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# Still Points: Simplicity in Complex Companies

#### Calvyn C. du Toit and Christo Lombaard

Abstract Building on a previous contribution on "negative capability" (Lombaard, Leadership as spirituality en route: "negative capability" for leadership in diversity, Increasing diversity: loss of control or adaptive identity construction? 103–114; 2017) as a non-directive but actively searching and highly influential (Chia and Holt, Strategy without design: the silent efficacy of indirect action, Cambridge University Press, 2009) style of leadership, this paper investigates aspects of the concept of simplicity and its relation to leadership. As management literature has recognised of late, simplicity as a spiritual orientation to life has deep historical roots and various dimensions. One predictable response to simplicity as orientation points to societies invariable complexity. Hence organisations, companies, and almost all human social systems defy attempts at effortless, simplistic illumination. However, niche building within complex systems allow leaders and managers influence. Such influence either aligns interdependent parts of a complex system or distorts the illusions of cheap harmony within it. Here, in these niches, insights and practices of simplicity cultivated in various spirituality traditions may fruitfully be employed. Such insights and practices might steer groups and entities, always awash in entropy, towards coherence, constrained (i.e., strategically guided) action and consistence. Thus, neither social system's complexity nor their entropy are denied or disingenuously reinterpreted. Rather, they are acknowledged and valued as key operational kernels giving structural stability, strategic progress and conceptual clarity to the whole. In this manner, simplicity contributes not only to the resilience organisations and companies but also to sense-making amongst people involved, namely as a dimension of experiencing fulfilment in life. Examples are provided, and spheres of applicability indicated.

C. C. du Toit (\*)

University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

Department of Dogmatics and Christian Ethics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

C. Lombaard (\*) University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

# 1 The Human Yearning for Simplicity

Complexity has become a contemporary buzzword; one which illuminates something new but also has ancient roots. Its ancient roots open the possibility of drawing from the past to assist us in the present.

The observation of complexity as an intense involvedness characterising our lives, private and professional, is valid for many people. This complexity could be taken as a problem, in the sense that we may wish to live in an age in which we have a more secure sense, a more solid grasp of our social world. However, as the South African philosopher Danie Goosen (2007) argues, in a notably optimistic tone, the sheer abundance that life offers us, is precisely one of the characteristics of our modern age. The interwoven tapestry (a concept here borrowed from Boersma 2011) of our existence is such that it provides a rich resource for constant wider referentiality, and does so in almost every dimension of human life. This includes, positively, the ability of seeking deep personal, social and transcendent significance within one's work life. In quite a surprising way, Marxist philosophy and Calvinist theology come very close to one another on the aspect of the significance of work: in work, one finds fulfilment—not only as duty, but also for meaningful existence.

The above-mentioned transcendent aspects refer, here, also to the complementary interaction of other fields which had in earlier decades and centuries been deemed either at odds with one another or fully incompatible. This includes fields such as theology and the natural sciences. Van Huyssteen (2006), for instance, argues on evolutionary grounds that religion had always been inherent to the advancement if our species: without religion, homo sapiens would have had less chance of survival. Religion, like technology and language and other aspects related to being human, constitutes part of the resources our species could draw on, in order to survive and thrive.

In the previous century, which may be termed the post-modernist decades, meaning was regarded as an almost impossible feature of humanity's language of life. Mere traces of significance may have remained, it was argued, but even then such sense was always beyond our reach (Derrida 1976). In our current, unfolding cultural era of post-secularism (Lombaard et al. 2018), however, it has been realised that meaning can indeed be sensed, namely experienced. Such experience does not have be viewed as a-contextual or anti-intellectual (Biernot and Lombaard 2017, pp. 1–12); still, the meaningfulness reflex of our times lies for more and more people in what they sense as valid or feel to be meaningful. What people reflexively undergo, what makes them feel existentially at home, is accepted as compatible with their sense of being and of wellbeing, without further questioning or validation required.

This age of interrelatedness, also, finds expression in a growing body of writings on management and spirituality, to which this contribution adds. For instance, in "'Visionaries ... psychiatric wards are full of them': religious terms in management literature," Kessler (2017, pp. 1–9) recently reviewed this trend, to which also one of the present authors (Lombaard 2017, pp. 103–114) contributed, with "Leadership as spirituality en route: 'negative capability' for leadership in diversity." In many other instances, some of which are referred to by these two recent studies, concepts from spirituality are drawn on in order to think through aspects of management in particular contexts.

The growth in this management interest in spirituality is telling, not only of our current age of interrelatedness, but also of the sense of meaning yearned for by many people, also in their professional lives. Spirituality is namely often associated with a kind of clarity of mind, a sense of purpose and groundedness, combined with an awareness of emotional rest or lucidity—orientations which unite many aspects of being human under an overarching (consciousness of) wholeness and wholesomeness (wellbeing).

Without diminishing the magnitude of this totality, or whole-person orientation, one may still discern core constitutive elements. Kernels are thus acknowledged: niches in which all, or much, of this totality is concentrated. These kernels carry extraordinary power of influence, for guiding from there the rest of the network which is humanity and institutions, interconnected. This foundational orientation on such kernels may be termed simplicity.

Such simplicity should not to be confused with religious fundamentalism, where a kind of "oneness" is found in a single truth which is sourced from a single source (a holy book or perhaps a revelation) to be forced onto everything and everybody, "for their own good" (a term from the Inquisition, often unknowingly appropriated in lessthan-democratic moments). That constitutes false simplicity, because it supresses complexity by means of an overarching, "heavy" truth. In an expression attributed variously to several philosophers and theologians: we should fear those who know only one book well. Rather, here, more organisational-architecturally than philosophicaltheologically, the most important operational hinges which afford structural integrity, strategic progress, and conceptual clarity to the whole are acknowledged for their essential value. Without these hinges, the doors of process do not just open or close. Importantly, the nature of complexity is neither denied nor disingenuously reinterpreted, as seems to be the case in some pop literature on the matter. The central cores and their hinge functions are, rather, acknowledged for the disproportionally high value that they, in fact, do contribute. Thus understood, this attribute of simplicity adds not only to the resilience of organisations and companies, but also improves sensemaking among the people involved, namely as a dimension of experiencing fulfilment in life.

Neither should the spiritual impulse, here, be equated with a yearning to escape from reality into a secluded sphere, cut off from the rest of life. Where such an understanding is ascribed to, the metaphor of the monastery in mediaeval times is often employed, and falsely so. Monasteries had namely been communities only minimally separated from other societal spheres, but their strength and success lay precisely therein that they were institutions also established with an explicit orientation to serving their immediate community. Similarly, the current turn to spirituality (an expression from e.g. Kourie 2006, pp. 19–38) in many aspects of society involves precisely a turn to the world (that is, to this world, rather than to only the inner world or the above world). For precisely this reason, it is not surprising that even an atheist could formulate his spiritual intentions as "to believe in spiritualities that open onto the world, onto other people, onto everything ... to inhabit the universe" (Comte-Sponville 2007, p. 197).

With these two possible misconceptions prevented, our concrete "age of complexity" moreover does not only refer three-dimensionally to the events and structures of society we encounter. Perhaps as the single most noticeable characteristic of our time, the fourth dimension, that of time, comes into play ever more strongly: because of economic, technological and cultural-personal drives, all things go faster—as argued influentially by Rosa in Social acceleration: a new theory of modernity (2013). In corporate life, this is seen as dramatically as anywhere else: the quicker things go, paradoxically, the less time there is—to cope, to reflect, to be. To adapt somewhat the ancient philosophical conundrum: speed as an unstoppable force is not met by any unmovable wall—be the latter workers' rights and/or wellbeing, the limitations of present states of (financial, technical, geographical, etc.) affairs, or laws (as recent corporate scandals have again shown). The quickening of everything seems like the lessening of humanity—an attenuation of being human.

In the busy-ness of business, work's multidimensionality often defies clear grasp, opening the gates, also, to the other kind of corporate scandal, the managerial, in which executive oversight just does not seem possible anymore. This is the void into which rogue stock traders, for instance, drift. The central beams or the key foundation points on which the construction of the business reality rests, have become unknown—often to most employees, at times to all, including management. This runs fully parallel to the phenomenon in spirituality which is, as stated above, associated with "clarity of mind, a sense of purpose and groundedness." On the absence of a still point which balances essential aspects of being human, follows disorientation, loss of contact with reality, and ultimately disintegration.

The still point is a term from TS Eliot (1943; Four Quartets: Burnt Norton, II)—a point where important things (the above-human, the three usual dimensions, and then the dimension of time) converge. Such convergence, not as a passive rest-point, but as an essential point of activity (the latter indicated by the italics added below), carries pivotal weight:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

The influence of the still point as concept runs widely within spirituality literature (e.g. Colacurcio 2015; Martin 2012; Beaudoin 2006; Harpur 2000). Echoing Psalm 46:10 and the dual Greek time concepts of chronos (times-as-flow) and kairos (timeas-event; Whitstable 2007, p. 23), the idea of a central point or a few such central points that have at once centrifugal and centripetal importance, is a fruitful and enriching analogy to the concept that will be discussed next with relation to Complexity Theory: key niches in complex organisations.

# 2 The Niche: Key Points in Complex Companies

The managerial-doctrinal lie of full efficiency, drawn from Fordism, implemented without care, and attenuating meaningful work, dominates to a substantial extent to this day. Even if organisations accept, or plan for, wasted time as inevitable, the dream of machine-like corporate productivity continues. Machines, however, ironically also require "down time" for maintenance purposes. No matter how hard an efficiency leader may try to limit wasted time, wasted time, nonetheless, persists. Quashed somewhere, it reconfigures in another place. The so-called "effective leader" would, in this line of thinking, pounce on such new wastes and refocus employees; such leadership becomes reactive vigilance rather than reflective guidance. Chronos tyrannises kairos at every corner where work tries turning the alchemic trick of wrangling efficient work from meaningful work.

Of these, the three metaphoric horsemen of chronic efficiency—speed, information and communication—are the main culprits which spread leaders thin. As speed increases, a useful knotting of information and communication becomes complicated and a scattered fool's errand. Enter, then, the already mentioned contemporary leadership synthesis: complexity and spirituality. Complexity is, however, itself a fuzzy concept, requiring a brief parsing (Loubser 2014, p. 1).

# 2.1 General Complexity Theory

Seldom, when drawing on complexity theory, do authors frame the complexity they have in mind. Often, this masks deep epistemic commitments; it is therefore important that we play an open hand from the start. With complexity, here, is meant General Complexity and not Restricted Complexity. Restricted Complexity designates some systems as complex and others as complicated, while General Complexity sees all systems as complex at certain levels (Morin 2007, p. 10). Restricted Complexity and General Complexity include various additional internal complications and categorisations not relevant here. For our part, we will keep to General Complexity, with this exception: we borrow from Restricted Complexity the difference between complicatedness and complexity. Drawing on this distinction we can illuminate how classical models of business are different from newer ones prevalent in information and service industries. Complexity suggests that social systems, such as human organisations, differ from complicated mechanistic assemblages, such as aeroplanes, in three important ways. First, the primary attribute of complex systems is connections, while information mark complicated systems (Cilliers 1998). For instance: although a mobile phone is very complicated, one can often troubleshoot a technical defect of a device with relative certainty; however, tracing a mobile phone maker's loss of market share is much more difficult and much less predictable—it is complex. An analysis of the latter must consider the connections between multiple factors, and even then, no single answer may crystallise.

The second difference between complicated and complex systems, following from the first, is memory management. Stagnant storage, as in a computer hard drive, marks complicatedness, whereas complexity's memory remains dynamic, akin to a brain. Like a brain, memory stored through connections give the memory of complexity its vibrancy. Repetition is the key to complexity's retention; "use it or lose it" remains the hallmark of complex recollection (Cilliers 2016). Another quality of complex systems follows from this: a particular slowness marks complex systems (Cilliers 2016).

