Get Wisdom

Wisdom is the principal thing;
Therefore get wisdom.
And in all your getting, get understanding.

Proverbs 4:7

Collaboration, or the effort to collaborate, like many other strategies, can be wasted and unproductive. Collaboration is a process of bringing others together for a common goal. However, many efforts can be made which look and feel like collaboration. We may in fact be completely wasting our time and effort. Or even worse, we may be doing great damage by attempting to partner with others without wisdom.

In an earlier post, I laid out a process.

STRATEGY

A well defined process can help us turn dreams into action.

What I see in my evaluation of every day business is that leaders and teams often attempt to start on step 7 without doing any of the foundational work. If we skip the steps, we create action without strategy. This is like getting on a bus with no defined destination, especially if we don’t know the driver and his/her intentions. The engine may be roaring, the radio is on, traffic is rushing by, the wind is in our hair, but we don’t know where we are going.

Wisdom is defined by as “the ability to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting.” If we attempt to jump ahead without discerning who we are partnering with, or who we are following, then we will learn in time that we are really not collaborating. We are just sitting on a bus going somewhere because going somewhere is what we are supposed to do.

So where is your bus going? Who are you riding with? More importantly, who is driving your bus? Look back at the steps. Wisdom will guide us through this process. Wisdom will open our eyes to see not only our own true values, but also to discern the true values of others.

I would assert that every failed relationship has its roots in a failure to discern, early on, what values were at play, both in ourselves and the others. In pursuit of wisdom, we begin to see a more clear picture of who we are in relationship with, where they are going and whether or not we want to be part of that journey. In reality, collaboration is not a process of bringing others together by redirecting their lives. If you look at the parts of the whole team, you will see people who were already going in a similar direction. The leadership process here is simply activating similar values, bringing people together around shared passions and creating goals to reflect these hidden elements.

When we fail to collaborate, we have opportunity to learn and apply these lessons to our future use of energy. This is part of the process of developing wisdom, along with absorbing the lessons learned from those who model a life lived by wisdom.

We don’t want to waste years of our lives working hard to collaborate with those who are going in a different direction. We need wisdom to guide us to discern, allowing us to expend our energy on relationships and projects that align with who we are and express out true values.

This all starts with us!
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates