INsight/ Your Learning Mindset
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Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash
Manila, 10 February 2021 — Suspicion or Faith, what is your hermeneutic?
Story
It happened in 2015 at a historic UN Summit in New York. Government leaders from around the world agreed to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The goals came into force soon after, in January 2016. Now, five years later, the pressure is mounting to achieve the goals by 2030 as we have entered the so-called Decisive Decade. And I have a question for you: do you believe that it will be done? Before you answer that, please take a few minutes to think about it (and you can keep the answer to yourself if you like).
Let’s make a side step here. Last week I went on a fascinating journey led by Professor Bryan van Norden in his Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy. Feeling almost like I had a virtual-reality headset on, we took a deep and exciting dive into the succession of Chinese ways of thinking, right from their mythical Three Sovereigns and Yellow Emperor more than 5,000 years ago, to Laozi, Kongzi, and Zhuangzi, and many others, all the way to its present-day leaders. However, what puzzled me most was not in the main text but in an appendix where Van Norden helps the reader explore the different ways of learning from a book or text that we consider to be valuable to us. That’s where hermeneutics came in.
Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. It started with the interpretation of sacred and historic texts, and later expanded to our understanding of any important written, verbal, and nonverbal communications in the media we have at our disposal today. The use of hermeneutics is especially important to understand the messages we receive from another time in history or an unfamiliar contemporary context (such as from another culture or social media echo chamber other than your own).
Challenge
To help us recognize our own subconscious patterns of thought, Van Norden distinguishes a hermeneutic of suspicion from a hermeneutic of faith and points out that most people have a preference for one or the other. You can see it as a pattern in your subconscious learning mindset that is mostly ‘under the surface’ of your leadership dashboard until you start paying attention to it in your awareness. As the titles suggest, a hermeneutic of suspicion lets you start your interpretation with doubt about the truth, validity, or usefulness of the message, even leading you to look for the messenger’s possible ulterior interests or motives. On the other hand, when you prefer a hermeneutic of faith, you tend to start with finding reasons why the message you receive can be true, justified, and useful, leading you to explore it with an open mind and considering how you can apply it and benefit from it.
Professor Van Norden’s distinction reminded me that leaders like you and me, who want to influence positive changes in the face of the world’s unprecedented sustainability challenges, will need to go beyond technical expertise and even beyond learning as leaders how to build bridges between disciplines, countries, and the thinking of different generations and cultures. We need to also review how we ourselves think, learn, and practice. Our own learning mindset is where the challenge starts.
The journey takes us to look under the surface of our own minds and discern the patterns of thought that in turn produce our behaviors and actions. When we take up that challenge, we create the possibility of improving ourselves and helping others more effectively on the leaders journey. This challenge is what led me to shift my career from an international water specialist into a leadership development coach, prompted by my discovery that most of the world’s water problems are, under the surface, problems of people who want to do good yet find themselves at a loss for learning how to make a difference in our complex world.
Question
To solve most of the sustainability problems facing us today, including that of water security, we need to first make sure that our learning mindsets are not part of the problem and will not prevent us from building trust in others to finding better solutions together through collaboration. In other words, while the hermeneutic of suspicion and the hermeneutic of faith can both help us, we need to give enough space for faith, trust, and discovery. That’s where a dive into philosophy and hermeneutics can help us in our leadership development.
Now let’s get back to the question of whether you believe that the Sustainable Development Goals will be achieved by 2030. What is your answer after taking into account your preferred hermeneutic, that of suspicion or of faith? And what are you taking away from this post that you can use on your way forward?
Want to learn more? In Grow3Leaders, our international community of leaders, we take deep dives into effective leadership behaviors, including those that investigate our learning mindset and other mental models that are hiding ‘under the surface.’ Exploring together what we can learn from China’s classical philosophers to solve today's sustainability challenges is part of that.