Introduction | The Warrior and the Sage | Balancing | Learning | Conclusion | References | Appendices | CSML Home
The importance of learning has become increasingly recognised. At the end of the last century terms such as 'the learning organisation' and 'lifelong learning' were heavily used. So there we are. All the right-on people are in favour of learning. But when you delve behind the rhetoric there are serious differences.
Therefore I believe that we need to explore more what actually constitutes 'good learning'. My exploration here will focus more on the adult world and also more specifically on the world of work. However I believe that there may be some general lessons in what I will discuss here. It is not apparent that young people necessarily have to learn different things from adults. And one of the problems that those of us who work mainly in organisations face is that much of what we work on could have been better addressed as the person matured into adulthood.
An example of this is in the area of emotional intelligence. This topic has become enormously fashionable and a whole array of 'learn emotional intelligence in two days' courses have appeared. Yet the qualities claimed as being part of this idea are relatively simple to grasp - self awareness, sensitivity to others, the ability to handle feeling issues and so on.
In this paper I want to take only a partial view of what is an immense topic. I can't be encyclopaedic in one short paper. So I have decided to dwell on some features of what is required of people in specific roles. This immediately challenges the notion that there are many standard things that everyone needs to learn. I do accept that there are some qualities that might be universally desirable - and proponents of emotional intelligence make an excellent case for the universality of some of those qualities. However it is also apparent that people play different roles in any society and it is some of those differences that I want to focus on.
It is a common feature of all organisations and societies, for instance, that they have to deal with the issues of leadership. I deliberately use the word 'leadership' rather than referring to 'leaders'. It isn't necessary for a social organisation to have to have just one designated leader. The Blackfoot tribe of North America had different leaders to suit different circumstances. They would select one kind of leader when they had to attend to their agriculture and another kind when they were faced with warfare. So even if we narrow down consideration to the role of leadership this in itself does not imply a unitary model of working.
Because the issue of leadership has been so widely explored and because it's one of continuing confusion I have decided, in this paper, to side-step the concept to some extent. Hence my use of the notions of the Warrior and the Sage. I will need firstly to justify my choice here before going on to say something of the specific qualities and capabilities that may need to be acquired by people who fulfil these roles. In an earlier text I argued for the value of learning both capability and wisdom. I associated 'capability' with 'doing' - the ability to take action in the world - and 'wisdom' with 'being' - the quality of who the person is. In this paper I want to take a different cut at the same problem. Like any model it is only a guide to our thinking and not an absolute truth.
It is usually regarded as of value to be a sage - a wise person. Most people would see such a person as a positive attribute to a society and certainly not likely to have negative features. However the idea of a warrior is likely to be more controversial. After all, warriors are people who fight and that can be regarded as offensive. Also the notion of a warrior may be seen as sexist - as only being an attribute of men (and then not a nice attribute). Let me tackle that one first.
I am using the warrior notion metaphorically as, yes covering people who fight but fight in the metaphorical sense i.e. not physically. We often refer to someone as 'fighting for a cause' and it is that notion that I want to foreground here. And I see women as being just as likely to do this as men. There have been women who literally fought - for example the Amazons, various women pirates and female soldiers. There have also been women who have supported armed conflict, from Elizabeth the First to Margaret Thatcher. My role models would be a bit different - and closer to the Anita Roddick style. That being said I recognise that, just as the leadership literature is overwhelmingly male dominated, so my examples will perforce be more male than female.
Another reason for facing the warrior idea head on is the way in which the managerial world has, in any case, taken on warfare metaphors. The idea of strategy, so beloved of management writers, and sometimes of managers, is one that is taken directly from warfare. Strategy is the thinking part behind winning wars. Similarly the concept of tactics becomes linked to winning battles. And these military metaphors translate into the day-to-day language of managers. Take-over battles are the modern day equivalent of battles between nations and white knights are often sought by those in difficulty. I hope that you may have some sympathy for these warriors as much as you may have for a St George and his dragon slaying.
