Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 56-minute talk, Liana Taylor draws on Buddhist meditation principles to explore practical wisdom in leadership and decision-making, framed around the title Buddha in the Boardroom. She begins with a guided group meditation leading participants into deeper states of absorption, then unpacks the distinction between discernment (clear factual seeing) and judgment (storytelling around facts), using concrete workplace examples. Taylor introduces Richard Kilberg’s continuum of leadership awareness—from malignant ignorance through normal blindness to human wisdom and leadership wisdom—and illustrates how lack of clear discernment leads to poor organizational decisions through two detailed case studies: a CFO undermined by a hastily hired conflict consultant, and a hotel repainted in uninviting colours despite contemporary design. She then presents Kilberg’s six overlapping domains of leadership wisdom: system, mediated, executive, human wisdom, barriers, and environmental, encouraging participants to reflect on which domains require stronger awareness for their own pending decisions. Throughout, Taylor emphasizes that wisdom in leadership depends on the ability to see clearly, decide skilfully, and act effectively, grounded in the meditative cultivation of aligned body, heart, and mind. Pitched at professional practitioners seeking to integrate Buddhist awareness into workplace and personal leadership contexts.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 12 12 Buddha in the Boardroom 12-12-08.mp3
UUID: 2008b9b7-29ab-486d-822c-547021fd1500
Teacher: Liana Taylor
Collection: Liana Taylor Buddha in the Boardroom (Liana Taylor)
Date: 2008-12-12
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~7,557
Bashing the television to make it work, isn’t it? So just briefly, what was your experience in the meditation tonight? What happened for you? You are very still? Not thoughts, emotions and body sensations.
Just still ness. Yeah, for you. Yeah. For other people. It came and went, as things do.
I can’t remember it. Aware of the very conducive meditative energy in the room. Yeah. The energy in here is always so very soft and it’s very easy to disappear very quickly. Just to kind of be boundaryless.
Yes, absolutely. Just part of the space, the space around you, Disintegrating into the space. Yes. For other people, what was your experience tonight? I found that I could concentrate on counting and still have a little bit of dialogue on the last few days at the same time.
Yes. And I don’t think I actually lost the number I was sort of still Dual tasking. Yeah. I had a female after all. Part of meditation, the way that I led you in, is designed to lead you in to certain stages of absorption so it’ll be interesting to hear how you experience that and in the first stage of absorption we give people counting something for their minds to latch on to so that so there is something to actually focus your mind on to that’s kind of forced to hold on to and oftentimes there is chatter going on in the background as well so that that’s a very common thing that there’s thoughts still there Commonly as you go into that, the thoughts start to slow down.
They don’t necessarily disappear, but they’re just kind of wafting through and not not being the focus. I see a few nods in the room. What happened after that for you? After the counting? A lot of peace for me.
Yeah. After a hectic week, that was lovely because I found stillness, the quiet, the concentration. I found a lot of peace in that. Yeah. Yeah.
How how at what stage does that peace come for you? Like, when does that start? Do you remember? I don’t know. I sort of gently went into it.
It’s after the counting finished I was concentrating on taking the air to my heart and I had this wonderful glowing red picture of me and the blue fresh air coming through. Through clearly. I don’t know. In there. Think.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it’s a place of going to stillness. What was other people’s experience?
I got the light right at the end. Blue blue light, deep blue. I really like it’s always a good Yeah. Quick thing. I forgot a bit of discomfort in my upper back, and that kept kept sort of Pulling your attention?
Yes. And I find I’ll be I was aware that I was kinda rolling through and I think, no. It’s pretty wet. Yeah. Yeah.
But I I enjoyed it very much. Yeah. Sort of was easy to focus with the counting. And just And And I was getting just the feeling and the thoughts when I was quite youngish, like a foreigner. Just suddenly, I could see these pictures and Opened up the mind sense.
Yeah. Yeah. How interesting. Others, what was your experience in the meditation tonight? Sorry?
You don’t I’m not trying to force invite you if you’d like to. I found when you changed around sort of lost count the second time up to the thirty, you know, harder, it has sort of drifted away. It became a bit more like the sort of thoughtless awareness we’ve talked about once before. But at the same time I was aware of what you were saying in terms of lengthening the out breath and things like this. So the duality effect Yes.