Now, calcified memory means complicated systems can tunnel through their environment with rapidity, with little regard or sensitivity to that environment. Complex systems, however, always remain entangled within their surroundings. Such an entanglement means complex systems remain semi-permeable, even though they may identifiably be outlined. Evaluative processes then become necessary, considering the semi-permeability of complex systems. Memory provides such an outlining discernment. Slow integration of environmental changes through memory procedures gives complex system adaptability, while also making them longer-lasting though pliable. Complicated machines like cars, for example, on the other hand ignore large parts of their environment up until the point at which they break down.

As e Cunha and Rego (2010, pp. 85–86) point out, many an organisation wants leaders to live in the gingerbread house of complexity, but they are at the same time encouraged to eat it with simplicity. Simplicity and complexity, however, are not the strangers one might assume. For instance, "fractals" 1 are complex patterns born from simplicity folding in on itself (Wheatley 2011, p. 273). The seeming paradox, then, is that simplicity and complexity can be partners. However, leaders often confuse complicatedness with complexity. Leadership in such circumstances becomes a question of information volume and speed: a complicated problem, and not one of connection—hence a complexity problem. As markets drift from an industrial economy to knowledge or service based economies, a leadership cohort that can manage the volume and complexity of such information-rich environments, are key (Uhl-Bien et al. 2007, p. 299). Information, here, designates more than the overt and networked data-sea; it also covers the multifaceted intercultural and interdisciplinary meshes stirring underneath the social surface.

Such profound and occluded connections, then, are opportune only if leaders are comfortable with a short-term time expenditure for the sake of long-term creativity, stability and gain. Allowing for short-term wastage does, however, mean cultivating discipline. In brief, for chronos to transmute into lasting kairos, time and attentiveness, both as marks of ancient spiritualities, are required. Restraint from quickturnaround strategies is of great importance as leaders find multiple organisational tools at their disposal designed simply to reduce wasted time. Email, online

1 Fractals are complex mathematical sets created by repeating a simple formula. The Mandelbrot set where the function does not diverge when iterated from, is one example of such a set. Every time the function is reiterated, complexity increases, until one arrives at a mindboggling amount of complexity, all through reiterating simplicity (Mandelbrot 2004, pp. 9–26).

collaborative platforms, and infograms are only a few of the tools available to the contemporary managerial reductionist who focusses on efficiency alone. Although such instruments may carry the accurate label of "productivity suites," in an ironic twist, their productivity sometimes undermine effectivity.2 We will return to this point below to provide some examples.

To summarise: complexity means that the primary task of leadership is no longer to manage information, but rather to link the cluttered multiplicity. Of course, productivity tools are also helpful when searching for notable connections in the brute information haze. Their principal value, however, are as utilities for administrative leadership, which manage the bureaucracies and ruling regimes which large organisations bring (Uhl-Bien et al. 2007, p. 307; Uhl-Bien and Marion 2009, pp. 631–650). Administrative leadership however manages a different set of complexities than adaptive leadership, which focuses on the implementation and inculcation of organisational culture.3 One area adaptive leadership guides, perhaps without explicitly realising it, is the waste which complexity brings.

Indeed, leaders in any organisation should pause to reconsider "waste management." Systems wading into the stormy waters of complexity produce superfluous communication, which in turn may leave the human actors confused and unfocused. Here, again, this contribution wants to marry complexity, simplicity and spirituality. We do this by considering time wastage, simplicity and the negative capabilities4 key to adaptive leadership. In the conclusion, we describe what adaptive leadership can learn from spirituality.

# 2.2 Niches Within Complex Companies

An often-overlooked part of a complex system is the waste produced. As complexity in systems increase, so waste inevitably increases as well. Were we to forget this important part of complexity, we quickly fall into the trap of pretending that no waste exists. Leaders, then, only manage positive outcomes and are prone to forget about

2 To accede for a moment to the predilection of philosopher Slavoj Žižek for using examples from human ablutions in order to illustrate a point: toilets may be ever increasingly productive in saving water, up to the point where they are no longer effective in clearing away waste. Being ever more productive does not equate to being ever more effective.

3 Here lie echoes of the two types of thinking identified by Martin Heidegger (1998), summarised recently by le Roux (2016) as follows (italics added): "rekende denke en nadenke. Rekende denke fokus op beplanning, ordening, sistematisering, regulering, administrasie en organisasie. Alhoewel dié soort denke onontbeerlik is, is dit nie egte of eintlike denke nie. Alles draai egter om nadenke, diepdenke, kontemplasie oor ons wêreld en menswees."

4 "Negative capability" of leaders (cf. Lombaard 2017, pp. 103–114) is, briefly defined, "the capacity to contain one's fear and anxiety when faced with a challenging situation and not respond with a knee-jerk reaction. Rather than 'doing nothing' negative capability is the capacity to wait, observe and enquire into a situation as it unfolds in order to discover an optimal way forward" (Ladkin 2015, p. 214, see also pp. 195–196).

negative management. The best leaders, however, manage waste through discernment as complexity increases (Simpson et al. 2002; on the modus operandi of discernment, cf. Waaijman 2013, pp. 13–24; applied to organisational context, cf. Bouckaert 2017, pp. 15–25).

What is meant by waste? As complexity increases, so too do connections increase. Increased communication, however, does not produce the utopia some would suggest (Angelopulo 2014). More links mean greater complexity, but it also means the possibility of needless communication, miscommunication and (where complexity is mistaken for complicatedness) the fear of communication. Waste management does not mean cutting out all possible wastefulness, for as stated above, there will always be some waste in a complex system. If cut off at one junction, it will reconfigure somewhere else. Leaders with deeply reflective capacities ("negative capability," cf. Lombaard 2017, pp. 103–114) seek to understand how to manage such structured, incidental and angst-driven waste.

As businesses increase in complexity, needless communication is equally inevitable. A quick glance at most people's email inbox will confirm how menial administrative tasks can distract one from one's core business. No job advertisements, however, contain the requirement that one answers hundreds if not thousands emails each week, with many of these messages being superfluous. Large corporate meetings offer another example. Such gatherings tend to find yet another PowerPoint masterpiece that should convince all of the poetry of a prosaic detail, which is somehow key to everyone's function in the organisation. Such meetings often inspire participants to take out their own smaller screens ... ironically, probably to catch up on the just mentioned emails.

Often it is in unstructured work periods, such as the coffee breaks between possibly mediocre speakers, that the really thought-provoking connections are made. Companies like Google, for example, "manages" such creative waste by demanding employees "waste" 10% of their time on creative projects. From Sweden hails a whole culture of such "waste management" called Fika5 —the now widely adopted extended coffee breaks during a work day. In other words, effective leadership in such instances manages "waste" by making it mandatory, ritualising and simplifying it—a simplification which takes place precisely through ritualisation.

Such a simplification of waste within complexity creates space for niches to grow. Niches, in this instance, are understood as pockets within the dominant system that foster novel ideas (Westley et al. 2011, p. 767). Such niches are, however, also managed. Managers are essential to niches, but their leadership style cannot be

5 "The word fika (from ka-fi) coffee backwards is a vague concept. It means taking a coffee break, but has other meanings as well. When a boss says, "let's fika"—it could be to discuss work, give advice, ask advice, give caution, talk promotion, or just gossip. This is not gossip in the negative sense of slander and malice, but constructive, "coffee-break gossip": exploring ideas, debating rumours and conjecture, considering different views, and finding out about what's going on... What for many is a hidden code in Swedish decision-making processes, is quite apparent in Swedish corporate décor—the coffee break area is the central hub to the Swedish organisation" (Alexander 2010, pp. 38–39).

traditional: they do not lead through express instructions or orders. Such leaders require "negative capabilities": an orientation of listening and facilitation, rather than of being forcefully directive (our traditional associations with a "strong leader"). In other words, a niche leader would not say, "you must" or "you cannot," but instead encourages with something akin to "you can." In a sense, what a niche leader is doing, is through this proclamation of "you can" releasing participants to rearrange the business culture—what would be called in complexity theory its memory. Furthermore, with the liberative "you can," the manager also implicitly makes a covenant to protect niche participants from what could be a negative dominant regime or remnants thereof.

Although in zen-like thinking small things, such as a butterfly, are understood potentially to have a larger effect than a volcano erupting, such change happens from locality to locality within a corporation, and not all at once. The possibility of such larger events from a small occurrence, or the reverse, cannot be guaranteed—which brings us again to memory in complexity systems. Although some niches may namely not be taken up in dominant regimes, they remain useful as contributors to the superfluity of a system; a necessary by-product of meaningful interaction.

We now turn to another type of "time drag" created by complexity. Wasteful niches cannot always be structured. Complex systems draw on connections rather than on calcified hierarchies. Even if one structures superfluous communication in complex systems through niches, emergence means wasteful residues persist. As with structured waste, incidental waste can equally lead to creative solutions. Unlike structured waste, however, resistance is built into incidental waste, and thus requires a different set of (also negative) capabilities of a leader.

Incidental waste requires what Schreiber and Carley (2008, pp. 291–331) call contextual and process leadership. In brief, contextual leadership realises that knowledge and expertise do not reside in a single person, but are distributed over the whole network. Process leadership remains sensitive to where meaningful connections coalesce, fostering them. Schreiber and Carley, however, add a descriptive modelling of context and process. Such an analysis not only divulges their Restricted Complexity assumptions, but also works against their comment about the quick-paced change and the complexity of organisations today, which produce as pointed out above, incidental waste.

The management of incidental waste through contextual and process leadership should be seen as parallel to negative capabilities. Analysis and modelling may serve as training ground for contextual and process sensitivities, but no emergent moment waits for an analysis to be complete. Incidental waste, as the name suggests, occurs haphazardly. Thus, context analysis and process facilitation require more than analysis; it entails embodied awareness.

Simpson et al. (2002, pp. 1211–1218) of how context and process as embodied negative capabilities turn incidental waste into a creative and educational process:

Nicholas is sent to negotiate a deal with Russian and Chinese counterparts for a certain multinational company. As the orchestrator of the deal, Nicholas must deliver swift results. Soon, however, he faces resistance from his compeers. At first, Nicholas struggles to understand why various parties resist what seems to him to be reasonable demands.

Nicholas's mistake, which he is slow to realise, is his single focus—get the deal done. When working with other cultures, age-groups, or companies, one soon learns, like Nicholas, that one cannot steamroll decisions without collateral damage or encountering cooperative refusal.

Adaptive leadership, here, would mean drawing on the negative capabilities of allowing and acknowledging resistances, namely as a cooperative learning experience. In other words, if Nicholas overpowers his peers with the minutiae of the deal, without acknowledging the resistances and differences represented, he not only misses an educational moment, but he also reduces the resilience of future cooperative calibration.

We have now covered how leadership can leverage structured and incidental waste for learning and creativity. There remains, however, one more category of potential waste that a complex system can produce. The third type of waste in complex systems trains others into its own ways. Thus, whereas structured waste through niches protect the creativity of its members from dominant regimes, and incidental waste require an inculcation of reflective values, textured waste trains other human actors, which in companies means employees, to live within complexity.

The difference pointed out earlier between complex systems and complicated systems becomes important here. Social systems such as businesses are complex, and treating them as only complicated is reductive, in many ways. With complicatedness, operational units stand in a mono-modal relationship. In other words, each component is functional to another component. In contrast to this, however, complex interactions are multi-modal: one interaction has multiple effects throughout the system.

Thus, leaders who collapse complexity in mere complicatedness are shortsighted. Often such leaders see employees as means instead of as ends in themselves. The workers must, thus, be tapped for all their worth, and no mistakes on their part are allowed. Quite naturally, such a rigid approach soon spirals into error-shaming. Such a system may appear, at least in the short term, to produce less waste. The longterm price, however, does not justify the short-term thriftiness. The complicated system may seem more "toned," but it also breaks far easier than a complex system. A short-lived complicated view of a team would accordingly make everyone puppets of the leader. Such draconic leadership encourages grovelling instead of appreciation, reluctance instead of willingness, and insipidness instead of ingenuity—the seeds herein of longer-term effects are clear to be seen.

