THE WISDOM FACTOR™
Sacred Leadership for a Planet in Transition
Co-authored by Jim Garrison and Will Taegel
ABSTRACT
Imagine for a moment you sit with your family on a beautiful beach in Sri Lanka on Christmas day,
2004. The leaders of your organization are there for a planning retreat. Someone mentions that tribal
people on a near-by island have abandoned the beach and moved to high ground They sense an impending danger: It troubles you for a moment, but the day is beautiful and your drink relaxing. You open gifts
the next morning and return to the beach even though your spouse had a troubling dream about a big
wave. At 10:04 a.m., as people stroll casually along the beach, you see a white water wave in the distance. At first it doesn’t register, but soon it hits with a force beyond the wildest dreams of your spouse.
How could this happen? Where was the internet? Where was the governments early warning system?
Where was the data and information of technology? How could you be so oblivious to the danger for your
family your community your business?
Only later do you realize the tribal people had somehow known about the 9.0 earthquake the day before
With exquisite sensitivity they picked up the tremble of the Earth though the epicenter was a thousand
miles away. They knew that the tsunami was coming. They knew to go to higher ground as did the animals. They had a wisdom unknown to modern organizations. Their ancient epistemology connected them
with a transfer of information and meaning not available to the modern mind.
Sipping your drink on the beach, you might think oft he questions raised by T.S. Eliot:
Where is the information in the data?
Where is the knowledge in the information?
Where is the wisdom in the knowledge?
We propose that this wisdom lies in a descent down the spiral of human evolution to recover the knowing of the ancients. Our task is to retrieve this capacity for attunement with Nature, to bring it to the
present and then to formulate solutions using the best advancements of contemporary knowledge. Leaders
equipped with this primordial sensitivity may show us the way to high ground, a sacred path.
We call this the Wisdom Factor™
In the past fifty years, there have been, broadly speaking, two major models of leadership—one based
on the needs and logic of the organization and the other based on the character and values of the
individual. The organizational model has generally been derived from the constraints and missions of
the corporation in a free market system in which the corporation must successfully compete or die. The
individual leader inspired model has generally been derived from one’s own character, religious values,
and moral imperatives.
There have been several which broaden this to include the new sciences and the implications to leadership of modern physics, such as Meg Wheatley’s work. All these approaches, from the “organizational
man” in the l950’s to the more recent “U Process” of Joe Laworski and Peter Senge, have been useful
and have enabled men and women to provide effective leadership in their organizations.
Our contribution is based on emerging world conditions that we believe compel all of us to reframe
existing theories within the context of new potentially ominous trends.
The megatrend that is sweeping all of us in its wake, which we ourselves have produced and which is now
challenging the very foundations of human civilization, is climate change. Global warming and other environmental pressures are now activating primordial forces beyond the scope of human power to remove
or control. After centuries of humanity dominating nature, nature is increasingly dominating humanity.
Just in the past year, we have seen the transformation of climate change into climate shock: Epic storms,
two in a row, pummeled Washington, D.C; a volcano in Iceland erupted with a plume that shut down
northern European airports for a week and in England much longer; a huge block of ice broke off of
Antarctica the size of Rhode Island; another huge block of Greenland ice broke off nine times the size of
Manhattan; scorching heat plagued Russia, bringing life virtually to a stand still and devastating crops;
torrential rains and river flooding ravaged Pakistan until fully 20% of the entire nation was underwater;
mud slides devastated China with towns up to the third and fourth stories inundated with mud; and
scientists reported a 40% decline in phytoplankton, the basis of the oceanic food chain. And these are
only the events that hit the mainstream media. Our proverbial picnic on the beach is being threatened
by a massive storm lashing the horizon. Nature is reminding us that we are not the Prime Mover. She is.
The key point to internalize is that none of our conventional leadership theories either prepared us to
see this coming or have been able to enhance our capacities to discern the forces with which we must
now contend.
Climate change is fundamentally altering humanity’s relationship with nature, and this shift mandates a
focused exploration of the very nature and intent of leadership. The central questions are:
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• What qualities emerge for effective leadership in the face of an ecological crisis rapidly escalating
out of control?
• How do we learn to commune with nature in a way that can actually inform our values and actions?
• How can we lead ourselves back from the abyss and toward a way of relating to each other and
the Earth that is designed for long term abundance and prosperity?
• How can we accomplish this all together and in a diminishing frame of time?
These are some of the salient challenges at the heart of our crisis that confront leaders today.
Sacred Leadership is thus not merely an academic or for profit enterprise. It requires intense accountability, a willingness to speak hard truths, and a capacity to engage in thinking derived not from the past
century but from a future vision of what we want to become and an existential imperative to understand
the very forces that might now destroy us because of our lack of understanding. It is a leadership model
not sourced in either the corporation or in the individual or religion or the community. It is derived
from beyond the corporate and human realms in the wisdom of the natural systems of the Earth herself
It is there from which the primordial forces emanate, and thus it is into this labyrinthian depth that we
must now plumb and our leaders must understand.
