Intellectual Fencing
What is the difference between understanding and experiencing?
What is the value of something you don’t understand? What is the difference between understanding and experiencing?
The sport of intellectual fencing is good for some things, and bad for most. When we operate in the subjective domains (giving advice, designing, consulting), it is interruptive all the way down.
An overly intellectual practitioner (stuck in the head, can’t embody meaning) will forego intuition in favor of a book (or a PhD, or an expert quote). Then they would study that book as a source of authority–still foregoing intuition–and ask everyone else around them to do the same.
The cost is vast. Firstly, it becomes expensive to make progress on things that should be intuitive and subjective. Knowledge becomes debilitating. Unless we’re doing science, we should be able to bridge the objective (expertise, and data-driven) with the subjective (interpretive, and interpersonal) with a simple mental check-in.
The most straightforward way to do it is to ask (1) what it means, (2) for you?
A speaker who integrated the books they read would be able to answer and truly enroll people, instead of telling them what to do.
Remember that generative leadership is still valuable when you leave the room. That always includes integration.
This week, I'd like to invite you to reflect on the last time you sat through an intellectual fencing match.