Yes. The thoughtless awareness but being aware of the things Of the voice when you’re in the background. Yep. Thanks, Ron. Did you wanna add anything?
You don’t have to. I was I was looking forward to it, and then I went in very deep, and then I was falling asleep. Yeah. And now I feel bright as a button. Yeah.
Replenished. They say that meditation can be more relaxing than sleep, so that might be true. So one of the things that we’re doing in meditation and particularly in this meditation, this meditation was set up on purpose to give us the opportunity to see what it’s like when we take ourselves actively through the absorptions. Those of you who are familiar with meditation will know something about the kind of different, deeper layers of meditation of a certain kind of, you know, so coming in into using the concentration to kind of still our minds and come into a kind of more and more still space. How that relates to tonight is when you’ve got really important decisions to make, that’s the best place to make the decisions from, from creating that kind of stillness, coming into that level of stillness.
And as you can imagine it’s not too often in many people’s working lives that we get the chance or take the chance to come into that level of stillness in order to make our decisions. So we’re in that level of stillness. We have the the bodily sensations our body, our heart, our emote oops our emotions and our minds, our thoughts all lined up. Hence the stillness. There’s just this whole sense of alignment congruence in the body happening.
And when you make a decision, you want that same level of congruence of the body, the mind and the heart. Not that those things are actually separate, but we talk about them separately in order to articulate them and come to understand them. So when we’re making personal decisions or we’re making decisions about broader aspects, if we can line those three up, then we can be pretty confident that we’re making the best decision that’s possible to make for us at any given time. In addition to that, when we come into that place of stillness, that’s the place from which we can move into kind of mindfulness, you know, insightful mindfulness and open up to all sorts of inner experiences. It’s the place where our conscious and our unconscious minds meet and so our creativity really comes to the fore in that place.
The spaciousness, our reconnection with the sense of oneness, sense of ourselves, sense of the universe, so that sort of grace that comes with that kind of spaciousness also comes back to us in that place. And so hence the importance of that kind of meditation in order to be able to come into that place, especially when there are very important decisions to make. Okay, so that’s where we start this evening. Leader is a person who has followers regardless of whether the leader has become a leader by choice or by accident role. Their influence shapes and fashions those who follow, regardless of whether we choose it or we don’t choose it.
The act of wise leadership, however, is a choice, an art that needs to be practiced. We cultivate an abiding orientation toward wisdom in leadership through extraordinary character and exceptional competence, developed over time, time, fashioned by countless wise choices and right calls. Historically, the literature on wisdom has been huge. Every religious tradition, philosophical tradition, cultural tradition has talked about and written about wisdom. In last forty years in our culture, there’s been a lot written about management and more recently leadership.
However, there has not historically in our culture been lot written about wisdom in leadership. There are recent exceptions, of course. And certainly many of the religious traditions, certainly in the Christian tradition, are a lot of people writing in the area. And in the psychology field, there are a lot of people writing in the area. This is a book by Richard Kilberg called Executive Wisdom.
It’s one of my favorites. I’ve lent it to Jenny. I’m curious. Did you like this? Yeah?
She says cautiously. I’ll ask you at break time what that was about. So, and tradition when we’re talking about cultivating wisdom in any part of our life and especially in leadership, the important factors are being able to see clearly what is going on at any given time in order that we decide what we do wisely, in order that we can act skillfully. Too often people act without having made a clear decision based on enough information to make a wise action. I’ll talk after the break I’ll talk a little bit more about some recent examples I’ve seen in the about that in business and organisation management contexts.
One of the things Kilberg cites in here is this concept of wisdom in leadership. I’ll just find my way into this. And he writes he writes these on a continuum, though in some ways they’re not a continuum, it’s more like an arc with the center being a part of the normal human experience and one side being the more malignant and less than constructive aspects of our human behavior and the other side being the wise aspects. He looks at it like this, that some people have malignant ignorance. Ignorance.
So they’re ignorant about leadership and they’re malignant about it. Like their behavior is spreading. I’m sure you’ve worked in organizations where people are ignorant about the consequences of their behavior and and that they’re ignorant about what could be going better but in fact what they’re doing is just like a cancer in an organization spreading mess everywhere I’m sure that you’ve worked with people in a context like that. There are not too many nods in the room why the only one who’s ever worked in organisation with things like that? Okay.
So malignant meaning both purposefully negative and growing, you know, cultivating itself. So I think I can picture is Sort of nasty. Yeah. Think about it. Then he talks about studied ignorance, which is not not quite as malicious as malignant ignorance but nonetheless there’s an element of knowing what they’re doing and still being still having studied it and continuing.
Yes, yep there’s a conscious maliciousness about malignant ignorance. Then we come into normal human blindness. Of course, nobody here in this room has ever had normal human blindness. It’s just all the things, the blind spots, the things that we don’t know about, the things that later on we look back and think, oh my dear, yes, I really was doing that, and yes, that really was very unskillful. Oh, I wish I’d found that out sooner.
Then we go into kind of normal human knowledge, which kind of speaks for itself. I haven’t left myself enough space. Then we go into human wisdom, which many of us are attempting to cultivate our capacity for wisdom in just the normal human sense. I’ve certainly seen examples recently, well, actually, over time. In fact, repeated examples of people who I think have developed quite a lot of human wisdom.
The two people I’m thinking of are both teachers in excuse me. That was all the green tea on the plane. Both of the people that I’m thinking of are teachers in Buddhist centers, different two different Buddhist centers across Australia, where both of those teachers, I think, have got quite a degree of human wisdom. Like, they’re very skillful. I really appreciate their work.
Lots of people appreciate their work. The books they’ve written are wonderful to read. There’s a great deal of human wisdom in them. However, human wisdom is not the same as leadership savvy. And so in those contexts, those teachers and both of those centers have had big dramas in those centers and big fallouts and big breakups and big arguments with the people involved in the centers because despite their human wisdom, they haven’t actually developed leadership savvy, you know, which is a a whole other ballgame, and it’s an extension of human wisdom.
And then the extension which I would really like to put on the end, but I’ve drawn this badly, is leadership wisdom. So Kilburn talks about wisdom and leadership as an extension of normal human knowledge, knowledge, moving to human wisdom, adding leadership savvy, and coming into leadership wisdom. And because of that, he talks about the importance of developing normal knowledge and normal human wisdom in order to lead wisely. I think that that’s a big question. I think that one can always look at the difference between judgment and discernment.
Mean again it’s a semantic thing. There are certain people I would choose to make decisions for me and there are certain people I wouldn’t choose. It’s very important for me to make that discernment. I would see it as a problem when I start to consider them lesser beings because I wouldn’t trust them to make judgments. But it’s important to be able to discern who you would have make decisions for you.
And the same with leaders. You know, who do we choose to lead us? We need to be able to make wise choices about that. We need to make choices ourselves about whether we have the capacity to lead or not. Who makes those decisions is a whole other story.
This notion have I talked in here about the difference between discernment and judgment before? No. It’s a distinction that I didn’t make. Somebody whose name I can’t remember wrote this some years ago one of the FM what’s it called? PT?
FPMT. Gee for a girl, FPMT. Okay. I don’t know why I’ve never thought about that. I had that journal for years.
I’ve never thought about that. FPMT. Well, there you go. Somebody could make something up about that. And he wrote this wonderful article about the difference between discernment and judgment.
Now, again, these could be semantic arguments, and you could use these words completely differently. So I’m not saying this is the only way that you could use the words. But in terms of the ways that he uses the words and that I’ve continued to use the words, discernment is my ability to to look at someone and sort of and say, she’s short, or look at somebody else and say, she’s tall. So if I’m in my kitchen and I want something from the top shelf, my daughter who’s six foot tall and is six foot tall and hence in our culture tall, I will say well in my head she’s tall. Discernment, just basic information, factual information.
She’s the sensible person to ask to get the stuff off the top of the cupboard. My best friend who’s five foot tall, comparatively, you know, in our culture, you would call her short. So the discernment is she’s short. I wouldn’t ask her to get the stuff off the top of the cupboard because she’ll have to stand on a chair to do it. So I need to that’s just information, fact factual information.
How I would differentiate that from judgment is she’s tall. God, I wonder what her mother was eating. I wonder what her life has been like tall. I wonder she got a complex about being tall. Must be ugly being tall.
You know, what’s her problem for being tall? Did her parents feed her hormones? You know? Or whatever else your mind is gonna do with that information. And the same with short.
How did she get so short? What sort of culture did she come from? Maybe her family were raised through the war and they were malnourished. Maybe she did this. Maybe she did that.
How did she end up being so short? Must be horrible being short. I wonder what it’s like being short. So that’s judgment because there’s a whole story around judgment, and we can do that about absolutely everything in life. I can be talking to someone and people are often asking me would I like them to come and work for me and I almost always say no, but but not always.
So if I’m talking to someone who’s wanting to come and work to me and they’re talking to me about their skills and what they can do and what they’ve learned and what they understand, I can be listening to all of that and I can make a discernment. Okay. They’re probably they probably are really good with computers. They probably, know how to put together, what do you call them, overheads. They probably, you know, some of these things they’re telling me, yep, they’ve probably got those things quite quite right in place.
I might also think, and I don’t think their language skills are very good. I don’t think their ability to make decisions for themselves is very good. I don’t think that they would be able to, what’s that word it starts with I and it means you think it was something to do yourself? Initiate? Yeah, thank you.
I don’t think that they would have necessarily a lot of initiative. So these could be just discernments. Yeah. If I’m saying to myself, yeah. Well, sure enough.
They can they can do the emails and the computer, but they’re not gonna have any initiative, and I don’t want anybody like that. I mean, what sort of slack person is that gonna be? How come they’ve got no initiative? You know, in the conversation, they’re not showing any initiative. What’s wrong with them?
They should be different to that. They’ve had three years of education. How come they haven’t developed any initiative yet? So and so overheard so much more initiative from them. How could they be so bad?
So then I’m telling myself a story about them, which I would consider judgement. So is that making sense, that distinction? Again, you might use different words for that, but I think we need to be able to see facts. This person has a proven record of being able to do this. Chances are they can do this.
This person hasn’t got a proven record. They may or may not be able to. And but I don’t need to tell a story. I just need to look at information and make an assessment. So discernment versus judges.
Does that answer your question about how I think about those things? You haven’t used the word critical. Critical. I would associate that with judgment. And discernment a more just simple difference?
I think discernment is more linked to wisdom whereas judgment is more linked to ignorance. Yeah. I think that sometimes we just that’s probably true. That’s also probably true. We can just use those words differently.
And we come from different contexts. For me to have critical thinking is a really valuable asset but how do we use the word critical? Do we think of critical as always negative and you know is there an emotional context of that word so in certain situations you know we feel like someone’s criticizing us and there’s an emotional context to that and a moral context to that that makes that feel quite judgmental and unpleasant and unhelpful whereas in another situation someone’s got a critical faculties operating in a really sharp way and we’re so glad because they’ve just saved our lives. Yeah. Our lives.
Yeah. So it yeah. All those words, we can use really differently. It’s the English language. It’s probably every language, actually, but certainly the English language as well.
So so in leadership wisdom, leadership wisdom is about having the ability to do the right thing in the right way and right in the same sense we’re talking about the Noble Eightfold Path in the wholesome way, a way that serves us, serves the people around us, and serves the greater good in the right time frame within a particular context, and that context may be very different at different times. So at that point, I’m gonna have a break. Taking any more on a Friday night? Would you like me to read it again? Yes.
Leadership wisdom is the ability to do the right thing in the right way, in the right time frame, within a particular context. It’s because I interspersed in it right in the context of right as in wholesome, as opposed to right wrong. Think about the ending context. Again. Welcome back, everyone.
Is it easier to listen to or harder to listen to when the mic goes on? It’s easier. It is. Easier. Yes.