The three described kinds of waste may be employed to guide leaders beyond over-psychologised business babble. Caution against such cheap, short-termed "solutions" is a must for managers who draw on a humanity endeared with traits related to our spirituality. An important difference remains between spiritualties that feign wholeness or existential meaning, and a complexity-model-focused locale of spirituality with integrity. A manipulative use of spirituality directs its canons at the employee. As more integral spirituality and view of humanity transmutes demands like "Work harder!" and "Be loyal to the company!" into questions like "What makes your work meaningful?" and "How can you draw on your inner strengths within difficult projects?," wholeness and wholesomeness are, thus, non-forced and well-facilitated.

In contrast to control sublimated as care, a complex way of approaching spirituality requires not more from the employees, but from managers. Overseers may thus orient themselves to understand the conditions under which a deeper humanity is fostered, risking the valuable possibility of "waste."

# 3 Whyte Noise

British philosopher-poet David Whyte—no stranger in the world of business, as demonstrated by his 2002 volume The heart aroused: poetry and the preservation of the soul in the new workplace (an updated version of his 1994 The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America)—illustrated in one of his poems how what may seem intangible or unfathomable, in reality has high concrete impact. In his 1996 poetry collection titled The House of Belonging is found:

Working Together We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again. The visible and the invisible working together in common cause, to produce the miraculous. I am thinking of the way the intangible air passed at speed round a shaped wing easily holds our weight. So may we, in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine, and look for the true shape of our own self, by forming it well to the great intangibles about us.

In this poem, the interactive reciprocity between the concrete and the ethereal, the individual and the group, agency and determinism, what is at hand and what is elusive are balanced, and not only aesthetically. The word balance is central here: with each of the elements of these four seeming pairs of opposites, foundationally, the one cannot exist without the other. The elements may seem like opposites, but they are more like two sides of the same coin. Thus we find interactive reciprocity not only as symbiotic concepts, but as a way of living and working: aspects that seem clear and aspects that seem less tangible form a network of understanding which constitutes life.

The same holds true for the key niches within complex organisations discussed above. For the most part, those associated with a business (and the larger the business, the more this is the case) know neither of key niches that impact on them nor how they fulfil for others that role. Not because key niches are in any sense ethereal; their concreteness speak clearly from the huge (potential for) influence they hold. Like "white noise" in shared modular office environments, employees may not be conscious of how niches work, how it affects them or how they contribute to them, but its enabling effect within the workspace is concrete.

One question remains: how to convey to supervisors who are used to traditionally-styled leadership approaches the orientation for adaptive leadership, for structuring waste and for such alternate, more fruitful and more humanlymeaningful leadership roles? For some decades now, religious organisations have tended to borrow "best practices" from corporate governance theories, with questionable results. Perhaps, in today's complex environment, organisations would consider the reverse, namely how corporate leadership may benefit from more humane, more spiritually-inclined practices of facilitation. The above thoughts hope to act as a primer for such a future discussion.

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Calvyn C. du Toit is a Ph.D.-candidate in Christian Spirituality at the University of South Africa, and a Research Associate in the Department of Dogmatics and Christian Ethics at the University of Pretoria. His interests include: how Christian Spirituality intersects with cities and technologies, places where religious and philosophical metaphysics intersect, and how complexity studies might assist in building awareness of memory as key to emerging ethics. His most recent publications, in collaboration with Gys Loubser, focus on liturgy as one contemplative space for the ethical integration of technology, and myth as a technic of knowing with a specific focus on Big History.

Christo Lombaard is Research Professor of Christian Spirituality at the University of South Africa, in Pretoria. His research specialisms include Biblical Spirituality, Post-Secularism, Spirituality Theory and Applied Spirituality. He holds two doctorates: a Ph.D. in Communications (North-West University, Potchefstroom, specialising in Religious Communications) and a DD in Theology (University of Pretoria, specialising in Old Testament Studies). He is a South African National Research Foundation rated researcher, and a regular contributor to conferences across the globe. His most accessible publication is The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality (Atlanta, Georgia: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 Krister Stendahl medal for Bible scholarship by the Graduate Theological Foundation, USA. This volume may be downloaded at http://ivbs.sbl-site.org/ uploads/SBL%20book%20%28final%20edit%29.pdf.

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# How to Integrate Spirituality, Emotions and Rationality in (Group) Decision-Making

Volker Kessler

Abstract This chapter presents a model on decision-making published by Ignatius of Loyola, which integrates spirituality, emotions and rationality. The three different modes are analyzed. Some parallels to modern management advice are shown. The model is then especially applied to group-decision making, which was already done by Ignatius and his "companions of Jesus." I then use the Six Thinking Hats method developed by Edward de Bono, which I adapt in order to integrate the Ignatian model of decision-making.

# 1 Introduction

According to Luhmann's theory, "organizations can be designated as decision machines" (Nassehi 2005, p. 85). The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann distinguished three types of decision premises within organizations: (1) decision programs, (2) communication structures, and (3) persons (Luhmann 2011, pp. 222–255). In this chapter we deal with the third type, decisions made by persons.

Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the founder of the Jesuits, reflected in his Spiritual Exercises, on "decision making." He grew up in the beginning of the Modern Era, during which time more options became available, thus offering opportunities for decisions. Ignatius discovered three modes "in which a sound and good choice may be made" (Sp.Ex. 175–177).1 Here "good choice" is meant

V. Kessler (\*)

Akademie für christliche Führungskräfte, Gummersbach, Germany

GBFE, Oerlinghausen, Germany

Department of Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

1 Since the Spiritual Exercises are numbered, the format "Sp.Ex. No" is commonly used for reference. Re the paragraphs Sp.Ex. 175–188, I follow Gallagher's translation, which is based on the Spanish original (Gallagher 2009, pp. 141–144). In the other cases I use the translation given by Louis J. Puhl (Ignatius 1951) spex.ignatianspirituality.com, accessed 12 Dec 2016.

spiritually: what does God want me to do? The first mode in discerning God's will is "immediate intuition," where God moves so clearly "that a devout soul will follow without hesitation." The second mode refers to the emotions, and the third mode to the rationalization of the process.

Ignatius' model is worth studying for several reasons: First, it is a model for spiritual decision-making; it integrates spiritual intuition, emotions and rationality in a coherent and structured way. Secondly, Ignatius' preference for relying on feeling more than on thinking challenges the modern Western preference for thinking (cf. O'Sullivan 1990; Moberg and Calkins 2001, p. 263). Thirdly, in his explanatory notes on the third mode, Ignatius gives some practical advice that can be regarded as a forerunner to modern management techniques of decision-making. Fourthly, "the deliberation of the first fathers," which led to the founding of the Jesuit order, is a model of good practice for group decision-making.

This chapter will investigate the three modes and discuss possible applications. It will also point out similarities) between some of Ignatius' advice and modern management techniques. Finally, I will suggest a way to integrate Ignatius' model into group decision-making.

The focus of this chapter is on the three different modes of decision-making (Sp.Ex. 169–189) and their possible applications. This chapter does not deal with spiritual discernment as such, because this is the topic of another chapter.2

# 2 The Three Modes

# 2.1 The Context

Ignatius, born as Iñigo López de Loyolas, started his spiritual journey in 1521. During his journey he was confronted with existential decisions, such as whether or not to become a priest. All the while, Ignatius was taking notes, recording insights and "movements" of his soul. He began to distribute this spiritual record because he thought it could help others as well (Knauer 2015, p. 11). The greater part of his originally Spanish text was done by 1541. With papal approval, a Latin translation was published in 1548. The Spiritual Exercises have in time become fundamental to the Society of Jesus and far beyond. Even Protestants practice the Spiritual Exercises,3 despite their battles with the Jesuits since the Reformation. The Spiritual Exercises have also been received outside of theology. For example, Fortemps and Slowinski (2002, p. 109) in their mathematical paper refer to Ignatius' method of decision-making.

2 See the chapter by Patrick Nullens, "From Spirituality to Responsible Leadership: Ignatian Discernment and Theory-U," pp. 185–207.

3 For example (Kusch 2017, p. 122ff).

A number of books have been written on the Spiritual Exercises, and there are diverse interpretations of this work, the first of which already appeared in the sixteenth century, after the death of Ignatius (Sampaio Costa 2003, p. 75). Modern prominent interpreters are the German Jesuit Karl Rahner and the American Jesuit Jules Toner (1974, 1991) with his monumental work on the Spiritual Exercises.4 I especially make use of the following publications: the American theologians Christina Astorga (2005) and Timothy M. Gallagher (2009), the Brazilian Jesuit Alfredo Sampaio Costa (2003), the German Jesuits Stefan Kiechle (2008) and Peter Knauer (2015), and the Irish Jesuit Michael J. O'Sullivan (1990).

The Spiritual Exercises have a natural rhythm. Ignatius divided these exercises into four "weeks." This does not necessarily mean calendar weeks but refers rather to phases or movements felt within a person (Sp.Ex. 4). The modes of decision-making are part of the second week, which starts with an introduction to making a choice of a way of life (Sp.Ex. 169). Two fundamental prerequisites are named there:

These prerequisites deal with the ethical issue. If one alternative is ethically good and the other one is ethically bad, then there is no need for a further decision-making process. It is evident that the ethically sound one should be chosen. If one introduces the three modes to an audience without mentioning this fundamental prerequisite, it might lead to an application of the Ignatian process, which would not please Ignatius at all.5 People might say: "Well, I know that this decision violates God's commandments, but I had a good feeling doing it and therefore it must be right."

The second prerequisite is necessary because, according to Ignatius, "there are things that fall under an unchangeable choice, such as the priesthood, marriage, etc" (Sp.Ex. 171). "With regard to an unchangeable choice, once it has been made, for instance, by marriage or the priesthood, since it cannot be undone, no further choice is possible," even "if the choice has not been made as it should have been" (Sp.Ex. 172). Nowadays, mainstream Protestant theology would regard neither priesthood nor marriage are "unchangeable." Still, there are choices which are unchangeable. One may for instance decide whether one would like to have children or not, but as soon as one has become a father or mother one cannot simply undo this decision. Some choices in life lead to responsibilities one cannot escape. Parents therefore do not have a real choice "between proper care of their children or additional voluntary activities, no matter how good" (Gallagher 2009, p. 17).

These two prerequisites must be fulfilled in order to apply the following three modes of decision-making (Sp.Ex. 175–178):

4 See, for instance, the review of both in Astorga (2005, p. 89ff), the review of Rahner's interpretation in Waaijman (2002, p. 485, 497f), and the review of Toner's book in Africa (Mugabe 2005, p. 130).

5 Unfortunately, Gallagher (2009, p. 141) starts with Sp.Ex. 175 and not with Sp.Ex. 170.

These two ways within the third mode are by (a) weighing the pros and cons of the various options (Sp.Ex. 178–183) or by (b) considering the end, what one would like to have chosen if one were facing death and the day of judgment (Sp.Ex. 184–189); more on this in Sect. 3.

# 2.2 Analyzing the Three Modes

Ignatius locates rational reasoning in the third step, which only becomes relevant if neither of the first two steps has led to a decision (Sp.Ex. 178). Thus the rational option appears as a last resort (Kiechle 2008, p. 29). In my longstanding participation in church board meetings, I have observed that today usually the opposite order is practiced: one starts with rational discourse (mode 3). If and only if this does not work out, one tries to incorporate intuition and emotions, "the gut feelings."

Gallagher (2009, p. viii) uses the following headings for the three modes6 of decision-making:

First mode: Clarity beyond doubting Second mode: An attraction of the heart Third mode: A preponderance of reasons

The first mode seems to be the most attractive one because "when God gives this gift, no further discussion is necessary" (Gallagher 2009, p. 82) and there is no need to proceed to the other modes (p. 151). However, even in the Bible records, the first mode is not the typical one.7 There were situations where the person involved knew

6 In the Spiritual Exercises Ignatius used the word "time," but in his Autograph Directory he used two words, "time" (tiempo) and "mode" (modo). Gallagher (2009, p. 69ff) opts for the word "mode" and so does Kiechle (2008, p. 27ff).