One reason for picking out these roles is that they indicate the need for balance. I will argue that we do need people who are prepared to stand up and fight for morally right causes. But they need sages around to provide wise counsel. Nelson Mandela was a warrior in his youth. (In this case literally so since he actively supported the use of violence to overthrow the apartheid regime in South Africa.) However he was supported by others in the ANC like Oliver Tambo and by his fellow prisoners on Robben Island. After the fight was successful and he became the leader of South Africa he moved towards more of a sage role, giving rein to others to get on and govern the country.
In companies there has been a similar distinction between a sage chairman and a warrior chief executive. Note, though, that the chief operating officer role is emerging as a kind of junior sage to also go alongside the finance director or company secretary role. This three to one ratio is reflected in the traditions of the Dagara people of West Africa. They have a sophisticated cosmology that is based on five elements. The elements correspond to personality characteristics and to roles in the Dagara village. The Dagara believe that people have one of the five elements as their essence but will also carry the other four as well. In a village they look for the balance of the qualities represented by the five elements.
The fire element is associated with what I am describing as the warrior dimension. It is active, passionate and visionary. The water element is calming, harmonious, seeking peaceful solutions to conflict. The Dagara believe that, in a village, you need three times as many people of water as people of fire. Are companies discovering Dagara wisdom in the balance they attempt to make at the top of the organisation?
Another way that companies look to balance is to have non- executive directors on the Board. These non-executives are usually seen as wise figures who can assist the more warrior-like executive directors. Note that the Dagara have three other roles that are equally important. Earth qualities are associated with taking care of others, being nurturing and accepting and being grounded. Mineral qualities are centrally about communication. The person with a 'mineral essence' is seen as the story- teller of the village, the person with good social skills who is good at conversation. Finally the nature essence is associated with the person who is natural and without pretence. They may become the jester (as in the European courts in the middle ages) or the wizard.
For the sake of simplicity, in this paper I am focusing on what I'm calling the sage qualities that come out of the water, earth, mineral and nature 'essences'. Remember I'm not putting up the Dagara model as a truth - just a stimulating way of facing up to the issue that people are different and will have different things to learn to fulfil their role in society or in an organisation. My explicit challenge is to the notion that there can be one curriculum to suit, for instance, all managers in all organisations.
As Machiavelli commented 'A prince who is not himself wise cannot be wisely advised'. Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, exemplified this problem. He was a well-educated and hard-working ruler. Yet throughout his 22-year rule he ignored the pleadings of his advisers to create a parliamentary government, hence bringing on the Bolshevik revolution. That, then, points to what the Dagara suggest - a person may have a particular orientation but they need the other elements as well.
This can be true also for the sage. In the Victoria and Albert Museum in London there is a wonderful little collection of Rodin statues. One of them is called 'The Muse'. It is a statue without arms or legs. Rodin explained this as follows: 'My figure represents "Meditation". That's why it has neither arms to act nor legs to walk. Haven't you noticed that refection, when persisted in, suggests so many plausible arguments for opposite decisions that it ends in inertia.' So the sage also needs to act - but usually in a different way from the warrior.
Let me take the body metaphor a bit further. I have already quoted Rodin as using the arms to represent action - and this is one of the defining features of warriors. They are oriented to take action to solve problems. Julian Metcalfe, the co-founder of Britains best sandwich-making company, 'Pret a Manger', commented 'A lot of people seem to monitor their own failure and then do nothing about it. It's extraordinary!'
Thoreau, writing in America in 1849, said: 'There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery, who in effect do nothing to put an end to it; who sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do and do nothingSS. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret.' We all know the saying that all it takes for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing. And we know that Thoreau was right. It took far too long for the evil of slavery to be tackled. So we need people who are prepared to commit themselves to action.
