Chapter 8: Wisdom

Though we emphatically want to disconnect the concepts of age and wisdom, in order to make wisdom more accessible to younger people as well, there is of course a strong association between growing old and developing wisdom. Wisdom is also one of the very few positive concepts associated with aging. Not everybody become wise though and nobody is always wise. Still we can make steps in that direction. Wisdom as an ideal, a cart horse of a better reality, though – of course – it is far from a panacea.

Still, wisdom does have much to offer to our organizations when it comes to dealing with issues such as change (Featherman, Smith, & Patterson, 1993; Labouvie-Vief, 1982), survival, and future flourishing of those organizations. As it is, wisdom happens to be the ultimate way of coping effectively with radical changes and losses, as well as with chaos, both at a personal and organizational level. As such, wisdom as we see it is concerned with personal development, leadership, and making sense of work in a turbulent and kaleidoscopically changing world without precedent.