7 There are many different opinions on the frequency of the first mode. Some take the extreme view that it is quite rare; others say it is exceptional but not too rare; others say it happens quite frequently, is ordinary. The Ignatian texts say nothing to answer this question (Astorga 2005, p. 79). Based on the Bible records of spiritual experiences, I would argue that it does happen now and then, but not as often as mode 2 or mode 3.

immediately what to do; for example, the calling of Matthew is reported in one verse (Mt 9:9): Jesus said to him "Follow me," and Matthew rose and followed him. In many other situations in the Old and the New Testament, though, the believers did not know what to do and asked for guidance from God.

At a first glance, one is tempted to label the three modes as:

Then Ignatius' advice in Sp.Ex. 175–177 could be presented as an algorithm:

Start with step 1, spiritual intuition;

If there is no clear spiritual intuition, go to step 2, listen to your emotions; If the emotions are not clear, go to step 3, use your mind.

However, we have to be cautious about the connotations of the terms "intuition," "emotion" and "rational." When, for instance, I mentioned the three modes to a German business consultant, his spontaneous reply was: "This is well known in marketing. We make our decision by heart (emotions), and then we use our head to rationalize this decision." Although there is some truth to his reply, this message is different from what Ignatius had in mind. The emotions listed by Ignatius are spiritual emotions, i.e. emotions initiated either by the Spirit of God or perhaps by a deceitful spirit (according to the warnings in the New Testament, e.g. 1 Tim. 4:1). Furthermore, Ignatius had a process in mind, with its own possible ups and downs. Thus, these sorts of emotions are to be distinguished from the so-called "affect heuristic" (Kahneman 2011) or from the spontaneous consumerist emotion we might have when we see a new car or a new smart phone for the first time.

In his Spiritual Diary Ignatius described a process he himself underwent (Gallagher 2009, pp. 83–85). The decision to be made was: should he and his companions live in radical poverty? In the first six days, Ignatius felt more inclined to this option; this inclination he interpreted as "spiritual consolations." Later, more troubling experiences entered the process. Mode 2 does not happen in a moment; it requires at least a few days and may in some cases last several months or even years (p. 92).

It is actually the second mode that requires and involves discernment of spirits "for only in this time do we find feelings to be discerned" (Astorga 2005, p. 73). The distinction between consolation and desolation, and openness to both, are crucial to the right application of the second mode. Ignatius understood consolations as "feelings of peace and/or other positive emotions which draw one toward God" (O'Sullivan 1990, p. 5).

Differences between the modes The following is a comparison of the different modes in order to highlight the specific characteristics of each mode.8

First, in mode 1 one has absolute clarity; one is not even able to doubt (Sp.Ex. 175). Conversely, doubt is typical of mode 2 and mode 3.9

Secondly, mode 2 is a process that unfolds gradually, sometimes over several months, whereas in mode 1 it happens suddenly.

Thirdly, in mode 1 the person is totally passive while receiving God's gift of clarity. In modes 2 and 3 the person has to be active, either observing his/her emotions over a long period or by weighing pros and cons. "The second and third modes are made available for human effort and striving in decision-making; the first mode is a pure gift from the freedom of God's love" (Astorga 2005, p. 98).

Fourthly, one's emotional state differs from mode to mode. In mode 1 the person experiences "certitude and deep peace." Gallagher (2009, p. 72) reports the experience of Malia, who considered becoming a nun: "There was a sense of great peace and joy and direction. In fact, it was the only time she had experienced such certitude." In mode 2, (strong) emotions can arise, consolations and desolations. Mode 3 requires a calm heart ("tranquil," Sp.Ex. 177), being "indifferent" toward the two alternatives (Sp.Ex. 179). "The third mode is bereft of consolation and desolation, indicating that a different kind of discourse is used to make it distinct from the second and first" (Astorga 2005, p. 87). Gallagher (2009, p. 106) therefore recommends: "If the heart is not calm—is not in a 'tranquil time'—the third mode of discernment should not be attempted."

In spite of the apparently different focuses of modes 2 and 3 it should be noted that mode 2 cannot be reduced to pure affections, nor can mode 3 be reduced to pure rationality. "It is necessary to get beyond a false contrast between a second 'time', arising from affectivity, and a third that is more rational. In different ways, heart and head are present in both these 'times'" (Sampaio Costa 2003, p. 87). Mode 2 requires observing and evaluating the emotions. "Such tasks require substantial amounts of

8 Some Ignatian experts deny any real distinction between the modes. Rahner, for instance, regards the three modes as constituting one identical kind of choice. Astorga (2005, p. 89) summarizes his position: "All Ignatian discernment of God's will, in his view, is ultimately a second-mode discernment, with the first mode an extraordinary phenomenon whose practical importance is secondary. The third mode is a deficient modality ... the less perfect mode of the second." According to Rahner the third mode is contained in the second mode.

Rahner's interpretation is criticized by Toner (1991) who argues that "Ignatius presented each mode as fully distinct from each other and that each is able to function autonomously as adequate in itself" (Astorga 2005, p. 91). Sampaio Costa (2003) gives further evidence for this position by investigating the Jesuit documents of the sixteenth century. Sampaio especially follows the directory written by Polanco, Ignatius' former secretary, which he regards as "one of the most balanced and illuminating documents we possess illustrating Ignatius' thought" (p. 77). From his investigation Sampaio concludes: "It is important to be able to distinguish what is characteristic of each of the 'times', and to understand their fundamental rationales" (p. 87). I follow this interpretation and will therefore list some differences between the modes.

9 It is disputed in the Jesuit tradition whether mode 2 or mode 3 will lead to greater certainty (Sampaio Costa 2003, p. 86).

Table 1 Similarities and differences between the three modes

cognitive processing and rational judgment" (O'Sullivan 1990, p. 38). Astorga (2005, p. 98) uses the terms "affective reasoning," "judgment of the heart" for the second mode and "discursive reasoning," "operations of the brain" for the third mode.

Modes 2 and 3—sequential or parallel? The advice in Sp.Ex. 176 and 177 reads as if they were to be done sequentially, i.e. mode 3 is only be used if mode 2 does not lead to a decision. Thus the third mode appears as something like a last resort. "You only go to the third 'time' if the second has not brought sufficient light" (Sampaio Costa 2003, p. 85). However, as pointed out by Gallagher (2009, p. 156f), Ignatius himself employed mode 2 and mode 3 in parallel when he had to decide about radical poverty for his society. Thus, although Ignatius presents mode 3 more as a last resort, in practice both modes can be done in parallel. This procedure is also suggested by Kiechle on the basis of his and other people's experiences. Both modes should complement and confirm each other.10

All modes are spiritual The distinctions between the modes could give the impression that only the first mode is a truly spiritual one. On the contrary, Ignatius was convinced that God would speak through the consolations and desolations in mode 2 and that God would guide the person's will in mode 3 (Sp.Ex. 180). The decisive criterion when evaluating the different options in mode 3 remains a spiritual one: which option will "be more for the glory and praise of God our Lord and the salvation of my soul" (Sp.Ex. 179)? This is called the Magis principle, i.e., the greater glory principle (Toner 1991, p. 173; Astorga 2005, p. 87). Moreover, both ways of deliberating in the third mode close with bringing the election before God so that He may confirm the choice (Sp.Ex. 183, 188). Thus the whole decision-making process, including all three modes, can be regarded as a "spirituality of choice" (Byron 2008, p. 59) (Table 1).

10"Die Erfahrung jedoch zeigt, dass das Entscheiden meist in einer Verbindung aus zweiter und dritter Weise des Wählens zustande kommt. Man prüft Gefühlsregungen und Argumente. ... Beide Ebenen sollten sich ergänzen, ineinander fließen und sich gegenseitig bestätigen." (Kiechle 2008, p. 29).

No priority Since all modes are spiritual, one should not consider any mode to be better than any other. The wording in Sp.Ex. 178 might create the impression that Ignatius saw the third mode as deficient compared to the other two. Thus it is interesting to note that some of the first-generation followers in the sixteenth century saw the third mode as the safest one (Sampaio Costa 2003, p. 86).11 An investigation of the different Ignatian texts on this topic leads Sampaio to the conclusion: "Ignatius had confidence that all three 'times' could lead to a good and healthy Election, and that consequently we were in no position to decide which way was better or safer" (p. 86). As a practical application, Sampaio teaches: "It is not for us to decide which 'time' of Election is be used: we need to accept with humility the 'time' that God chooses to give us" (p. 88).

# 3 Forerunner of Modern Management Advice

Some suggestions within the two ways of making a choice in mode 3 sound like a herald of modern management advice. For instance, Fortemps and Slowinski (2002, p. 109) explicitly refer to the first way of mode 3. I will point out five more similarities.12

First, Ignatius taught that "the first point is to place before myself the thing about which I wish to make a choice" (Sp.Ex. 178). Fredmund Malik, one of the most influential management thinkers in German-speaking countries, lists seven steps for a decision-making process (Malik 2006, p. 211). His first step is almost identical to Ignatius' first point: "the precise determination of the problem." One might argue that this first step is just common sense, but Malik (p. 203) explicitly warns against the illusion of assuming that the problem is clearly defined. Ignatius and Malik agree that the first step in a decision-making process must be the identification of the problem.

Secondly, in Sp.Ex. 181 it is suggested that one should list the advantages or benefits and the disadvantages or dangers if one accepts an opportunity, and then should list the advantages and disadvantages if one does not accept this opportunity. By looking at these lists one should notice to "which alternative reason inclines more" (Sp.Ex. 182). In a modern manner of representation this leads to the following 2 2-matrix, which could be a typical flipchart presentation in a modern group meeting (Table 2).

The scientists Figuiera et al. (2005, p. xii) appreciate Ignatius' "approach of explicitly taking into account the pros and cons of a plurality of points of view." They regard his method as an early example of Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis.

11Probably this shift occurred because of the fear of the Inquisition which suppressed any trace of illuminism (Sampaio Costa 2003, pp. 76, 78).

12O'Sullivan (1990, pp. 28–34) lists some parallels to modern psychological models of decision making.

Table 2 Illustration of Sp.Ex. 181

Thirdly, Sp.Ex. 185 reads like advice from a modern book on self-management:

185 ... To look at a man whom I have never seen or known, and, desiring all perfection for him, consider what I would tell him to do and choose for the greater glory of God our Lord and the greater perfection of his soul; and doing myself the same, follow the rule that I propose.

In modern terminology, this is often called "self-coaching" (Dießner 1999), i.e. a person treats himself or herself as a person to be coached.

Fourthly, in the second way of deliberating, Ignatius suggests looking at the alternatives "as if I were at the point of death, what procedure and norm of action I would then wish to have followed in making the present choice" (Sp.Ex. 186). This suggestion is similar to advice from modern management books on imagining one's own funeral: what would the people say about me? (Knoblauch et al. 2007, p. 138). Some authors suggest even writing one's own funeral speech in order to find out: what do I want the people to think about me upon my death? Answering this question will give direction to one's life.

Fifthly, Ignatius distinguished between times for emotion, for reason, for pros and for cons. This is also the basic idea of the "Six Thinking Hats," which will be discussed in the next section.

# 4 Group Decision-Making

# 4.1 The Deliberation of the First Fathers

The well-known "deliberation of the first fathers" 13 offers a good example of how to apply these principles to group decision-making. In the year 1539 Ignatius and his other nine "companions of Jesus" lived in Rome to serve the Pope. The Pope then decided to send them into different parts of the world. Thus several questions were on the table: Shall we continue our companionship? If yes, shall we found a religious order? They were all searching for God's will on these questions, but they had diverse opinions (Toner 1974, p. 185). So they took 3 months to find the answers. In

13"Beratung der ersten Väter" (Waldmüller 2008, p. 13).

this process they developed new methods for consulting and decision-making within a group. During the day they would pray and think about the decision to be made. At night they would meet for consultation, during which each of them shared his thoughts and feelings about the decision (p. 187). Thus they came to the decision to continue their companionship.

The first question now answered and a decision made, we came to another question more difficult and no less worthy of consideration and forethought. All of us had already pronounced a vow of perpetual chastity and a vow of poverty ... The question was this: would it be advantageous to pronounce a third vow, namely, of obedience to someone from among us ...? (p. 194)

But even after many days the uncertainty about this question remained. The companions then reflected on their initial method of consultation and modified it. In particular, they implemented a procedure for separating the discussions on pros and cons. On one evening they would collect all the reasons against a vow of obedience. "On the next day we argued for the opposite side of the question" (p. 202). The advantage of this method is that the group focuses on one aspect at a time, i.e. they are all looking at the pros and later they are all looking at the cons. This is actually the essential feature of the De Bono method, explained below.

From today's perspective the method of the first fathers was very innovative. But it only became popular after their Superior General Pedro Arrupe, in 1971, encouraged the Society of Jesus to apply this method of the first fathers. It was seen as a good method to work out the participation processes initiated in Vatican Council II.

# 4.2 Modern Adaptations of This Method Within the Ignation Tradition

The American Jesuit Byron (2008, pp. 64–75) has developed a method of group decision-making, which is rooted in the deliberation of the first fathers.14 Byron stresses the importance of discernment. As a method he suggests having different times and phases. For example, he would start with laying out the relevant facts; then he would give room for people to express their emotions towards this decision (p. 65). "Before any major decision is made, the decider, in the Jesuit tradition, will want to ask how he or she feels when considering the options" (p. 73). Participants should try to evaluate the source of these feelings: is it the Spirit of God or evil spirits? Then there must be room for listening to God. "This calls for more than just a quick invocation or prayer of petition; the decision-making process has to be laced with a quest for God's will" (p. 66). Byron (p. 68) also suggests separating the discussion of positive and negative arguments, i.e. the pros and cons.

In the Swiss culture, participation and democracy are important values. The Swiss Catholic Waldmüller (2008, pp. 13–17) refers to the deliberation of the first fathers

14An adapted extract is available on the Internet Byron (n.d), "A method of group decision making."

as a good model for participatory processes: "Gemeinsam entscheiden" (deciding together). He applies it to the retreat of a church board (pp. 59–70).

# 4.3 Six Thinking Hats

The idea of structuring the group discussion into different times for facts, emotions, pros and cons is also part of the "Six Thinking Hats," a method published in 1985 by the Maltese author Edward de Bono (1990). As far as I know de Bono never refers to the deliberation of the early fathers as a source. Instead he refers to the Japanese meeting culture (pp. 44–46).

The basic idea of the Six Thinking Hats is that there are six modes of thinking, and at a given time the whole group is in the same thinking mode. This avoids the so-called "spaghetti thinking," when for instance one person is thinking about the benefits of an idea, a second person is considering the facts, and a third person is dealing with emotions.

The six thinking hats are distinguished as follows (pp. 31–32):

A possible structure for a group discussion could be as follows:

Of course, many variations are possible. Sometimes one has to switch to the red hat more often; sometimes it may be necessary to go back to the white hat, because one discovers during the process that important facts are lacking.

Some ideas from the Six Thinking Hats can already be discovered in Ignatius' teaching on decision-making and in the deliberation of the first fathers: separation between emotions (red hat) and facts (white hat), separation between listing pros (yellow hat) and listing cons (black hat).

Since 2003, I have been teaching a modified de Bono method. There I use the word "mode/phase" instead of "hat," because the latter is sometimes perceived as childish. This modified method consists of eight modes. I have included a "purple mode," reserved for spiritual aspects, a time for prayer and listening to God's voice. (Furthermore, I split the blue mode into two modes, one for chairing the meeting, one for making the final decision.) This method requires time, at least 90 min, and it requires several flipcharts and pin boards to visualize the facts, the ideas, the pros and cons etc. The participants always appreciate the clarity of the process because the rationale for the final decision becomes very transparent. Many of my students then apply this method in their contexts and later write a report on it. These reports give good evidence for the usefulness of this method.

After this study on Ignatius, I would definitely stress the purple mode in order to give more room for listening to God and spiritual guidance. For example, I would apply the purple mode quite early, to provide room for spontaneous spiritual intuition (mode 1 in Ignatius' model). Perhaps God will speak so clearly to everyone in the group that doubting becomes impossible. If this is not the case, I would then use the red mode after the purple mode so that the participants can share the feelings they had during the purple mode (mode 2). Then I would go on with the more rational modes, i.e. facts (white), pros (yellow) and cons (black). After making the final decision, one could again switch to the purple mode in order to ask God for his confirmation. This would constitute the final point in the Ignatian mode 3 (Sp.Ex. 183, 188).

# 5 Conclusions

In his Spiritual Exercises Ignatius presented a holistic model for decision-making that integrates spirituality, intuition, emotions and reasoning. An important advantage of his method is the separation between the different modes. The "deliberation of the first fathers" provides a good model for how to apply this method in group decision-making. Their approach has some parallels to de Bono's "Six Thinking Hats." Integrating the Ignatian ideas into the Six Thinking Hats will lead to a method of group decision-making that leaves sufficient room for spirituality, emotions and reasoning. Thus, it will strengthen the nexus between leadership, spirituality and discernment within an organization.

# Bibliography

Volker Kessler (Ph.D.; D.Th.), holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics, University of Cologne, and a D.Th. in Practical Theology, University of South Africa. For 12 years he worked for the Siemens Company, Munich, as a researcher in cryptography. Since 1998 he is director of the Akademie für christliche Führungskräfte (www.acf.de) and since 2002 he is also dean of the GBFE (www. gbfe.org). In 2012 he was appointed as professor extraordinarius at the Department of Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology, University of South Africa. He teaches (Christian) Leadership at different universities and also does professional trainings for business companies and NPOs worldwide. He authored many academic articles and many books, among others the bestsellers Kritisieren ohne zu verletzen and Die Machtfalle, which were re-printed several times and also translated in five other languages.

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# Embodied Realism as Interpretive Framework for Spirituality, Discernment and Leadership

Jack Barentsen

Abstract There appear to be two ways of knowing, the one driven by scientific evidence, the other by practice and intuition. The concept of embodiment brings these two ways together. Embodiment is now widely studied, as in the disciplines of nursing (Benner), cultural psychology (Voestermans and Verheggen), and cognitive psychology (Lakoff and Johnson). These developments point to the philosophical perspective of "embodied realism," as initially outlined by Merleau-Ponty and Dooyeweerd. Our human system of knowing is directed and limited by the way our bodies enable us to interface with the world we inhabit. It requires dialogue to transcend our individuality, without arriving at universals, as research on cognitive bias by Kahneman has demonstrated. The centrality of embodiment, then, implies that spirituality is not in opposition to material concerns, but rather that embodiment is foundational for spirituality, as evident in religious ritual practices as well as in the Christian confession of the Incarnation. Moreover, spiritual discernment takes shape, not as a disembodied practice of meditation to access the divine, but as embodied seeing, listening and feeling in a collective effort to understand God's call in the middle of one's rapidly changing world. Finally, leadership can be seen as the embodied performance of providing a safe holding environment amidst liminality in order to enable people to cope, to be transformed and to develop a new sense of personal and social identity.

J. Barentsen (\*)

Department of Practical Theology, Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven, Belgium

Institute of Leadership and Social Ethics, Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven, Belgium

Faculty of Theology, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
# 1 Introduction

Evidence-based strategies seem to be the answer to everything, from evidence-based coaching, evidence-based nursing, evidence-based horsemanship, evidence-based psychotherapy, evidence-based investing and evidence-based vitamins.1 A particular example of this trend was when my daughter explained that after changing her baby's diaper, she needed to take his temperature. If the temperature was below 36.5C she should put on his cap; if it was above 37.5C, he didn't need a cap and probably not even socks. This lasted only 2 weeks. Such a technical approach might provide the needed personal security; it was after all her first baby. It might also teach her to distrust her developing motherly instincts. Or perhaps she learned to discover her motherly instincts through this more technical approach rather than through networking with family and friends. Such a priority of "evidence-based baby care" probably spawned reactions in the opposite direction, namely "natural" baby care, natural pregnancies, hypno-birthing and a veritable "baby wrap consultant" to assist in carrying your baby more "naturally" against your body instead of in highly mechanized baby carriages.2 Presumably, mothers are encouraged to trust nature's care processes, including their own intuitions about baby care, where "nature" becomes a rather romanticized opposite of "science."

This phenomenon juxtaposes two ways of knowledge, one through evidencebased approaches supported by scientific research, the other through more intuitive ways of knowing, sometimes labeled as "natural" or "spiritual." These might be viewed as complementary, as when my daughter would be helped to develop her motherly intuitions by first relying on evidence-based strategies, but they might also be conceived of as competitive or in opposition, proposing that the scientific way (like taking the temperature) is better than the intuitive or spiritual way (following motherly instincts), or vice versa.

The same duality can be recognized in the domain of spirituality and religion. Theological scholarship has always devoted considerable effort to historical and empirical research in a search for theological knowledge. Since the Enlightenment this search has become dominated by a strictly critical and a-religious approach to historical and empirical religious claims. For more liberal theologies, this often meant applying a hermeneutic of suspicion to any historical or empirical aspect before they would be counted as trustworthy evidence of theological knowledge (Gill et al. 2013, pp. 47–50). In my field of Practical Theology, this approach has sometimes led to purely descriptive approaches, bracketing any claims about transcendental realities (van der Ven 1998), or to forms of pastoral care that seemed to have more in common with psychotherapy than with spiritual guidance and "shepherding" (Graham 2002, chapter 3). Based on the understanding that

1 An internet search for "evidence-based" on amazon.com yielded these and other results for recent book titles with this phrase in the title.

2 From http://natural-baby-care.nl/, carrying the baby in a wrap-around cloth or sling ("babydraagdoekconsulent").

transcendental phenomena cannot properly be the subject of scientific inquiry, these theological approaches have principally not counted transcendental claims and spiritual experiences as theological knowledge, leaving them to the realms of personal faith or spiritual practice.

More conservative approaches have taken a different approach to what counts as theological knowledge. This form of theological inquiry often operates from a mode of "faith seeking understanding," adopting a hermeneutic of faith. Again, in my field of Practical Theology, this has led to renewed attention to a normative engagement with faith praxis as a primary avenue of scholarly research. Browning, De Ruijter and Osmer each advocate in their own way a normative assessment of practice as part of the practical theological enterprise (Browning 1991; Ruijter 2005; Osmer 2008). More recently, some practical theologians have argued that spiritual experiences or divine encounters are an explicit concern or even a center of practical theological reflection (Root 2014; Cartledge 2015; Iyadurai 2015). These conservative approaches have been more generous in counting a wider range of evidences as theological knowledge.

The debate between the liberal and conservative approaches has changed with the onset of postliberalism in a postmodern climate (Michener 2013, 2016). Nevertheless, these approaches all use certain scientific criteria for establishing what counts as evidence for religious phenomena and theological knowledge. They may differ on the criteria, but they seek to operate as an evidence-based scholarly discipline.

However, what counts as theological knowledge in the setting of a faith community or in Christian praxis may be quite different. Religious leaders, for instance, deliberately speak and lead in such a way, that people connect their lives with God or the divine. They aim to lead believers in experiencing divine presence and recognizing God's work in and among them. In many churches, testimonies of miraculous religious experiences or dramatically transformed lives count as key evidences for God's presence and transforming work. There is usually little concern over whether these testimonies can stand the test of scholarly scrutiny and interpretation, and in some quarters such scholarly scrutiny is even rejected as potentially harmful. On a more scholarly level, some discussions of missional leadership focus on discerning the Spirit's work and joining God in serving the neighborhood (Roxburgh 2015; Vlaardingerbroek 2011). In these instances, knowledge of divine presence and activity is quite intuitive and experiential. There seems to be quite a gap between the logic and the evidences of formal, academic theology, and the evidences as experientially encountered in vital faith communities that are intuitively accepted as true.

