Move Over Information Age, Here Comes Wisdom Management

The Road Less Travelled Is The One Going To Your Preferred Future

“Whenever you can’t decide on which path to take — pick the one that produces change,” wrote Kevin Kelly in his book Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier (2023).

Kelly is a co-founder of Wired Magazine and served as Executive Editor for its first seven years. On his 68th birthday, he decided to give his young adult children some advice by writing 68 bits of wisdom. That became the Excellent Advice book and if you are hoping to reach age 68 or think you have wisdom worth sharing, you’re in the right place.

Wisdom is becoming more important than information. Wisdom is pulling way out ahead in the race for knowledge, personal fulfillment, health, and living longer. Wisdom is hot and getting more valuable because it comes from a place that artificial intelligence will never know — lived experience, trials, triumphs, love, grief, and human connections.

Why we formed a community of wisdom givers and sponges

We’ve been bumping along in the Information Age for about 50 years and noticed the sheer volume of information led to the problem of finding meaningful, actionable insights. Five years ago we all noticed an information meltdown, then came the COVID-19 challenges which flipped a lot of scripts and lives upside down.

More information is not the answer. No longer do we care about influencers or more information pushed into our faces. We are overloaded with the consumption of information and we’ve spent too much money and precious time on online courses and tutorials that give only incremental satisfaction but not the ultimate quests and adventures in life we yearn for, before decline and death.

As we pass the midlife point, we see the wisdom of downsizing and counting our wealth in terms of how many friends and community connections we have. Who has your back and who needs your love and gifts of wisdom, stories, and laughter?

As we began to build the online community in 2020 for Gifted Professionals and Communicators (GPC), we listened to hundreds of people we’ve known and served over the past 40 years, with emphasis on who is still active and frequent in our lives in the past five years.

These are whip-smart, funny, generous, expressive, and fascinating adults with plenty of success, and get this: They are even more curious about today and tomorrow.

Most have passed the point of making lists of goals because they know that’s only a temporary high. They are into quests and adventures, instead. A quest changes you, not just your situation. A quest can change the world. A quest has a dark villain to slay (it’s that negative voice in your head).

Just as Kevin Kelly understood that his children wanted no more advice or information but would love to have 68 bits of wisdom, we are online, on the phone, and responding to direct messages every day to learn how much you know and what you desire to learn, and from what kind of authority.

We need wisdom, the highest form of knowledge. Wisdom goes beyond information to the application of knowledge, coupled with ethical and moral insights. More recently, with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, we see the greater need for wisdom because it is essential for personal fulfillment and societal well-being, informing decisions that transcend mere data.

This was one of the drivers to create a community for gifted professionals and communicators and our mission to connect the most interesting people who have something to teach us, that we can’t find on the internet.

Credit Geralt on Pixabay

Is Wisdom Management the Next Big Thing?

Because I am your guide, storyteller, journalist, and observer of humans and nature, let me point out some recent twists and turns in this adventure of information giving way to knowledge management. Start with these three articles for a big picture of what’s about to become more obvious and more commercial:

Wisdom and Management: A Conceptual Study on Wisdom Management(2014)

From Knowledge to Wisdom: Will Wisdom Management Replace Knowledge Management (2021)

Evolution of Knowledge Management Towards Wisdom Management (2023)

Then shift into gear with the Harvard Business Review article this month by Chip Conley, Why “Wisdom Work” Is the New “Knowledge Work”. Why did this get our attention? It’s hard to miss Chip Conley because he shows up in our news feeds and direct messages from members as they attend his events, listen to his interviews, buy his books, and ponder his next business invention, the Modern Elder Academy, pitched as the “world’s first midlife wisdom school.” If you love first-class travel, resorts, cruises, and self-awareness retreats, you might be searching for experience and wisdom. His background is in the hospitality industry, specifically boutique hotels in the U.S., and then Airbnb’s Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy.

Credit Arek Socha on Pixabay

The Online Community for Wisdom and Laughter is Our Vibe

In the months ahead the founders of the GPC Community will experiment with microprograms and three-person retreats for Communication Mastery, Narrative Navigation, and Nurturing Collective Genius. The whole point is shared wisdom from the minds of the profoundly gifted in a symphony of theory and practical actions.

The secret sauce is our skill when confronted by The Curse of Knowledge.

According to Anne-Laure Le Cunff, founder of Ness Labs, this curse is a cognitive bias that occurs when someone incorrectly assumes that others have enough background to understand. For example, your smart professor might no longer remember the challenges a young student faces when learning a new subject. And the expert might overlook the need to simplify concepts, assuming everyone knows what they know.

Our aim, here in the GPC Community is to avoid the negative effects of the curse of knowledge by constantly questioning assumptions and putting more energy into listening and watching for expressions of interest, instead of thinking about content or our next sentence.

Following the Ness Labs directions, here is how we embed this in our community.

1. Ask our subscribers and members to do most of the talking. The only way we’ll know how much you know is to ask. The only way we will find out how fast you are unlearning old stuff and learning new skills is to ask. Please comment and use email.
2. Simplify the language. We will stay away from jargon and complex terminology.
3. Use storytelling. This whole community and my life work have storytelling at the core. That means I like photographs, pictures, analogies, and metaphors. We encourage all to use words to create a picture if you don’t draw or use a camera hardly at all.
4. Show, don’t tell. We will remember that anything visual such as photos inserted in the content or a cartoon sketch can be better than a lengthy explanation.
5. Engage with questions and discussions. We will pause or shut up to breathe and allow the person we are addressing to ask something or just signal they are still following the conversation.

While together with you, doing the important work of unlearning what’s not working for you and gaining wisdom from someone who has been through exactly what you hope to take on next, we will keep it light.

Jonathan Fields, Awake at the Wheel Substack, provides this wisdom:

“Think about a moment where, even for a hot second, you took yourself a little less seriously. What if, rather than doing all we can to elevate ourselves to the level of demigod, we actually stepped into the fact that, very often, nobody is really looking. Not even us. What if, just for a day, we could point the spotlight somewhere else, like nobody was watching? Even if they were? What if we could take ourselves just a bit more lightly?

You. And your bad self-aware, weird Self. Are. Enough. Always were. Always will be. No one else can give that to you, or take it from you.”