Yes. It’s much easier for me too. So what I’d like you to do for a moment before we move into the next section is reflect upon your own life and reflect upon an area in your personal area of life and one more in your working area or out of the home area, you know, that’s the communities you hang out in or the places you actually work or somewhere that’s not so much about your personal life. So I’d like you to reflect upon a decision you might need to make in each of those areas. If there are none, you’ve made all your decisions, if everything’s completely clear in your life, then just sit peacefully appreciating the decisions you’ve made.
But if there are decisions, be they very small or very large, I’d just like you to reflect for a moment about decisions you might have to make or want to make in the next little while in your personal life and in your working life? So just take a minute to consider that. I’m a Cancer. Cancer’s hate making decisions. Oh, so you might have a few to make.
Always good to have lots of material to work with And some decisions we have to make, we know that we’ll make well because some decisions we know we do make well, we just haven’t gotten around to making it yet. And other decisions we know might be a challenge for us. Be aware of where you are with these decisions. It’s quite handy, really. And so let me tell you about some other people that I’ve worked with and been associated with that have made some decisions and made some actions and some of these haven’t gone so well.
So first one is a woman that I was working with here in South Australia. She was the Chief Financial Officer for manufacturing firm that works across Australia and so it’s a fairly flat organisation above her is the CEO or he’s actually the Managing Director so he fundamentally owns the company and he’s the director and as as best as I can understand from listening to her he’s actually a very skillful, friendly, amicable, peaceable, sensible fellow, you know, just calm, steady, gets everything done, goes ahead. Go very well with him However, there’s some things that aren’t his great talents so he has in his hierarchical structure him at the top and then underneath him three directors and the person that I know is the Director of Finance and then there are two other directors, one is Director of Marketing and Sales and the other is Director of Operations. My client is the only woman in this executive management team. Then in her staff there are mostly women because you know she’s doing the admin and the finances and the reception and all that kind of stuff so there are mostly women in her staff.
In the other two, in the manufacturing plant there are almost all men not all but almost all men and in the sales team there are only men. So the organisation is very male dominated. Manufacturing is by and large a male dominated field. This is a male dominated organization. So as we go on over time my client is doing quite well in her she started this job a couple of years ago.
She quite enjoyed the role she liked the challenge of the role There was a whole lot of mess there when she got there, so she kind of stepped in, got sorting things out. She’s a very highly organized, functional, efficient, slightly demanding kind of person. Exactly sort of person you might need for a finance officer really. Pays sharp attention to lots of details and make sure everybody’s doing what they’re supposed to be doing. So she comes in and she’s doing that.
And every now and then, there’s a little bit of a ruffle with her and one of the other male managers. As it turns out, she is being groomed to take over the Managing Director’s role. He is actually only in his mid-40s but he wants to retire in five years because he can and it seems like a sensible thing to do for his life. She’s being groomed to go into this position and the other directors know that and they also know that they’re not being groomed for that same position because they simply won’t have skills to manage a whole organization, but the CEO, the managing director, is hoping that she will have the skills. So this is going on quite well.
You know, the usual sort of little ruffles into a new organization, you know, personality clashes here and there, and a few little frictions between my client, the finance officer, and the other two managers. Mostly because she’s kind of trying to pull them into line and get them to do things in a timely way, in the way that they’re supposed to keep records. They don’t like being told this and they haven’t had to be told this before. Mind you, the company has lost many thousands of dollars because the previous finance officer didn’t follow-up. So this is all going on, by and large fairly well with these occasional little ruffles going on.
Then, one day, the managing director is down, would you believe, at the footy club talking to his mates. And he hears one of his mates talk about the fact that in his organisation they’ve got these guys coming in doing these things called crucial conversations. Anybody heard about crucial conversation? It’s kind of one of the new in, well, in things at the moment Yep, and so there’s a whole model and there’s really useful stuff about this notion of crucial conversations So there’s this team of people doing crucial conversations and offering consulting and training to do these crucial conversations. You could look at it as a kind of team building exercise and sorting out some of the little problems exercise.
At heart it’s really well intentioned, there’s good stuff behind all this training. So the managing director, you know, nice friendly guy down the football club with his mates, hearing his mate, having brought this team of guys over to do this crucial conversation, thinks, well, should I? That’s a good idea. Perhaps we’ll do that in my organization. So he brings in this fellow who comes over from Melbourne at five thousand dollars an afternoon to this organ we should all be doing that.