This raises a question of discernment: "How does one discern God's presence and the Spirit's work?" It seems that there are two different sources for theological knowledge, the one scholarly, the other more intuitive. Should we privilege scientific theological knowledge, for instance in its historical-critical form, over the non-critical faith experience of believers? Or should we prioritize spiritual knowledge arising from faith praxis over against rigorous scholarly theological analysis? It does not seem sufficient to identify one area with objective fact-finding, concerned with "truth," and the other area with subjective meaning making and identity construction. In fact, both areas are concerned with facts, and both areas contribute a sense of meaning, belonging and identity for its practitioners. What is needed is a way to bring these two sources of knowledge together.

This chapter proposes that the concept of "embodiment" links these areas of knowledge to each other.3 Moreover, the chapter will argue that "embodiment" provides a fruitful tool for deepening our understanding of spirituality, and the practices of discernment and of leadership. The research question can now be phrased as: "How can the concept of 'embodiment' link scientific and spiritual streams of knowledge together, and what does this imply for spirituality, discernment and leadership?" This question will be answered, first by an exposition of the concept of embodiment as illustrated by its reception in various disciplines. Second, the paper will present a more philosophical case for "embodied realism" as a primary way to bridge the scholarly and experiential dimensions of our knowledge. Third, the paper will analyze the implications of embodied realism for our understanding of spirituality, discernment, and leadership.

# 2 The Turn Towards the Body: Embodiment

The relationship between emotions and the body on the one hand, and knowledge and reasoning on the other, has been a subject of intense study over the last decades in disciplines such as sociology, cultural theory, and cognitive psychology. Gabriel Ignatow presents an overview of how disembodied theories of knowledge have been changed by what he calls "the bodily turn." Newer theories consider the body as location of symbols and meaning, so that knowledge is foundationally embodied (Ignatow 2007). Taking a closer look at these developments, I focus on embodiment in nursing, cultural psychology and then cognitive psychology.

# 2.1 Embodiment in Nursing

The concept of "embodiment" is perhaps easiest understood by considering briefly the discipline of nursing, which is both a highly demanding medical and technical profession, as well as a professional practice that is strongly focused on embodied intuitions and interventions. By this, I mean more than simply that nurses care for hurting bodies. Dr. Patricia Benner, herself a nurse, academic and educator, is known in her field for her study of learning and skill acquisition throughout a nurse's career (Benner 2000, 2001). Much of this learning is technical or medical skill, but a good nurse also learns to recognize early warning signs of conditions like shock or embolism and to detect slight variations in patient color and demeanor. This

3 See similar arguments in Bass et al. (2016), especially in Chapter 6 on the eclipsing of embodied knowledge and Chapter 7 on recovering it within practical theology.

represents a fuzzy recognition process with varying degrees of vagueness that develops throughout a nurse's career and becomes an embodied, non-rational process of discernment that is vital for patients in their time of need. Referring to philosopher Merleau-Ponty's work on embodiment, she writes that "the sensing, skilful body allows one to negotiate and flourish in the context of the inevitable human condition of ambiguity." She continues, with reference to Dreyfus' model of skills acquisition: "Through our embodied capacities of perception we are able to notice subtle, imprecise changes, recognize family resemblances and comparisons with past whole clinical situations" (Benner 2000, p. 7).

Benner argues that medical and experiential or embodied knowledge are complementary, both necessary for developing excellence in nursing (Benner 2000, pp. 6–10). These bodies of knowledge are developed differently, the first through the study of theories and books, the second through reflective practice which develops increasingly trustworthy levels of intuition. She compares these bodies of knowledge with the Aristotelian distinction between techne as knowledge about production and goal accomplishment, and phronesis, discernment rooted in embodied and experiential knowing that requires moral agency. Moreover, she critiques the overreliance on rationalization in some forms of nursing practice with a critique of Cartesian mind/body dualism that is continued in the Kantian reason/moral agency dualism. Instead, she sides with Merleau-Ponty who views the body as mediating our access to the world (instead of through "pure reason"). Dualistic approaches that posit a rational subject "I" over against an external objective world imply a commitment to the correspondence theory of truth; instead, Benner is committed to "a socially constituted, embodied view of agency" with "socially intelligible terms and intersubjective knowledge that reflect skilful comportment and knowing" (Benner 2000, pp. 11–12). Such intuitive practices develop and improve within a community of practice that upholds particular standards of excellence (Wenger et al. 2013).

Benner's arguments are intended to correct an overreliance on formal, medical knowledge by pointing out the importance of more tacit forms of knowledge that are learned through repeated experiences. As Merleau-Ponty points out, such experiences over time become like layers of sediment in the body, so that nurses are able to respond adequately and quickly to situations that are similar to previous experiences. In other words, repeated experience allows rational medial knowledge to become part of a bodily repertoire of nursing interventions that requires only minimal reflection in order to be effective. This is not so much to argue that techne is gradually overshadowed by phronesis, since unfamiliar cases are typically discussed in interdisciplinary consultations, so that doctors and nurses alike determine (and learn) how to act in this new situation. Rather, I would interpret Benner as arguing that both forms of knowledge are necessary and integrated in how nurses interact with patients and situations as embodied practitioners.

This brief consideration of nursing demonstrates how various forms of knowledge converge as embodied knowledge, how they develop through experience and within community, and how they lead to intuitive assessments as part of a discernment process for providing excellent care.

# 2.2 Embodiment in Cultural Psychology

Benner's views that nursing practice is nurtured and developed in a community of practice move us towards the concept of embodiment in the discipline of cultural psychology. Voestermans & Verheggen, educators at Dutch universities in this discipline, argue that culture should not be treated as the cause or explanation of behavior, as if "culture" explains that certain people behave in a particular fashion. "Culture does not do anything, only people act." That is, agency should not be attributed to culture but to people (Voestermans and Verheggen 2007, pp. 18–20; English translation 2013). They ask how it is possible that we intuitively recognize particular behaviors as belonging to our culture. To explain this, they speak about the body not primarily as a collection of complex biological and biochemical processes, but as the visible and practiced body that is the carrier of social norms and meanings. Through being raised in a particular family and within intrinsic social groups, our bodies are trained, literally "in-corporated," into the life of the group. These "intrinsic social groups" consist of social groups that are held together by a mixture of rules, conventions and arrangements that together constitute the culture of the group. Furthermore, they also demonstrate how our emotions, as the primary embodied responses that set us in motion, and our feelings as an imaginative or conceptual layer between these primary responses and our environment, are trained and shaped within our cultural group (Voestermans and Verheggen 2007, pp. 65–90). Culture then, is "created" by our bodies, trained and sensitized in particular social groups, where norms are internalized and embodied in a pre-reflexive process of socialization and inculturation. This creates a community of skilled practitioners, whose bodily interactions will be intuitively recognized as fitting (or not so fitting) participation in the group's culture. Such a group cannot be joined simply by taking the multicultural integration exam that governments typically require of immigrants; however, one can grow into it, gradually developing more of the sensitivities and patterns of behavior of the host culture (Voestermans and Verheggen 2007, p. 95).

Thus, while our considerations of nursing discussed the norms and practice, i.e. the culture of a particular community of nursing practice, cultural psychology broadens the scope from professional to larger cultural groupings that share certain cultural identity markers. In both cases, it is clear that the groups being discussed are socially constructed, and that our bodies are primary and visible carriers of this social construction. Our bodies are shaped and sensitized through daily practice in a particular culture, or, we should say, in particular cultures (plural), since we may identify with varying groups depending on what is relevant in a given social context.

# 2.3 Embodiment in Cognitive Psychology

When we deal with nursing or culture, we can readily admit that embodiment is an important if not crucial dimension for understanding these disciplines, because it is fairly intuitive that nursing and culture are not only and perhaps not even primarily cognitive constructs that we adopt through deliberate rational processes. Yet, when we speak of "scientific knowledge" in comparison with or even in contrast to "experiential knowledge," it may appear as if "scientific knowledge" relates to the rational and universal, while "experiential knowledge" is merely local or personal, and intuitive. However, a consideration of embodiment within the discipline of cognitive psychology helps us realize that even scientific knowledge is an embodied form of knowledge.

Lakoff and Johnson, well known within theological studies for their study on metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), extend their work in their magnum opus, Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). In an ambitious project, they aim to revise 2000 years of philosophy, since it is based on the allegedly mistaken assumption that reason is independent of our body and senses, and that there are such things as universal rational principles. Instead, they propose that: "The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical" (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, p. 3). These propositions are the three major findings of cognitive science, according to Lakoff and Johnson.

Their argument begins with the recognition that our mind is embodied not merely in the trivial sense that our brains are part of our physical bodies. Rather, based on our particular sensory-motor system, our bodies have distinct ways of perceiving, moving and applying force, which are the source of spatial and causal categories in our conceptual system. Our concepts are particular neural patterns in our brain, originating in embodied experiences, that allow us to categorize our concepts and to reason about them. Human categories are typically conceptualized as prototypes with rather general or fuzzy elements, but we think of them as sharply distinct, envisioned spatially as containers. The container schema turns out to be a very basic schema of perception and reasoning. Lakoff and Johnson describe how spatial concepts depend on our capacity for vision, how the logic of causality depends on our capacity for bodily movement, and how the aspectual structure of actions and events depends on how bodily movements create a perspective of "before" and "after," generating a basic concept of time (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, pp. 18–39).

Next, in their analysis of abstract thinking, Lakoff and Johnson explain that primary metaphors are based on our bodily capacities. A few primary metaphors are (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, pp. 50–54):

Abstractions are then created by combining primary metaphors into complex metaphors, such as the "a purposeful life is a journey" metaphor (Lakoff and

4 These primary metaphors are not arbitrary social constructs, but have been shown to be consistent across many different languages and cultures in the world.

Johnson 1999, p. 61ff). In the remainder of their book, they describe how time, events, causes, the mind, the self and even morality all consist of one or more complex metaphors that can be analyzed in terms of primary metaphors, that in turn are grounded in our bodily constitution and capacities. Thus, they make a case that even abstract thinking is, in its very roots, embodied thinking, in the sense that our bodies intimately and subconsciously shape our categories and direct our thinking.

They describe from the perspective of cognitive psychology what Merleau-Ponty said much earlier, that our bodies mediate our access to the world (quoted above). Lakoff and Johnson add to that perspective that our bodies also shape, empower and limit the ways in which we talk and reason about the world. That is, embodiment not only affects a particular kind of knowledge (i.e. tacit knowledge in a well trained nurse), but all our knowledge of whatever kind is essentially embodied.

# 3 The Case for Embodied Realism

Lakoff and Johnson stand within a philosophical tradition that seeks to overcome dualistic thinking in terms of the subject/object divide that permeates much of Western philosophical thinking. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception is a key resource for understanding this movement. Although Merleau-Ponty was a careful student of Husserl and Heidegger, he differs from them in significant ways. Husserl's phenomenology was built on the assumed distinction between the inner and the outer, between the immanent sphere of consciousness with its "ideal essences," and the transcendental sphere of external, "real" objects. Merleau-Ponty rejects this subject-object duality by focusing on the body, which is neither object in the world, nor ideal essence in our consciousness, but our way of being in and interacting with the world (Merleau-Ponty 1978, pp. xv–xvi; Carman 1999, pp. 205–207). Moreover, in contrast to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty does not focus on the abstract nature of Being, but rather on understanding concrete human experience in all its immediacy (Thomas 2005). For instance, in discussing intentionality he describes how an infant does not watch its hand but focuses on the object it attempts to grab. The members of our body are only known in their functional value and their coordination (Merleau-Ponty 1978, p. 174). Also, a door does not appear in the world as an object with an ideal essence, but as a passageway through which to enter or exit a room, with which we engage automatically and intuitively. The door has significance, constructed through social interaction, as I inhabit the world, quite apart from my critical reflection on the "nature" or "function" of the door. It is through and with our bodies, as well as in interaction with others that we perceive and interact with the world. Our bodies give us a world (Scharen 2015, pp. 52–54).