Essentially, what we have degraded and sought to dominate for millennia must now be elevated to lead
us. Herein is the seismic shift for discerning the leadership requirements of our time. We must come
to understand that the Earth is not just dirt beneath our feet, which organizations can exploit without
conscience and upon which humans can conduct their affairs without thought of consequence. She is
a living presence, with intelligence, consciousness, and intention, and it is our challenge to align with
her as the wellspring for the values, inspiration, and priorities that we need. Everything we conceive
and transact must he in the new meme bio-mimicry. The goal of all human endeavor must be to align all
our systems—political, economic, financial, cultural, social, technical, practical, personal, communal,
spiritual—with the natural systems of the earth.
In an age of potential environmental cataclysm, this recognition of the earth as locus of leadership is the
first step toward what we call the Wisdom Factor™.
Our notion of leadership implies the sacred because we believe that the fundamental shift in consciousness we must make concerning leadership is to become acutely aware that with every step we take, we
tread on holy ground. It is time that we all take our shoes off for a while and approach the burning
bush. That is where the light to guide us will come to show us our place in the natural order, leading us
to recover the deep connection we humans have with all that is non human. Only this new nexus for
inspiration and guidance will allow us to transcend our compulsion to dominate and control.
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This requires a leadership model far beyond the notion of simple sustainability which basically implies a
moderated business as usual that minimizes environmental damage but without a fundamental change
in consciousness. Ours is a leadership model that is fundamentally shamanic, for it has always been the
shamans who have spoken the language of both society and nature and whose mission it has always
been to translate the two realms to each other and thus create harmony and shared purpose.
Only the shamans have been able to understand the language of the primordial and to align with
primordial forces in a way that redeems. They have understood what Pierre Hadot calls the “Orphic”
way of harmonizing and communing with nature as opposed to the “Promethian” way of seeking to
exploit and dominate her. The shamans know well an observation made by Heraclitus, that “nature veils
herself.” The Sacred Leader must learn to journey into Nature’s wild heart to probe these fundamental
truths. The shamanic leader is one who knows the way to heal the rift between all energy forms so that
once again all creatures form a community of balanced life based on the ethic of` convergent respect.
In this spirit, Sacred Leadership takes the best of organizational and character theory and presses it
through the matrix of ecology using James Lovelock’s Gaia theory to demonstrate that the Earth is a
living consciousness and must be recognized as such. Earth Wisdom, not that of the organization or the
individual, needs to inform us now. She must lead us into a communion with all beings, including what
we have called the inanimate. As Mother, only she knows the way home.
What does Sacred Leadership require of us?
First and foremost, this kind of leadership is not limited to simply “the leader.” The urgency of global
warming compels each and every one of us to become environmental leaders, followers of Nature’s leads,
and translators of meaning within what scientists call “the eco-field.” For the first time in our lives, indeed for the first time in history all of us must take responsibility to learn the ways of nature and to use
nature’s ways as models for human ways, whether at the individual, community company institution,
state, or national level. We are all responsible for global warming. We must all share in the leadership
required to solve it. The crisis is that stark, the choice is that clear, the leadership required is that urgent.
This is not something that we must do outside the organization or as an avocation as individuals. It is
something that must characterize the very essence and mission for every organization and every human
being in the world.
• For the corporation this means aligning with natural systems as the over-riding priority and treating
planet and community on the same par as profits, indeed as the first principles within which profits
must be evaluated and derived. This necessitates completely reinventing the corporation, currently
designed with no purpose except to maximize shareholder profits, into an entity structured to
mimic natural systems and governed by moral conscience.
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• For the individual, this means bending every effort to establish low carbon and sustainable lifestyles.
We all must understand that our lifestyles are as unsustainable as that of our corporations and governments. We are all addicted to oil. We must all transition to clean green living and holistic health.
Embodying Earth wisdom must become a way of life for us all.
• For all of us, this means exercising leadership through retrieving the primordial wisdom available in
the profound reciprocity embedded in Earth’s intertwining ecology of being.
Sacred Leadership thus inspires us to make our choices aware that we do not live in a mechanistic world
of inert matter. We dwell in a living, breathing ecology of relatedness of which we are a constituitive
part and which is moral at its core. Organizations have demanded and obtained the complete loyalty of
thousands, offering untold wealth for those willing to use the ends to justify the means.
Individuals have demonstrated unswerving loyalty to principles and religious conviction, even giving
their very lives for causes and beliefs.
Moving into the future, the very essence of leadership must be
reframed and re-inspired within an even more intense loyalty to
the Earth as Mother, which in reality she has been all along and
must soon become again. She never left us. We left her, and the
leadership she will inspire in us is our only way back to her bosom.
This willingness to take up the central challenge of environmental change, this commitment to allow
Earth Wisdom to lead by becoming the organizing principle for all our beliefs, actions, strategies, and
policies, this is The Wisdom Factor™ of our time. This is what we understand by Sacred Leadership.
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