9. The High Art of Clear-Seeing
Whether it is a crucial meeting, a hiring decision or a product launch, seeing the matters that are before us with real clarity is of paramount importance. Indeed, for leaders it ranks as one of the core competencies because so much actually depends upon clear-seeing.
The first thing to understand about clear-seeing is that it is a faculty or skill that can be cultivated, and indeed, in matters of leadership, it must necessarily be practised and honed to a high degree. The faculty of clear-seeing rests on two foundations: the inner and outer realms.
The outer realm: colleagues, superiors, competitors, the organization, our specific business sector, the larger market conditions, societal trends ... Our clear sight depends on the careful and diligent work that we do in learning and mastering the various external dimensions of our field. This is just an essential part of the job description for leaders, and yet, often enough, it isn’t given its proper due.
Superior leaders are not neglectful here, and, over time, they learn to develop excellence in most matters external: dealing with people, communication, organizational culture, their specific field of expertise, the larger sector they are in … And when they are not highly competent in sub-components of the outer realm, they have the appropriate self-awareness to know their weaker areas and to surround themselves with complementary talent.
I promise you that, in order to live, you must arm yourselves with eyes, from head to foot: not only with eye-holes in your armour, but with huge eyes, wide awake ones. Eyes in the ears, to discover so much falsehood, so many lies; eyes in the hands, to see what others give, and more important, what they take; eyes in the arms, to measure your capacity; eyes in the very tongue, to consider what to say; eyes in the chest, to help develop patience; eyes in the heart to guard against first impressions; eyes in the eyes themselves, to see how they are seeing.
― Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658), Philosopher and consigliere
This outer realm is akin to studying geography, and you cannot become clear-seeing unless you really put in the time to travel extensively, to observe deeply, and get to know the territory very well. This is the obvious and necessary part.
However, to truly master the territory, everything also depends upon the personal and inner qualities of the traveler. As the writer Anais Nin famously remarked: “People do not see the world as it is, but as they are.”
And this is the far greater challenge that leaders face: clear-seeing, at the higher levels, is an internal matter. Really, it is a form of higher practice or Jedi art. If you are easily swayed by emotions or passions, if you have too much inner baggage, if certain virtues are insufficiently developed (such as self-command, listening, discernment, wisdom), if your mind is too crowded or overwhelmed, if you’re excessively attached to certain views, or if you are unaware of emotional transference and psychological projection, then you can travel around the territory all you want, but you will not see it clearly and you will not know how to navigate it properly. And you will certainly not be well placed to lead others on various expeditions across the territory…
And poor vision is one of the most common pitfalls for leaders. They are generally not lacking in expertise in the outer realm. Rather, in the rush towards achievement and success, they have often neglected or poorly cultivated the inner realm, resulting in projections, distortions and unconsciousness that prevents them from seeing reality clearly. And when that core faculty, among other internal abilities, is poorly developed, then all sorts of bad or sub-optimal decisions get made, and leadership abilities suffer accordingly, and sometimes to very high degrees. Indeed, whole divisions and even entire companies have been badly damaged, or outright ruined, from an absence of clear-seeing on the part of upper management
It is so old a leadership failure it is practically a cliché, and yet, since it is a constant facet in human nature, it is a pattern that continually plays itself out, most visibly on the corporate stage. It is often the underlying reason for hiring failures, for mismanaged departments, for bad product launches and for many failed corporate mergers.
Many acquisitions and mergers do not work out as planned. Many never live up to the expectations of the acquiring company. Some break up completely. A review of these broken corporate marriages reveal that things rarely go wrong because of marketing, production or finance. More typically, they go wrong because of a kind of myopia: the acquiring firm’s leaders fail to notice how different the two organizations are.
– John K. Clemens, Executive Director, Hartwick Leadership Institute
In the storied realm of High-tech, it is the story of Xerox inventing the Windows user interface and the mouse before everyone else, but failing to become Apple. It is Steve Jobs seeing the genius in Xerox’s inventions, appropriating them and creating the personal computer, but then badly declining before the PC industry and Microsoft in the late 80s. It is IBM blindly focussing on hardware and failing to see the central importance of desktop operating system software, and almost going bankrupt in the early 90s. It is Blackberry rising fast and then being crushed by Apple’s vision, and invention, of the iPhone.
At the core of so much organizational failure, and conversely of so much leadership success, across all sectors, what you often find is the degree to which there is clear-seeing, and its natural companions “big picture” intelligence and strategic foresight. It matters greatly to mid-level managers in all sorts of ways, since seeing properly is a form of systemic intelligence that impacts literally everything. And of course, for leaders at the highest levels it matters even more greatly, since the stakes are about whole divisions, new products or markets, and even the entire organization itself – since economic history is literally replete with companies going under due to leadership failure to properly see and understand larger market forces.
For leaders, the real question, sometimes the multi-billion dollar question, becomes: how does one cultivate the faculty of clear-seeing? The first thing to remember is precisely that it is a faculty to be cultivated, over the long-haul, indeed for the entire career of the leader because market conditions, political and societal trends, and reality never stop changing. When clear-seeing is no longer actively cultivated, for whatever the reasons, the result is soon enough calcification, of leadership, of vision, of entire departments, and even, of course, of entire organizations. Leaders must therefore make clear-seeing one of the core, ongoing leadership practices.
To cultivate this faculty, we must once again focus on the two dimensions of clear seeing: the outer and the inner realms. The outer realm is very clear to leaders and already an integral part of the job itself: people management, dealing with superiors, organizational intelligence, excelling in our chosen field, the larger socio-economic conditions etc. In this arena, there are already many excellent resources available to managers inside their organizations, at consulting firms, leadership Institutes, and with leadership advisers and executive coaches.
What is more rare, but equally important, is the practice of the inner realm, without which clear-seeing cannot develop to the high degrees necessary for leadership excellence. The main obstacle to clear-seeing here is our own inner baggage, in the form of psychological distortions, mental biases and limiting beliefs. We don’t see clearly - whether it is people, organizational facts, the competition, or larger socio-economic trends - because our inner issues and mental biases impact us in significant ways.
Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true cause of problems, and once blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse. That’s why self-deception is so central to leadership – because leadership is about making matters better. To the extent we are self-deceived, our leadership is undermined at every turn.
– The Arbinger Institute, from “Leadership and Self-Deception”
First, one’s inner baggage can actually restrict the amount of Reality that we can even allow in, or handle, to begin with. And this is already a serious limitation, and one that comes with real consequences. To just give one example in the psychological arena: if we have too much stress and anxiety, our minds often become chronically overwhelmed, and as a result our level of presence and attention to everything – namely seeing – necessarily suffers. And in turn, this then impacts everything else we are dealing with, and trying to grasp, as a leader.
Mental biases and limiting beliefs also directly result in a reduction in the extent, and depth, of reality that gets through to us, because they are essentially forms of blindness or akin to limiting filters on everything that comes our way. It is equivalent to the proverbial “thinking inside the box.” It is of course fine to think inside the box – this is, after all, a common and normal element of the human condition. But leaders cannot afford to just go along with the normal human condition, and they certainly cannot fall into the self-deception that the box from which they might be operating is Reality.
Our psychological baggage, and our mental biases, do not just reduce the quantity and depth of information that reaches us. They also distort, sometimes less and sometimes more, the stream of the reality that is coming our way, namely they distort our quality of seeing.
The impact of inner distortions on clear-seeing is a profound truth that was in fact known all the way back in antiquity, and of course one that is very well known in the field of modern psychology. In the Greco-Roman world, the first to discover that our mental biases distort our view of reality were, as you might expect, the philosophers. As many things do in Western philosophy, this began with Plato, and his famous story, “the Allegory of Cave,” which is indeed all about the absence of clear-seeing prevalent among human beings.
However, the philosophers that truly developed this concept, and created an entire practical discipline centered on clear-seeing, were the Stoics. This was known as the Discipline of Judgement or Assent. Indeed, it is a central premise of Stoicism that human beings often fare badly, make poor decisions and generally suffer, precisely because they do not observe and judge reality properly – namely they are wanting in the high art of clear-seeing. Why did ancient Stoics – such as Emperor Marcus Aurelius – succeed at very high levels of society, and why did Stoic philosophers often serve as advisers at the highest levels of leadership? One of the main reasons was that they had learned to excel at the art of clear-seeing, and as compared to the normal operating procedures, this ability is truly akin to a super-power.
Throw out your conceited opinions, for it is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.
― Epictetus (50-135 AD), Stoic Philosopher
To cultivate the high art of clear-seeing, in the internal realm, we must begin with a keen understanding of how precisely our seeing abilities are wanting and in need of fixing and cultivation. This is why we went over, as succinctly as possible, how our psychological baggage and our mental biases, limit the extent, the depth, and the quality of the reality we perceive. And, as stoic philosophers and psychotherapists well know, and, as is only logical, the higher the degree of psychological baggage and biases, the less clear-seeing there is.
The good news is: our clear-seeing can be greatly remediated and cultivated overtime, such that we can become very skilled in this department. There are three primary and complementary practices for cultivating inner clear-seeing, which are all about lightening our psychological baggage, and training and expanding our minds beyond our biases and limiting beliefs. These three core practices are: psychotherapy, philosophical counselling and practice (such as Stoic counselling, of course), and getting support from advisors and mentors.
Psychotherapy can help immensely to develop self-knowledge, to become more in control of our emotions and minds, and to heal and transform the inner ailments we may have. It is also is a great source of support as we face the challenges of life and leadership. In all these ways, psychotherapy is of great help in developing higher levels of clear-seeing.
Genius is the talent for seeing things straight. It is seeing things in a straight line without any bend or break or aberration of sight, seeing them as they are, without any warping of vision. Flawless sight! That is genius.
– Maude Adams (1872-1953), Actress
Philosophical counselling also helps in many of the same ways that psychotherapy does. However, in addition, philosophical counselling can help us to learn deeper truths about ourselves, about how society and the world really work, about how to deal effectively with others, and last but not least, about how to learn the art of clear-seeing itself, as Stoics do when they practice the Discipline of Judgement.
And finally, relying on advisors and mentors has always been a true and tried method for leaders to enhance their overall abilities. Indeed, since all the way back in antiquity, intelligent leaders have learned through experience to surround themselves with advisors and mentors who, among other things, also help them to see more clearly, as they navigate through the many challenges of leadership. This is a prudent and wise practice, for it helps leaders to rapidly remediate and expand their sight, while simultaneously helping them to develop this ability in an on-going manner.
Putting it into Practice
Think of times when you have seen other leaders make poor decisions due to lack of clear-seeing. What do you think got in the way?
Are there times when you made poor decisions, whether at work or in life, due to poor seeing on your part? What was the source of your poor seeing, and what did you learn from these experiences?
Practice a philosophical or spiritual path, that will expand your ability to see clearly, and help grow your intellectual and psychological abilities.
Practice the Stoic Discipline of Judgement.
Seek out advisors or mentors who are not afraid to point out your blind spots, and help you grow as a leader.