A characteristic of warriors is often to have the guts to do what is right even if the supposedly 'sensible', i.e. often weak-kneed, solution favours gradualism. US President Harry Truman abolished the racist segregationist practices of the armed forces by executive fiat and against strong opposition. It was not done gradually or by consultation. Nelson Mandela refused to compromise his principles and accept a gradual move away from apartheid. He insisted that one person, one vote had to be implemented from day one.
Ricardo Semler wanted to change Semco (the company his father had owned) to one which gave real power to the ordinary workers. The people who stood in his way were the old guard of authoritarian senior executives. On his first day in charge of the company he fired 60% of the senior executives. And he made them leave that day. No gradualism or evolutionary change here. On my model of the corporate warrior we can now see the importance of Guts.
An underlying feature of what can be called 'guts' is the refusal to compromise on principles. I'm not here saying never compromise - it can be vital to compromise on tactics and on concrete practicalities. I'm saying that the refusal to compromise where fundamental principles are at stake is the mark of the warrior. Twentieth century figures on the world stage who exemplified this include Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King. Bringing this into the British scene and to this century I would want to mention Anita Roddick. Anita Roddick is well known - she has positioned the Body Shop to campaign on human rights issues and is clear about her refusal to compromise on these. Recently she took her campaigning to Seattle for the World Trade Organisation meeting. On being unable to take her case into the conference halls she joined protesters on the streets. I'd guess that there were not a lot of other multi-millionaire company directors out there with her!
Part of the quality of 'guts' requires the ability to deal with fear. Carlos Castaneda quoted his sage Don Juan, who said that the warrior believes that he is already dead - and therefore has nothing more to fear. This stunning notion has resonances with the ideas of Susan Jeffers. She suggests that there are three levels of fear. At the surface level there is the fear of a particular act. For example many managers fear making presentations to large audiences. Jeffers suggests that underneath this surface fear can be fears such as 'looking foolish', 'coming over as incompetent', 'loosing business' and so on. She then postulates that behind all these second level fears is just one basic big fear, which she labels 'I can't handle it'. She argues that that fear is the fundamental one. We are afraid that we can't handle the consequences of whatever it is we are to do or is done to us. So her challenge is 'If you knew you could handle anything that came your way, what would you possibly have to fear?'
While in prison, Nelson Mandela commented:
'Once you have rid yourself of the fear of the oppressor and his prisons, his police, his army, there is nothing they can do. You are liberatedS..You don't want to be assaulted, you don't want to be hurt, and you feel the pain and humiliation. But nevertheless you feel that this is the price you have to pay in order to assert your views, your ideas.'
In this context it is worth quoting the passage that Nelson Mandela chose from all the works of Shakespeare as his favourite:
'Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.'
(From Julius Caesar - chosen by Nelson Mandela, December 16, 1977, Robben Island Prison)
A quality that is related to the above is that of focus. Peter Drucker, in his autobiography, 'Adventures of a Bystander' comments, as a classic sage, in the following terms:
'Bucky Fuller and Marshall McLuhan exemplify for me the importance of being single-minded. The single-minded ones, the monomaniacs, are the only true achievers. The rest, the ones like me, may have more fun, but they fritter themselves away. The Fullers and the McLuhans carry out a "mission"'; the rest of us have "interests." Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.'
In my warrior model I have not wanted to neglect the rational, thinking side. The warrior is not solely all instinct and guts. The people I have quoted are all thoughtful people. However their thinking can be double edged. I'll use the words of Clarence Darrow to indicate what I mean. Darrow was one of America's foremost defence lawyers. In his life he defended a total of 104 people who were on trial for murder and who faced hanging. None of them were ever hanged. He was a wonderfully courageous lawyer who, because of the principles he espoused (especially opposition to racism and to the death penalty) had a tough life. As he put it: -
'Most of life is hard for those who think. No doubt there are those who believe that 'God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.' If one can live on this delusion, it would be foolish to awaken from this dream. But if we really think and feel, life is serious and hard.'
