you are really looking at a potential problem and seeing an opportunity. Often times in ways that other people can’t identify.”

Strickland uses Howard Schultz, the guiding force of the Starbucks coffee empire, as an example of a person with intuitive understanding. Strickland said, “Howard Schultz comes along 100 years after Maxwell House coffee and says, ‘I can create high-end venues where people will pay three times the price for the coffee and line up to do it.’ How he saw that and nobody else saw that since Maxwell House is pretty amazing.”

For leaders, the “intuitive understanding of the material” that Strickland refers to means appreciating the powerful yet inscrutable natures of their own artistic media—story, feeling, and soul. They are the leader’s clay, the raw stuff out of which commitment is formed.

From Insight to Vision

Deepak Chopra offers a prescription for developing the kind of insight that produces a powerful vision. He said:

If I was a leader I would look and listen using the instruments of the flesh. I would be an unbiased observer. I would feel, I would think and analyze with my mind, and I would be with my soul. And only then I would create a vision.⁹

None of the leaders discussed in this chapter—not Monsignor Fushek, John Dryden, Bill Strickland, nor Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi—began their leadership efforts by creating a vision. They began by doing what Chopra advises as precursors to creating a vision; listening, observing, feeling, thinking, and analyzing, being with the soul. It is these activities, the insights they produce, and the compulsion to act on those insights, that form the nucleus of leadership. One need not have a well-articulated vision in order to lead.

Those who would lead too often sabotage themselves by retreating into intellect at the expense of intuition and insight. They retreat into what Joseph Chilton Pearce calls, “An intellect compulsively trying to compensate by engineering our environment and each other.” They create vision without insight. The visions they produce are typically formulaic and uninspiring. As the next chapter explains, a vision that does not begin with, and is not based on, a compelling insight, no matter how well-articulated the vision is, will not likely attract high levels of commitment from others. Given a choice between the two, a compelling insight beats a well-articulated vision, hands down. A compelling insight permits us to inspire the future as it comes into view.

Development Strategies for Insight

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.¹⁰

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 God-given 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. Jim Wold 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.¹¹

Summary

Insight is the first of the four competencies through which leaders win intellectual commitment A truly compelling insight from a leader who has also mastered the competencies to bring it forth, can win emotional and spiritual commitment as well. Insight is a product of intuition, the nonrational way of knowing at the source of creativity. The arrival of an insight is unpredictable, but leaders and others can encourage insight by asking vital questions, gathering and pondering information and thoughts about the question, reflecting on what they know, and trusting their intuition to recognize when a valuable insight appears. Insight is the ground upon which the noblest and most compelling visions are constructed.

Questions About Yourself to Contemplate or Discuss with Others

Who, in your life experience, was practiced at gaining insight?

To what degree are you practiced at gaining insight?

What is it about gaining insight that rings true for your current leadership role?

How important is gaining insight to your further development as a leader?

Notes

1.Biographical information about Bill Strickland can be found at <www.bidwelltraining.org> and <www.manchesterguild.org>.

2.C.R.E. Jr., “Biography of John Fairfield Dryden,” in Dictionary of American Biography (N.Y. Scribner’s, 1958): 463.

3.Bradesco Seguras, <http://www.prudentialbradesco.com.br> (January, 2002).

4.Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller, From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound New Vision of Growing Older (N.Y.: Warner Books, 1995): 1–3.

5.Spiritual Eldering Institute, January, 2003, <http://www.spiritualeldering.org>.

6.Robert J. Sternberg, Successful Intelligence: How Practical and Creative Intelligence Determine Success in Life (N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1996): 187.

7.Joseph Chilton Pearce, Evolution’s End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992): 151.

8.Ibid.

9.Deepak Chopra in a speech to the Mobius Leadership Forum annual conference at the Harvard Business School, April 11–12, 2002. <http://www.mobiusforum.org/deepak.htm> (June, 2002).

10.Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (N.Y.: Harper Torchbooks, 1971): 77–78.

11.Schachter-Shalomi and Miller, From Age-ing to Sage-ing, 3.