Merleau-Ponty argues that we are, as it were, thrown into the world bodily (cf. Heidegger's "Being-in-the-world"). With our bodies we "get" a world. Our bodies participate in the world and it is through this embodied participation that the "I" constitutes itself as consciousness in relation to the world and itself. We do not have a body as we might have a house, but we are bodies (Carman 1999, pp. 218–221; Scharen 2015, pp. 54–55). Merleau-Ponty drew heavily on empirical psychology (Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis), neuroscience, physiology and Saussurian linguistics for his phenomenology (Toadvine 2016), and offers a perspective that Lakoff and Johnson build on with their research in cognitive psychology. Although their Metaphors We Live By does not refer to Merleau-Ponty, they credit him for his pioneering work on "flesh" in their Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, pp. xi, 97).

The lesser-known Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, a contemporary of Merleau-Ponty, shares the focus on concrete human experience, which he labels as the non-theoretical attitude of naïve experience (Dooyeweerd 1999, p. 12). Although Dooyeweerd speaks of the subject-object relationship, he denies that the human subject can describe qualities to objects as if they pertain to the metaphysical realm of being. These qualities cannot be abstracted from the experience of an object within a subject-object relationship. For instance, the color red has no meaningful metaphysical conception as a quality of flowers, but is only grasped as an aspect of daily human experiences of a flower.

The subject-object relations of naïve experience are, consequently, fundamentally different from the antithetical relations which characterized the theoretical attitude of thought. Subject and object are certainly distinguished in the non-theoretical attitude, but they are never opposed to each other. Rather, they are conceived in an unbreakable coherence. In other words, naïve experience leaves the integral structural coherence of our experiential horizon intact (Dooyeweerd 1999, p. 14).

Dooyeweerd investigates the relationship between our naïve, pretheoretical experience and the antithetical theoretical attitude. This relationship cannot be founded by further abstractions of theoretical thought, but must find its origin in "the inner nature of the human I" by way of critical self-reflection (Dooyeweerd 1999, pp. 15–23). This I can only find its source and meaning in "the central religious relation between the human ego and God, in whose image man was created," which is at the same time intimately connected to the selfhood of "our fellow-men." Dooyeweerd speaks of this religious center as the human heart, which is the integrative point of human experience and knowledge (Eikema Hommes 1982, pp. 112–121). He began work on a philosophical anthropology, including theoretical reflections about the various modal aspects of the human body, such as the physicalchemical and biotic functions and its "act-structure," but unfortunately this work was never finished, and it would take us too far afield for this chapter. Suffice to say that Dooyeweerd aimed to offer a Christian critique of theoretical thought that transcended the usual conceptions of the subject-object relationship, and identified the integrative center of human experience not as much in the human body, as Merleau-Ponty, but in the human heart with its religious orientation towards its Origin.

For readers of Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, it may appear strange that a prereflective attitude towards concrete human experiences is valued as the primary mode of being and knowing by these twentieth century philosophers, over against more reflective, theoretical reasoning and its strategies of knowing. In his research on cognitive bias, Kahneman and his team found that intuitive reasoning, based on impressions, feelings and fuzzy categories (stereotypes) provides solutions to puzzles in our daily human experience (Kahneman 2011). Experts may render intuitive judgments that are quite accurate, even without much rational processing, based on years of training and experience in their field, as Kahneman and his team carefully documented. However, in difficult puzzles where the answers are not immediately apparent, sometimes our intuitions hide our ignorance and mask the uncertainty in the world as they point confidently to solutions that may prove false upon further rational examination, even though we are not aware of that. The intuitive level of thinking is labeled "System 1" and is compared with "System 2" that is effortful, more deliberate, rational thinking which kicks in when we encounter new situations in which we need to learn or when we discover that our System 1 conclusion may not be adequate. Kahneman's theory seems to suggest, then, that reflective or theoretical thinking is more reliable then intuitive thinking, and should have priority—which appears to contradict the priority that both Merleau-Ponty and Dooyeweerd gave to embodied human experience and non-theoretical thinking.

This is, however, not the case. Rather, System 1 and System 2 thinking are both aspects of human experience and embodiment. First, note that Kahneman himself observes that much intuitive thinking, especially by experts in a matter related to their field of expertise, is very helpful and often on target, even if not perfect. This parallels descriptions in the first section of this paper of the intuitive and embodied judgments of well-trained and experienced nurses and reflects precisely the present argument on embodiment. Second, Kahneman acknowledges that though he deals with cognitive bias, this is not meant to imply that intuitive reasoning as a whole malfunctions—only that occasionally it is inadequate (Kahneman et al. 2011). Rather, System 2 supplements System 1 thinking when an error is detected or when rule-based reasoning is required. It is unclear precisely how System 1 and System 2 thinking are related, or how they could be mapped biologically and psychologically, but clearly System 2 receives input from System 1 thinking (Shleifer 2012).5 That is, both systems are rooted in human experiences and in embodied knowing. Third, in a popularizing article, Kahneman et al.'s theory describe how difficult it is for corporate decision makers to detect their own System 1 biases, and that they should use their System 2 rational thinking to ask questions and uncover biases in the reasoning of their subordinates in the proposals they bring to them (Kahneman et al. 2011, pp. 50–52). This presents a communicative strategy for overcoming the limitations of our embodied knowledge. Through dialogue and interaction, multiple perspectives are brought to bear on a particular situation or proposal, resulting in the detection and correction of cognitive biases. This strategy links System 1 and System 2 thinking from a variety of actors, so that the pool of embodied knowledge is enlarged, and personal limitations are transcended. This implicitly reflects Herbert Simon's theory of bounded rationality (Simon 1972),

5 Note that Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh is an extended discussion of this psychological mapping.

which acknowledges that people rarely have all the relevant knowledge or insight at their disposal in making choices. Their rationality is bounded:

Rational behavior in the real world is as much determined by the 'inner environment' of people's minds, both their memory contents and their processes, as by the 'outer environment' of the world on which they act, and which acts on them (Simon 2000, p. 25).

In this way, Kahneman's theory about cognitive bias and System 1/2 thinking confirms rather than contradicts the emphasis on concrete human experience and embodied knowledge that we found in Merleau-Ponty and Dooyeweerd.

We now return to Lakoff and Johnson's proposal to label their account of how reason and reality interact as "embodied realism." This view accepts the "assumption that the material world exists and ... [that] we can function successfully in it," as well as the assumption that we have direct access to the world (no mind-body gap). However, it denies that there is one and only one correct description of the world, since our knowledge is based upon the nature of our bodies and brains, and upon our particular location in the world. This is a form of relativism that is connected to the nature of our bodies and the way our bodies enable us to see, to know and to be carriers of practices and cultures. Yet, it also remains connected to the real world to which we all have direct access (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, pp. 94–96).

Our entire human knowledge system is so finely attuned to the world we live in that, even though we cannot access that reality without our cultural and physical conditioning, nevertheless we generally succeed well in functioning in this world. We not only have access to reality, but we also succeed in communicating about it with others who are similarly equipped. The various groups within which we find ourselves influence our habits, our movements (literally) and our communicative patterns, giving rise to communities of practice and, on a larger scale, to cultural groups. All of this is implied in the argument that we live in and know the world in the form of embodied realism.

Embodied realism has fascinating implications for how we think about concrete experiences in all their diversity. For "pure reason," diversity is simply the contingent part of our experience that needs to be "peeled away" to attain universal knowledge. For practical reason, however, diversity is precisely the stuff from which we discover and attain knowledge. Such embodied forms of knowledge require relationships, interaction and dialogue to share personal embodied knowledge, to make it explicit or public. This can be done informally through common manipulation of the material world, and through conversation and dialogue, or more formally through community negotiations and scientific research. Dialogue within relationships is needed to supplement our own embodied knowledge with that of others, which turns it into what Merleau-Ponty described as public, intersubjective knowledge which is open to debate and questioning (Benner 2000, p. 8). It is thus, by interacting with the specific and particular, by being confronted with diversity, that we gain a broader appreciation of certain phenomena, without necessarily ever reaching an absolute level of universal knowledge. Embodied knowledge, then, also implies a process of community formation and development, which implicates ethical qualities like patience, openness, respect and perseverance in the process of knowledge formation.

# 4 The Importance of the Concept of Embodiment for Spirituality, Discernment and Leadership

After describing the "turn towards the body" in various disciplines, and making a case for embodied realism, the next task is to apply this perspective to the key dimensions of this book: spirituality, discernment and leadership.

# 4.1 Embodiment as Foundational Mode of Spirituality

Much of theological thinking seems unaware of the embodied nature of our religious knowledge. That is not surprising, since theological scholarship often focuses on texts and the history of ideas. Moreover, there is a tendency to reduplicate the mind-body dualism by focusing religious knowledge on that which is spiritual, in contrast to the body as a material dimension of faith. However, since time immemorial, Christian beliefs and practices are inherently linked to embodiment. Sacred objects point to spiritual presence or have spiritual significance. Rituals involve the body in patterns of behavior as a way of interacting with or presencing the divine. Christians regularly celebrate how the Spirit transforms people's lives and gives gifts in ways that can be bodily experienced. Christians confess that God entered human experience in bodily fashion through the Incarnation. Finally, as followers of Christ, Christians typically picture themselves as incarnating Christ anew in their own lives and experiences. Thus, embodiment is an essential part of Christian thinking and practice, even if much of academic theology has been disembodied, perhaps even disincarnated.6

Yet, following the dictum that all theology is born of practice, theology is called to be empirically responsible. If theology is not in some significant sense a theology of embodied practice, it is not theology at all since it has lost sight of the primary mode for living theologically, that is, through incarnating Christ daily in our bodily existence. What is needed is a theological account of embodied spirituality as basic feature of Christian living.

Lived religion and religious embodiment have surfaced recently as important themes in the study of religion. First, sociologist of religion McGuire demonstrates that the long centuries of reformation, from 1300 to 1700, led to the historical marginalization of embodied practice. During this period, people's everyday religious practices, especially where they involved the body and the emotions, were

6 See Bass et al. (2016) for an extended discussion of the historical background and current issues on embodiment.

devalued, while religion was defined more institutionally and theology more cognitively. In short, "church" became organized religion which was seen as a "creed" or "faith" (McGuire 2007, pp. 188–190).7 Much of the modern sociology of religion betrays this institutional bias, surveying people's institutional attachments as markers of religiosity. Instead, McGuire argues, sociologists should be more sensitive to daily spiritual practices, which may or may not reflect the institutional practices that people are connected to:

Lived religion is constituted by the practices by which people remember, share, enact, adapt, and create the 'stories' out of which they live. And it is constituted through the practices by which people turn these 'stories' into everyday action. Ordinary material existence—especially the human body—is the very stuff of these meaningful practices. Religious and spiritual practices—even interior ones, such as contemplation—involve people's bodies and emotions, as well as their minds and spirits (McGuire 2007, pp. 197–198).8

Second, psychologist of religion Luhrman investigated extensively how people learn to recognize God's voice. She found that newcomers in certain charismatic faith communities went through a process whereby they learned to distinguish an internal mental process as not their own, but God's. Trained in psychoanalysis, Luhrman uses the technical term "dissociation" to describe this practice, which refers to the phenomenon that individuals may dissociate themselves from some of their own mental processes as if they came from another, external source (Luhrmann 2006). Although Luhrman does not self-identify as a Christian, and makes no claim about the reality of the transcendent that her respondents claim to experience, she describes a psychological and even physiological learning process that leads some individuals to conclude that they hear the voice of God in their own mind and body. Even if this process is experienced differently in other types of faith communities, this case study shows that there is an embodied process involved in learning to know God.9

As a theologian, I would argue that God has created a world with human beings in such a way that they are intimately attuned to this world and to one another. It is a material and embodied world that serves as stage for humans and God to know each other and to interact.10 Our entire human system of perceiving and knowing is attuned not only to knowing the world and the other, but also to knowing God. Moreover, God entered upon this creaturely stage to literally flesh out the bridge between the human and the divine. The gospel writers testify that it is in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, that is, in his embodied experience, that we observe and experience God the Father: "Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9, ESV).