Hey. You know, change your jobs, guys. Go and teach people crucial conversations. Anyway, so this fellow comes over at five thousand dollars an afternoon and starts having crucial conversations with the staff. Now what he starts to do is get groups of people together and so what he did was get various people at different levels together in the one room and get them sharing some kind of honest thoughts about each other.
Yeah precisely! So in the Hum at one stage was my client, the finance officer, the woman, a couple of her staff, few of the sales staff, the marketing and sales manager, and a few of the factory workers. And so they’re all in this conversation they’re all in this room together. There’s eleven of them in this room together. And this fellow starts opening out these crucial conversations.
As it turns out, what actually happens is some of the people make some complaints about my client. Now when I listen to the complaints, you know, I’ll I’ll tell you a bit more about them later. They made some complaints about her and her demands and, you know, things that she was doing, including the fact that she’d come in twice to change the air conditioning without asking anybody. So this was one of the complaints they made about her that changed the temperature of the air conditioning. Anyway, my client gets a little bit upset about this.
When they come out of the meeting, my client goes off to her office to kind of lick her wounds a little bit because she kinda feels a bit beaten up by these people and unsupported. And she feels particularly unsupported by the person running the crucial conversations dialogue at the five thousand dollars a day, which she’s writing the check for. So she’s a bit pissed off about this. So she goes into her office. It turns out that particular night, it just so happened she had a coaching session with me, just lucky for her.
And she hadn’t. I’m sure she would have been on the phone to see if she could get me. Anyway, so she rolls up at my door pretty upset about this and feeling a bit beaten up. Now, of course, when we’re when we’re being criticized, sometimes what people are saying is absolutely accurate. Sometimes the way they’re saying it is not very helpful, sometimes what they’re saying is just crap.
You know? Sometimes it’s just not useful and not accurate. And so she’s sitting in my office talking about this. It turns out that she’d come away from that and afterwards one of the managers came up to her and talked about all these problems that she has and she needs to change and she needs to do some things differently and be a bit gentler with people and be a bit easier and be a bit more laid back. So she’s sitting in my office talking about this struggling between feeling very defensive, which she was feeling very defensive, feeling very hurt, and sort of like, well, maybe I am really awful.
I am a bit mean, and I am very focused, I’m very strategic. Know? And I just am the kind of thought police in this place and, you know, make everything happen. And then feeling like, well, if people are gonna talk like this in her in the organization, maybe she shouldn’t be working for, know, so, you know, the kinda usual response to an upsetting situation, all these things going on, you know? And so she’s sitting there in front of me.
As we’re having the conversation, I start talking to her about, you know, why this came about. And, you know, it came about because he was in the pub. It seemed like a nice idea, not because he had any idea what the organization actually needed. So the conversation I had with her was about her personality and why she was hired. She was hired because she’s a finance person.
She’s really sharp. She’s really particular, she’s really detailed, she’s inclined to be bossy and demanding and she gets things done and she takes care of business. That’s why she was hired and I said to her, well I think you should go back and just remind the people who are complaining to you, these are the skills and the personality qualities they hired you for and asked them do they really want you not to have these skills and qualities that they hired you for? So that calmed her down as soon as she had that conversation and was reminded of her personality, sort of thing we’ve been talking about in the last few weeks, know, coming back into the awareness of that. And the second thing I talked to her about was to maybe go back and ask the managing director why did he make this choice to do this thing?
And so she did that. She went back and talked to him about that. The upshot of all of that was that the managing director kind of swallowed a bit of his pride and apologized to her for what had happened, realized that she was getting paid out for the very things he hired her to do and wants her to do and is cultivating her to do more of in the organisation and took responsibility for the fact that he made the decision to have this person come over based on a friendly conversation that seemed like a nice idea at the time but nothing to do whatsoever with any particular problems that were happening in the organisation. He didn’t check out what the staff needed, how they could have spent actually it was twenty grand you know by the time he was going to come over four times. The managing director did not check one thing about the needs of the organisation or what was going on it just seemed like a nice idea at time because his mate was doing it.
