Part Two: The Practical Wisdom of Leading with Narrative Intelligence

There seems an intuitive distinction between ‘intelligence’ and the fuzzier concept of ‘wisdom.’ It seems an acceptable proposition that there may be people who are very ‘smart’ yet not very wise. Wisdom offers an entirely extra dimension to any consideration of intelligence, which perhaps accounts for why the concept of ‘artificial wisdom’ is almost entirely absent from the debate about artificial intelligence aspiring to a general human intelligence. Where ‘intelligence’ seems grounded in knowledge and understanding, wisdom seems grounded in knowing what to do, with the Aristotelean notion of, “practical wisdom – [being] the general ability to do the appropriate thing, at the appropriate time, in the appropriate way” (Dreyfus, 2009, p. 46). Aristotle (2009) describes how living a ‘good life’ involves using practical wisdom, the highest of all virtues, to develop other virtues.