An example of something 'serious and hard' is quoted by the British forensic psychologist Paul Britton. He describes a case of a missing baby who was abducted and in severe danger. He comments as follows on the dilemma for the policeman in charge: -
'Shepherd had stopped talking. The real time sense of urgency was even stronger than I had recognised on the phone. He and his team were working on what I call the edge of oblivion. If they got it wrong, they could lose a child but at the same time they had to move forward at a very rapid pace. Everything inside says to you, 'Slow down, don't make mistakes,' but you can't because a baby is missing, the world is watching and the clock is running. It takes an enormous mental effort to be acting in real time, yet sitting above it and monitoring everything you do so that you don't make a tragic mistake.'
This captures very well a particular aspect of warrior thinking. It has often to be in real time and does not allow for relaxed contemplation. Police officers are just one of a number of groups in society that we expect to behave in a warrior mode on our behalf and yet who can be subject to the opprobrium of the media and others if they don't get it 100% right every time.
Darrow's linkage of thinking and feeling is important. It is also an element of the case Britton quotes. In the latter it's clear that emotions would be running high. Given all the now overwhelming evidence on the importance of emotional intelligence (as it is popularly called) I'll not dwell on specific aspects of this domain. However it may be worth mentioning one quality that often gets lost and that is 'trust'.
I have mentioned already Ricardo Semler and his company Semco. Central to his democratising of the workplace had to be a trust in others that they could (and would) make it work. Coming closer to home a neglected warrior figure has been Ernest Bader. He also trusted his workforce to the extent of handing over ownership of his manufacturing company to them. The company (Scott Bader) is still going - and very successfully (though with inadequate recognition of its importance).
In the fielding of learning and education A. S. Neill would be an obvious choice as someone who trusted children sufficiently to let them make their own rules and police them themselves.
The examples of Neill, Semler and Bader are remarkable in so far as there have been so few people in positions of power who have had the guts, the intellect and the faith in fellow human beings to follow their lead. Ricardo Semler travels the world talking about the success of his company and senior managers pay lots of money to hear him. I often wonder why they do that as they clearly have no intention of doing anything about what they hear.
This may be where the sage comes in.
Warriors may be so focused and so active that they miss things. And they may go badly wrong as a result. There is a Tibetan saying that
'When a pickpocket meets a saint all he sees are his pockets.'
The wisdom that the sage can bring can help the warrior re-focus because the sage takes a wide-angle view. This has been a classic role of sages in all cultures from Confucius in China to advisers to monarchs in Europe. R. D. Laing, as he so often did, put his finger on one real stumbling block here.
'The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.'
A tragic example of failing to notice would be the Hillsborough disaster where Liverpool Football Club supporters died through lack of attention to the bigger picture. Nick Hornby put it well in describing his own experiences of going to football matches.
'But the thing was, I trusted the system. I knew that I could not be squashed to death, because that never happened at football matches. The Ibrox thing, well that was different, a freak combination of events; and in any case that was in Scotland during an Old Firm game, and everyone knows that these are especially problematic. No, you see, in England somebody, somewhere, knew what they were doing, and there was this system, which nobody ever explained to us, that prevented accidents of this kind. It might seem as though the authorities, the club and the police were pushing their luck on occasions, but that was because we didn't understand properly how they were organising things.'
'But I thought about that evening nine years later, on the afternoon of the Hillsborough disaster, and I thought about a lot of other afternoons and evenings too, when it seemed as though there were too many people in the ground, or the crowd had been unevenly distributed. It occurred to me that I could have died that night, and that on a few other occasions I have been much closer to death than I care to think about. There was no plan after all; they really had been riding their luck all that time.'
A fashionable way to articulate this need is to refer to systems thinking as the answer. However, as Peter Vaill puts it:
'One reason "systems thinking" is such a difficult mentality to acquire is that we often do not want everything to be connected to everything else. We want relatively simple cause-effect chains so that we can "take action" that will "get results".'