And so that’s a really good example of someone making a poor decision that was really undermining a senior staff who had actually considered leaving because of this decision and what had happened based on on really poor awareness of what the organisational needs were and simply just not paying attention to those. The second thing that I saw when I was in Perth on one of my trips to Perth this year is I’ve been to Perth four times this year and I often stay in hotels when I’m working because I can just you know be by myself at night and recover myself. I was in this hotel and all the walls were painted green. Now some of you are younger and some of you are kind of my age ish but when I was young a lot of hospital walls were painted green. Do you remember that?
And a lot of rented properties were painted green. Kind of greapy kind of green. Yeah, that’s it. Public works department green. Anyway, this hotel, like the one I’m in now but it’s a different color on this one, had been refurbished about two years before I stayed there.
And the rooms were quite cheap and I was surprised at how cheap the rooms were and I couldn’t quite get over this this you know four star hotel. I enjoyed it mind you and so you know just in my usual chit chatty chatting along way, I was talking to the staff about how come the place is so empty. They said that they’d had a new person take over management of the place before it was refurbished. They hired a really young team of people to refurbish the place, and they kind of set up this whole beautiful contemporary refurbishing of the peace. And in the process of that, had painted everything that sort of icky I mean, I hate that green.
That green color that what did you call it, Rob? P p w d green, public Works Department Green. And you know they painted the whole place there and then they started getting all these complaints from people that were because their clientele, you know, four star hotel Perth, you know, who were their clientele? Middle aged people who can afford to be there and business people and corporate people who are going to stay there by and large. Most of those people are forty and up, most of us have suffered that green in our childhoods and all sorts of icky memories from it.
So despite the wonderful service and all these great things about the hotel the fact that it looked very contemporary thanks to these young designers who did all this redesigning, actually they didn’t keep getting repeat business. The reports they kept getting was about this green color. This is, I don’t know how many stories high, was ten or eleven stories or something. At some point they were going to have to repaint the entire building because they didn’t pay enough attention to what the needs were of the customers when they were doing it. So again, simple lack of awareness led to a decision to do what seemed like a really good idea and cost them big time.
So just yet another example of poor decision making leading to poor outcomes. So, let me go back to looking at Kilberg’s Kilberg’s work again. When Kilberg is talking about these three aspects, he uses slightly different words, but aspects of discerning, we’re talking about discernment being seeing things as they are, as we would in the Buddhist context. Awareness at all costs awareness is the first step to everything. And so we use both our intuitive awareness and our rational awareness.
We want to see wisely and we want to know wisely what is going on. If we don’t see exactly what is there first, then we can’t make wise decisions. So if we don’t see what the staff needs are, what her personality is and why we did really choose her that way and what the staff needs actually are, then we make some decision based on something unrelated to what is actually going on, act on spend a lot of money and create a lot of mess. Discernment is the act of seeing clearly. Over the last few weeks we’ve looked a lot at different ways of seeing things clearly, Personality styles, what it means to love, what love has got to do with leadership, disciplines that we cultivate in order to lead wisely.
These are all things that are the fundamental aspects of seeing things clearly as they are. As that meditation we did earlier was it’s a way to come still so that our sense of body, heart and mind are all aligned and we can see clearly what arises from that place. Decision making, discern, decide. Decision making is about perspective and planning. Perspective over whatever one needs to have perspective of.
I’ll have a look in a minute at all the things that we can have perspective of. Perspective and planning both at the intuitive level and at the rational level. Of course, this requires some level of analysis and wise choosing. Again, we want those choices to line up. Body, mind, and heart.
And then deliver. And delivery, our action, our wise action requires both intuitive and rational understandings, execution of choices and wise actions. So one of the things that Kilberg did, the guy who wrote the book I showed you before, is that he created this notion of what does he call them six domains that contribute to leading wisely, to wisdom in leadership and also to a part of our decision making. And these are the domains. They’re all kind of overlapping and in the centre is the cultivation of leadership wisdom.