7 For the extended argument, see her monograph, McGuire (2008).

8 James K. Smith makes a similar argument in developing a theological anthropology in which human beings are portrayed as essentially liturgical beings (Smith 2009, 2016).

9 See her full length study on this phenomenon in Luhrmann (2012).

10For a theological argument about human nature as essentially relational, based on an understanding of the Trinity, see Grenz (2001).

Knowing God, then, comes through our human capacities for knowledge, as described by the perspective of embodied realism. This implies, first, that spirituality is essentially an embodied phenomenon, like all other human forms of being and knowledge. God created an embodied system of knowing people, God and the world. Thus, knowing God does not take place without our bodies for we simply have no language and no way of being other than embodied.

Second, embodied spirituality is essentially a relational phenomenon. Our embodied, metaphorical mode of thinking, and our embodied discernment in communities of practice assume a social and ecological system in which we live. Humans cannot function otherwise. It is only in relational fashion that our embodied intuitions and knowledge become shared, open for discussion and dissent, whether this knowledge concerns the physical or the spiritual world. Knowing God and knowing the world is to participate in the material, social and spiritual world by sharing with and relating to other participants. Although we dare not minimize the impact of divine-human encounters,11 humans need the context of a community of practice to begin to interpret the significance of these encounters and to translate them into knowledge of God.12

# 4.2 Discernment as Embodied and Extended Cognition

This conception of spirituality as an embodied and relational form of knowing God has significant consequences for processes of discernment. Usually, Christian discernment is conceived of as a process of finding the will or call of God. It involves a sense of vision, seeing "the essence of the matter," that cannot always be achieved through "reasoned discourse" and "business-as-usual meetings" (Morris and Olsen 2012, pp. 3–8). It also involves close listening for God's call and guidance, sometimes discerned through impressions and emotions. It may take some solitude, but it always needs the Christian community in an effort to determine how to act faithfully. Contemporary Christian practices of discernment stand in a tradition of two millennia and more (Morris and Olsen 2012; Liebert 2015). These aspects indicate an awareness of the embodied nature of discernment, with its attention for vision, hearing and feeling in the context of relationships, dialogue and commitment.

Moreover, discernment should be distinguished from decision-making, since it focuses on the processes of "seeing," "listening" and dialogue more than on the final result, the decision. Of course, discernment usually leads to a decision. However, rational decision-making processes, with their focus on rational techniques like a

11Root offers an extended argument that divine-human encounters should be moved to the center of practical theological investigation (Root 2014), and Iyadurai argues that "religious experience" should be a prime focus in studying conversion, next to psychological and sociological aspects (Iyadurai 2015).

12For a further theological assessment of embodied spirituality, see Murphy 2006, Brown & Strawn 2012).

SWOT analysis, seem to presuppose that a group of people deliberating an issue see through a single lens, and should find the one right solution (Berlinger and Tumblin 2004). Discernment, instead, acknowledges our embodied situatedness, which leads to multiple competing and incomplete perspectives on the issue that cannot always be resolved through rational methods. Realizing that there may be more than one "right" solution, or even that several "right" solutions might yield significantly different results, discernment helps weigh the alternatives while listening closely to intuitive and more rational assessments in the group. Thus, discernment processes may complement more rational techniques for decision-making (Kaak et al. 2013).

Thus, the current literature on discernment already demonstrates various features of embodiment. The perspective of embodied realism adds more depth. Our bodies are the interface with the world, so we think in terms of sensing, motor movements and action—this even applies to more abstract domains of theoretical thinking (Brown and Strawn 2017, p. 414). Long years of socializing in social and cultural groups shaped our habits, our movements (literally), and our communicative patterns, giving rise to communities of practice. Thus, our bodies are shaped socially and culturally, often in a prereflective attitude. Discernment, then, is the interactional and communicative process that takes place within a community of practice to reflect on these habits, actions and communication patterns, and to bring to the surface that which is relevant but hidden, in order to determine the best course of action for a particular situation.

Such a process of discernment is helpful in overcoming the limitations of our situated embodiment. Asking reflective questions about our habits and (intuitive) practices—reminiscent of Kahneman's research—surfaces both practical knowledge as well as cognitive bias. Communication enables multiple actors together to overcome the limitations of their personal embeddedness in concrete situations by becoming aware of and compensating for our biases, and by enlarging the shared pool of experiences and knowledge. The aim is not to produce universal knowledge—which is beyond our reach—but to develop a broader social consensus suitable for a particular time, place and culture.

Newer theories of extended cognition enhance our understanding of this process (Teske 2013). In this communal discernment process, a dynamic occurs that makes it difficult to decide from which person the solution originated. Cognition is not limited to what happens within one individual (embodied cognition), but can be extended across a larger collective or group with a common identity. As individuals become incorporated in the group and participate in mutual problem solving, an encompassing identity is created that is larger than the sum of the individual identities involved (Brown and Strawn 2017, p. 416). Individual cognitions are not simply exchanged, but as it were networked throughout the group, like computers might be networked to create a larger, more powerful processing unit. Thus, solutions produced in such a group by this mechanism of extended cognition cannot be simply attributed to one of the minds, but to the aggregate whole.

The perspective of embodied realism, then, portrays discernment as a somewhat fuzzy and intuitive, but also rational and relational process, based on our incorporation in a social group and our embodied participation in a particular context. Rational, emotional and intuitive concerns each play their role in corporately constructing or adapting the interpretation of the situation in such a way that one or more courses of action open up for the group, and that a choice can be made for what appears at that moment to be most optimal.

Embodiment further implies that discernment is not primarily framed by institutional concerns and societal values, except in so far as they represent the social setting within which one participates. It also implies that authority figures have no special claim to discern better than other participants, except in so far as the authority figure is incorporated in the group in which the discernment process takes places. Discernment is a fuzzy and relational process in which all participants have an important role to play in contributing from their perspective as embodied participants.

# 4.3 Embodiment, Discernment and Leadership

Embodiment is beginning to impact leadership studies as well. In 2013, the journal Leadership published a special issue on "The materiality of leadership," creating a space for discussions on how embodiment effects the relationship between leaders and followers, on the gestures and aesthetics of leadership, on the effect of (material) place on leadership, on the embodiment of emotions and passion in (abusive) leadership, and on gender and transgressive bodies in leadership. In the same year, the International Leadership Association published a volume in its Building Leadership Bridges series on The Embodiment of Leadership (Melina et al. 2013). The introduction explains that great leaders are memorialized by statues, celebrating their bodies. These statues present a visible reminder that the leader is different from followers even in their bodies. Also, leadership involves a particular bodily performance of various tasks, and is experienced as embodied authority, control and/or empowerment (Melina et al. 2013, pp. xiii–xvi). To advance our argument about embodied spirituality and discernment, the question arises, How does embodied discernment affect our views of leadership?

In his contribution to The Embodiment of Leadership, David Holzmer offers a three-part conceptual framework to reconstruct leadership as embodied leadership in a context of rapid and continual change. The first concept, "liminality," focuses on experiences of "disruption and upheaval" which leaders can use "as an important and necessary condition ... to construct new narratives" (Holzmer 2013, pp. 49–50). This liminal period is not simply an insecure transition period through which leaders quickly navigate their constituency; rather, the leader is able to bear and hold fast this liminal insecurity in order to lead others in re-habituating their practices and remolding their identity. In Heifetz' theory of adaptive leadership, this is comparable to the holding environment that leaders are to create as they strive to harness and resolve conflict (Heifetz et al. 2009, pp. 149–157). The description of this "holding environment" indicates various physical and embodied features, so that people are, as it were, physically held together in one place to face the conflict or liminality. Liminality, then, is not a moment of cognitive confusion but a period of disorientation and change that is felt and experienced viscerally as well as cognitively. The holding space likewise is an embodied experience of being held together, not so much by force (although that might occur as well), but by factors such as persuasion, encouragement and empowerment by adaptive leaders to resist the tendencies that drive the group apart in order to find a constructive way forward. Although Heifetz et al. did not use the terminology of embodiment, Holzmer's analysis makes the embodied dimension manifest.

Holzmer's second concept, "performance," relates to how leaders present themselves and their body, and how their embodied leadership is experienced by subordinates. Typically, leaders embodied control and domination in a long history of leadership practice, but now leaders are called upon to openly acknowledge the hierarchical norms they embodied and to experiment with new forms of embodied leadership to create new ways of common action (Holzmer 2013, pp. 53–56). It has long been maintained that domination and hierarchy are simply rational ways of controlling and leading others, in a way that leaves the role of leadership bodies unexplored. However, in many ways, leadership is the performance of a particular social role in which social and cultural norms are enacted. This performance is more than just rational, and relates to the leader's presence and interaction with his or her followers. Occasionally, a leader's presence can be intensely felt in bodily fashion (Ladkin 2013, pp. 321–22). Thus, the way a leader uses his or her body is an essential part of leadership performance, highlighting the embodied nature of leadership.

Finally, Holzmer's third concept, "dialogue," focuses on the leaders' task to create "communicative space between people" so that the "transformative process" of dialogue can yield fruit (Holzmer 2013, pp. 57–58). In this perspective, leadership is not simply a rational process that directs the vision and actions of followers through disembodied discourse, but it becomes a rational, emotional and intuitive performance to create a safe holding environment for followers in spite of fears and insecurities. The concept of extended cognition, discussed above, can explain how such a dialogue in a safe holding environment can create a new sense of group purpose and identity. It creates cognitive connections between group participants that allow for a broader and more adequate way to process the challenges of liminality. This, in turn, creates the personal and organizational transformation necessary to stand strong in a fluid society. Evidently, dialogue in all its richness is an embodied process that cannot be managed purely rationally and cognitively.

Holzmer thus illustrates how leadership is an essentially embodied process in which discernment and dialogue are vital social practices to enable groups and organizations to determine fruitful courses of action.

# 5 Conclusion

In summary, based on theories about embodied and extended cognition, embodiment offers important epistemological insights that generate the perspective of embodied realism, a perspective that has gained significant attention in various disciplines. Embodied realism implies that spirituality, as a concern with the divine-human encounter, is an embodied phenomenon, as practiced in religious rituals and as confessed in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. This, then, allows us to consider discernment as not merely a rational or disembodied spiritual practice, but as a practice of seeing, listening and sensemaking that draws our embodied experiences, memories and perceptions together to arrive at a collective attribution of meaning and wise action. This, in turn, recasts the framework of leadership from one of vision casting and rational strategizing to embodied (social and institutional) performance, creating a safe but liminal space to enable the transformation of personal and collective identity, leading to renewed social and religious action.

# Bibliography

Kahneman D (2011) Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

Jack Barentsen (Ph.D.) studied physics, philosophy and theology in the US, and moved to the Netherlands in 1988 as pastor and church planter. Working with new church plants provided opportunity to learn about discipleship and leadership development. This became an academic pursuit at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit in Leuven (Belgium) by researching leadership development in early Christianity through the lens of modern leadership theory (Emerging Leadership in the Pauline Mission, W&S 2011). Since then, Barentsen teaches and researches the practice of pastoral and religious leadership in multiple countries, developing his own descriptive "Integrative Model of Pastoral Leadership." He serves as Full Professor and Chair of Practical Theology and as Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Social Ethics. He also holds an appointment as Extraordinary Associate Professor of New Testament and Practical Theology in the Faculty of Theology of North-West University, South Africa. He is married and has two grown-up daughters, with their own expanding family.