This is the voice of the warrior speaking and Vaill identifies one reason why the sage is an important counter-balance to limited 'cause-effect' thinking. In organisations I meet Chief Executives who want a magic bullet. 'Just fix the problem of my people not being motivated enough' they say. And my role has to be, in part, a challenge to that way of thinking while at the same time honouring the fact that the CEO is under pressure from the City, from shareholders and from employees to deliver - and fast.
Often a CEO is blocked from making the right changes because of vested interests. And most CEOs don't have the luxury of the Semler solution of firing the blockers. The sage can be the person who helps the active CEO to see how change is prevented and what to do about it. (The Appendix on 'Twenty ways to stop change happening' is an example of the issues in change blocking.)
Part of my case for raising all these issue about the roles of the warrior and the sage is to ask some questions about learning and development in organisations. However there are also fundamental questions about what happens in schools as well. Malidoma Patrice Somé was born in a Dagara village in Burkina Faso. He was taken from his village at an early age and educated in a French Catholic school. He returned to his village after sixteen years at school and had a terrible problem of adjusting to the culture of his people. As he puts it:
'I discovered that, from the perspective of the villagers, what I learned from my white teachers was considered poisonous, and even dangerous, to me and to others. It was as if literacy destroyed the ability to learn the indigenous knowledge that I was trying to reclaimS. It made me prone to doubt, incapable of trust, and subject to dangerous emotions such as anger and impatienceSI realise now that what I thought was my civilised mind was in fact a rather narrow mind. The knowledge I had been exposed to in Western schools left a wide range of experience unexplored, and it was up to the wise people in my village to help me to learn to open up to all the realms of knowledge of which at that time I was ignorant.'
There is a link here to Sykes' view that:
'Psychopolitics would suggest that government by report-reading, which present-day conditions require, is apt to lead to disaster unless the report-reading is done by people with a deep subjective experience of life that is equal to the facts that have to be assimilated.'
While Somé's critique may seem too trenchant for some, it is clear that we do need to heed ancient wisdoms. A practical example is the £145million company Phytopharm. The company is valued highly because it is developing products to tackle a whole range of ailments such as eczema, baldness, psoriasis, cancer, obesity and Alzheimer's disease. And all their products emanate from herbal remedies from indigenous people around the world. Richard Dixey, their Chief Executive, commented:
'There are millions of plants out there - how did people stumble on [the right] ones? It cannot have been through chance - it beggars belief. There is no evidence of ancient cultures doing clinical trials, so there must be another way of interrogating the world, not the scientific way.'
Whilst it would be nice to think that we can easily broaden our perspectives there are some severe constraints to address. For instance it is reckoned that our sense organs are bombarded with between ten to the power seven and ten to the power eleven bits of information per second. Our consciousness, however, can only register 16-20 bits of information per second. A huge gap.
Clearly we need a balance of different people in an organisation and this challenges the individualism of the Anglo-American mind set. We need to have people around in organisations who notice different things and who think in different ways. And we have to find ways of bringing those differences together in productive communities.
The classic balancing act in organisations is for warrior figures to hire 'sages'. Richard Branson can only do what he does because he has a whole array of people who do the backroom work. And this is true of so many other business leaders.
However we can get bad combinations. The Nazis were ruthless warriors who had their sages. These latter included mystics who promoted ideas like the role of the Aryan race. They also included some bad scientists who promoted eugenics. So we have to address the issue of creating good, moral balances. And this points us, in part, to issues of learning. Even warriors who do not have evil intent can fall foul of narcissism, hubris and grandiosity. They need to learn to use others to avoid such traps. One wise piece of advice from ancient China counselled generals as follows:
'Generals must have three paths, four duties, five practices, and ten kinds of security. The three paths are knowledge of heaven above, familiarity with earth below, and perception of human conditions in between. The four duties are to secure the nation without increasing armaments, to lead without selfish interest, to face difficulty without fear of death, and to resolve doubts without trying to escape blame. The five practices are to be flexible without being pliant, to be firm without being stiff, to be humane without being vulnerable, to be trusting yet impossible to deceive, and to have courage that cannot be overwhelmed. The ten kinds of security are purity of spirit that cannot be clouded, far-reaching plans that cannot be stolen, firmness of integrity that cannot be changed, clarity of knowledge that cannot be obscured, not being greedy for material goods, not being addicted to anything, not being a glib talker, not pushing others to go the same way, not being easy to please, and not being easy to anger.'
