Blogging postponed for some years, gratitude for the Stockholm event of the International Coaching Psychology Conference (September 2011) got me started. Organised by Per-Olof Eriksson and colleagues at the Swedish Psychological Association, it was a great one-day event. My official part was to speak on Important but Uncertain Matters: Towards Coaching for Wisdom. Fellow speakers were Stephen Palmer (the development of coaching psychology), Jens-Boris Larsen (accentuating hope), Reinhard Stelter (narrative practice and collaborative working), Magnus Larsson (psychodynamic approaches) and Paul O Olson (state of the art in leadership coaching). There was a lot of engaging information from the speakers and enthusiastic discussion and networking among all.
The intellectual content has stayed with me but also the general approach and fellowship and a fantastic chance to look around Stockholm: beautiful buildings, bridges and water is a hard combination to beat. And, having only recently returned from a first trip to Poland, I found myself conversing about architecture – Poland being only a shortish hop across the water, which I somehow had failed to realize.
Reinhard Stelter begged to differ with me when I had introduced Clarkson’s seven discourses as part of my talk: “when you put up there ‘physiology’, that isn’t phenomenology in my view”. Turns out we agree on that.
I picked up the phrase, ‘the thing of it’ from the late and rather great Ken Campell, once upon a time when I was ensconced with a collation of venturers on their way to a production of The Warp. I’m pretty sure I’d heard it from him previously too, in a Channel 4 programme about chaos and complexity. Anyway, ‘the thing of it’. You know there is a ‘thing of it’ which you can’t really put your finger on, and it certainly couldn’t be reduced to simple physiology, for example. Certainly, it couldn’t be reduced at all without ceasing to be ‘the thing of it’ because it’s a holistic type of emergence that goes beyond the parts, or even the sum of them.
The conference had a thing of it, Stockholm has a thing of it, fellowship has a thing of it. Wisdom, too, has a thing of it. Ken may or may not have been referencing Kant and the noumenon that can’t be known (as opposed to the phenomenon, which is all we can know, in that way of thinking).
Many folk who are far more learned on these topics than I am have argued for ages about this business of the known and not-known, but when it comes to developing wisdom there is one line of enquiry I’m particularly keen on and it’s this: what do we count as knowledge or information, and what are the consequences of that? What are the consequences of the ways we have, or have not, been schooled in noticing? What are the consequences of the sorts of information or enquiry we privilege over those that we don’t?
Many folk who are far more learned on these topics than I am have argued for ages about this business of the known and not-known, but when it comes to developing wisdom there is one line of enquiry I’m particularly keen on and it’s this: what do we count as knowledge or information, and what are the consequences of that? What are the consequences of the ways we have, or have not, been schooled in noticing? What are the consequences of the sorts of information or enquiry we privilege over those that we don’t?
As somebody once said, all problems look like nails if all you have is a hammer.
The International Congress continues. http://www.coachingpsychologycongress.org/
