"Stickiness" and the Wisdom Economy

Reflections from Executive Director Terry Chadsey during his first month on the job

I feel like a kid in a candy shop. My days are filled with conversations with an eye opening diversity of interesting people, intriguing ideas and engaging experiences. I know I am richly privileged as I seek to harvest my own experience into giving back.
 
Some of these experiences simply flow over me and move on. Some stick in the way Chip and Dan Heath describe here.

This week a colleague mentioned the concept of “the wisdom economy” as used by Stan Davis, a thoughtful business futurist and author of The Monster Under the Bed.
 
This is an idea that stuck. Simply put, society has evolved mastering different economic challenges and moving onto the next. Although in no way is this universally experienced across the globe, the cutting edge of humanity has taken on and mastered the challenges of agriculture, industry, data and knowledge, etc. Now, Davis’ work suggests, we are entering “the wisdom economy.”
 
Wisdom economy—now there’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one—but it has a ring of truth to it.  
 
Daily we are overwhelmed with problems that seem unsolvable at every level. We can design and produce engineering and technological marvels at a furious pace from the horrible—drone aircraft with which a technician can identify and kill an enemy in a village in Pakistan from a comfortable office in the US--to the ridiculous—you fill in that blank. Yet we are daily overwhelmed with problems that seem unsolvable.
 
“Wisdom economy” suggests that there is compelling (and I’d say too long ignored and marginalized) value in the non-linear and non-rational. “Wisdom economy” suggests that whiz kids of Wall Street and Silicon Valley may have something to learn from those on Main Street and No Street who cultivate another side of human experience.
 
Although I’d never heard the term before, I realize that the Center is a young start-up in the wisdom economy as we offer resources for professionals and leaders to renew and sustain the inner wisdom that is a necessary foundation for powerful professional work and an undivided life.   
 
What does this term “wisdom economy” mean to you?  Where do you see it appearing in your organization, your community, our world?

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Comments (1)

• Aug 16 2010 | Rev. Naomi King
  The wisdom economy will reflect a deeper understanding of how we societies and individuals are affective (affective to be effective). To truly cultivate a wisdom economy, we will place greater social, governmental, and fiscal value on the wisdom practices that help people adapt to times of great stress and turmoil, while keeping folks rooted in deep values of care and supporting life. Technological fixes have created a number of problems, too and wisdom technologies have their sets of issues, like zealotry and bigotry. How wide the vision, how deep the values are very important questions for us if we're shifting in this direction, precisely because those with relatively easy lives can shut out awareness of their life impact and the incredible stress in the lives of others. Learning to love more deeply than we could have imagined, to risk caring and sharing more than we feel safe, to sacrifice and innovate for the health and good of the entire biosphere are three central practices of the emerging wisdom economy.

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