However this same writer pointed out the need to balance roles in the following terms:
'The way of the ruler is round, revolving endlessly, with a nurturing spiritual influence, open and selfless, harmonious, always in the background and never in the forefront. The way of the minister is square, deliberating on what is right and applying appropriate measures, initiating suggestions for action, keeping to the job with distinct clarity, thus achieving success. Therefore, when ruler and minister differ in their ways, there is order; when they make their ways identical, there is disorder. When they each manage to do what is appropriate for them and handle their own responsibilities, then superior and subordinate have the means to work together.'
Joseph Campbell uses a slightly different pairing in his reference to the traditional balance of the 'tough-minded hunter' and the 'tender-minded shaman'. He praises the civilising dialogue between the two:
'The two types of mind, thus, are complementary: the tough-minded, representing the inert, reactionary; and the tender, the living progressive impulse - respectively, attachment to the local and the timely and the impulse to the timeless universal.'
I have made a case for the idea that there are varying roles in an organisation (and in society in general). The common distinction is between the leader and their followers. (Though it is interesting that we have lots of leadership training and a dearth of followership training.) I have chosen a different dichotomy - and one that I hope is more fruitful. I do, though, recognise that it would be unhelpful to rigidify the distinctions I have made. There are quite different ways of being a warrior or a sage. And I'm not trying to put forward a new language either. Roles in organisations will have their own labels to suit circumstances. Rather my first aim is to challenge the standardised, so-called 'sheep dip' training that most organisations still carry out.
There may be some who accept my basic ideas but do not see a way of helping people to learn these capabilities and 'wisdoms'. I'll take this up by first quoting a distinguished British HR Director, Judith Evans of Homebase:
'Self Managed Learning has given us much more than a traditional training course. As well as people with more skills, it has give us more confident and able individuals who have the courage to tackle the many tough issues brought about by a changing organisation'.
You will note that Judith is not postulating an either/or approach to training - it's not about choosing between skills and such qualities as self confidence and courage. We can have it both ways. However each person in a Self Managed Learning programme is choosing a portfolio of capabilities that they want to learn in terms of their own career needs. More importantly the process of people having to think through their choices can allow them to see the route they need. Some are ambitious and want to be in positions of power; others see the 'sage' route as more appropriate. Or it may be some combination of the two.
In Self Managed Learning we do not encourage a self-centred individualism. We believe that learning groups of about five or six people are a key mode of promoting the kind of in-depth learning that is needed. In such groups one important process is that of disinhibition. We have a whole array of inhibitors in our brains - and it's, of course, a good thing we do. Here I'm talking about the inhibitors that go on in people's internal dialogues. An example would be where the person talks themselves out of the courageous action that Judith Evans referred to. In the programme that Judith mentioned people were able to absorb some of the necessary warrior spirit and go out and tackle long standing problems that required guts to take on.
Further, the learning group provided a sagacious environment within which to plan action. Also the differing perspectives of the group members offered a rich source for checking on the appropriateness of plans. The important feature of such groups is the notion that each person is different and is encouraged to work on whatever is suitable to them.
The extended case for the use of Self Managed Learning is made in a whole range of other publications so I have not repeated it here. What I have wanted to do is to come at the rationale for Self Managed Learning from a different angle. I repeat what I said at the start: the use of the warrior/sage dichotomy is no more than a device to explore some key learning needs in society. I fervently believe that we need more of both qualities. And I doubt that much of the training effort in organisations is helping in this process.
Ian Cunningham - May 2000
NB If you want a list of references related to this text please contact Ian Cunningham.
