“Let us learn from the past, to profit from the present, and from the present to live better in the future”
William Wordsworth
By connecting the three sequential states that make up the flow of time, Wordsworth captures a fundamental characteristic of wise leadership.
Simply put, the wise leader can make powerful connections between the past, present and future and is able to use these insights to make ‘good’ decisions that have a positive impact upon those around them and wider society.
Yet for all this might appear to be a relatively simple thing to do, the reality is that it is an asset that few leaders ever manage to pull off naturally.
For it’s likely that most of us who are leaders will have a preference for one or other of these points on the continuum of time.
There are those who focus primarily on the present. Not in a caricature of ‘mindfulness’, whereby they draw sustenance from being conscious of the moment; but as a favoured strategy to concentrate upon the concrete nature of the ‘here and now’.
Such leaders concentrate on the data, short-term projects and performance indicators and see the present as being something that travels forward in time to become the future, leaving the past behind.
Then there are those leaders who solely look towards the past, and measure everything against that yardstick. Such leaders can adopt one of two approaches towards the past; firstly, a slavish adherence to what has gone before, characterised by nostalgia and regret which they use to justify resistance to change; or, alternatively, to purge the past from every facet of their organisation on the basis that what went before cannot meet the need for change – regardless of its value.
Then there are those leaders who are transfixed by the future, which Tennessee Williams called the art of the ‘Perhaps’. Such leaders are driven by a need for relentless change by seeking out the new practices that will provide the ‘edge’ in that imagined world beyond the sight of those who are trapped (in the leader’s eyes) in the present or the past – yet who are isolated from their colleagues by their failure to inhabit the present.
From a personal point of view I am naturally drawn to the future, whereas my business partner is much more concerned with present – that is not to say their either of us is disconnected from either the future or the present respectively – simply that we tend towards a particular perspective. However, without knowledge and awareness of these tacit preferences we can miss out on what the other might see quite naturally.
Yet to suggest that we are one-dimensional souls would be a mistake. I recall a well-known leader who was once described, in frustrated terms, to be a ‘radical traditionalist’. The term was used as a way of capturing her capacity to meld the importance of tradition, ritual and custom with a fearless commitment to experiment with new ideas that challenged the boundaries of accepted practice.
Wise leaders seem to have that capacity to move their perspective backwards and forwards in time to look at problems through each of these temporal dimensions.
The wise leader appreciates that human beings have a fundamental need to feel that they belong to something that precedes their presence on earth. Not perhaps Newton’s idea of “standing on the shoulders of giants” but that they are part of something that builds upon the legacy of others, and in turn, gives them the opportunity to leave their own mark upon the world.
The concept of creating a historical reservoir helps to reinforce people’s cultural identity and sense of attachment to an organisation – and in turn helps them to make sense of the present – and the future.
This is why wise leaders, even of new organisations, help their colleagues to appreciate how their endeavors fit with those who came before and how it will contribute to the future – even in the most prosaic and practical industries.
Nor do wise leaders accept that the present is a fixed state, either to be decried or celebrated. Having said that they intuitively understand that the present is always a step towards the future. Yet through wise leadership they appreciate the need to avoid the pendulum created by an ‘addiction to change’ that can sometimes be the outcome of those who too easily let go of old beliefs and attachments.
Yet ironically these self same beliefs and attachments can merge with the present to create a bias towards the ‘status quo’ – where people are reluctant to engage in change due to their fear of losing what they know (even when that might be a practice that is destined to lead to the ultimate extinction of their organisation).
Wise leaders, then, always have an eye towards the future for their judgement will almost always influence a future state, albeit that it simply alters the present. Yet the past and the present also inform the future, especially in terms of learning from the mistakes we and our forbears have made before – this knowledge gives us a confidence to experiment and try things in the knowledge that learning from mistakes will make a valuable contribution to the future.
I have explored elsewhere the notion of reversing into the future, whereby the individual leader imagines a future, and then uses that knowledge to inform and shape the present.
However, the task for the wise leader, as this short exploration reveals, is exceptionally complex, given the need to navigate the contradictory advantages and disadvantages of the past, present and future perspectives in order to make ‘good’ decisions that will have a positive impact upon those around them and wider society.
Nonetheless, those leaders who only tend to inhabit one temporal state – albeit unawares – will be locked into a decision-making framework that narrows and limits their effectiveness, and diminishes the lives of those whom they would lead.
And so, to return to the words of the wise poet William Wordsworth, we should, wherever possible, seek to:
learn from the past, to profit from the present, and from the present to live better in the future