We cultivate leadership wisdom through clear discernment, decisions delivery. And these things all give us feedback and experience and therefore we can evaluate them and they all feed into each other. The six domains that he talks about that we’re looking at in our lives and that I’d encourage you to reflect upon in those aspects of your life that you need to make decisions right now are the system aspects. Let me get my notes so I remember to say everything I wanted to say. Some of these are sort of patently obvious and some of them are very overlapping but system of aspects, the system domain of leadership is about looking at the structure, the systems and the processes.
I don’t know if any of you have worked in an organisation where you’re supposed to be planning something or creating something or developing something new and your time is consumed by all the details of structures and processes that aren’t already clear and already sorted out. Has anybody had that problem in a situation that they’re in? Yeah. And so the system domain is the one thing that generally overwhelms leaders because they get caught up trying to sort out all this stuff, which is absolutely not where they ought to be spending their time. K?
Other than to see what needs to happen and to ask somebody else to make it happen. So system domain. Mediated domain and what this means is mediation between the leader themselves and the relationships and behaviour of everybody else in the organisation. So if you’re in business, if you’re in any kind of work environment, you need to develop relationships with the people that are there, with your mentors, your supervisors, the people that you’re leading, your clients, your customers, the stakeholders, the board, everybody else, both present, past and future. So those of you in an organisational context understand the importance of all of those relationships.
So decisions are a part of that mediated domain. The next domain is the executive wisdom executive domain, which are all of our internal functions. And if we’re in a leadership role in life or if we’re choosing leadership ourselves, it’s usually based on these aspects of our personality. Our own emotional capacities, our cognitions, our conscience, our personality, our ability to manage conflict, the skills that we have and the job roles and tasks that we’ve taken on the part. So these are our executive functions as a leader.
The next domain is the human wisdom domain. And the human wisdom domain is predominantly a kind of mix of these. And it’s just it’s just using those at the level of wisdom, so stepping up into a level of wisdom. And it’s about facilitating the these experiential contexts. So it’s not just being good in here and here, but it’s using this to facilitate these.
People may well have developed a whole lot of executive functions in themselves but may not know how to facilitate these things in other people. The human wisdom domain is about using those to facilitate the system and other people and relationships and behaviour. The fifth domain is called the barriers domain. The barriers domain is something that meditation does as well with especially mindfulness meditation because it’s looking at those both our strengths but mostly our strengths when they’re overused and they become our weaknesses or our limitations. They’re our action biases, the tendencies that we have to act in a certain way and not act in another way.
The barriers also are external, the markets, the political climate we’re in, the monetary climate that we’re in, economic situation we’re in and the motivation of others. So this domain also affects the decisions we make for ourselves. And the environmental domain. And the environmental domain is looking at the whole context that we’re in, past, present, and future. So it doesn’t matter what decision we’re making, we need to make that in the context of all of this over the past, the present, and the future.
So what I’d like you to do now is just turn to someone near to you and talk with them about as much as you want to share, as much or as little as you’d like to share, about the decisions that you need to make in your life and which of these domains are the areas that you need to be more discerning in order for you to decide skillfully and deliver skillfully. So what are the areas that you need to bring more awareness to that will make wise decisions and cultivate your leadership wisdom personal or organisational in those contexts? About five minutes. Is it making sense what I’m asking you to do? And as you’re ready, wind up those conversations and bring your awareness back to the front.
And so we become more and more clear that our capacity to develop wisdom in leadership is dependent on our ability to discern, decide decide and deliver wisely. All of that is fundamentally based on our ability to decide, to become aware. Wisdom requires us to have a complex inner mental and emotional landscape capable of metacognition, which is the ability to view our thinking processes, and also self regulation, the ability to manage and understand our emotions and act wisely. We use meditation as one of our main tools to train our minds, to work, to become more aware. In meditation we learn to focus where we want to focus, we train our mind to focus.
We allow automatic thoughts and judgments to fall away so we might be able to see more clearly. We cultivate calmness. We manage our own emotional states. We respond to other people more wisely. We allow the conscious and unconscious minds to come together and in that process open up to creativity and allow the space for decisions, new decisions to be made where there is an inner alignment of body, heart and mind.
And that’s how we make very clear decisions. And that’s the end of the talk this evening. Thank you for being here. Nice to see you all.