Stephen Billing’s Blog

One of the most common ways that people are finding this site and blog is through my earlier posts on Patricia Benner’s work on 5 stages of skill acquisition and their implications for leadership (here).

Other work of Benner’s is relevant to leaders initiating change in their organisations. In The Primacy of Caring, she explores the practice of professionals dealing with health and illness, growth and loss, as they are lived or experienced.

Her findings have relevance for leaders of change because people going through change situations are also dealing with growth and loss.

While it is common to think of grief in terms of a grief cycle (e.g. Kubler-Ross), Benner’s explanation of humans as self-interpreting beings suggests that the responses of participants come from their understanding of the situation, and that they respond as the situation demands and as it unfolds in time. It is not purely about a process such as a grief cycle.

This understanding of situation is important. Benner argues that humans have the capacity to grasp a situation directly in terms of its meaning for the self (not necessarily going through a grief cycle), and this ability is made possible by four aspects of our humanness:

• Embodied intelligence
• Background meaning
• Concern
• Situation

Firstly, people have embodied intelligence. This means that we grasp a situation quickly in a non-reflective way, as in our ability to recognise faces and also perform familiar tasks such as driving on ‘auto-pilot’ without conscious attending. Our embodied intelligence is what enables a racing car driver to assess a situation and take action much more quickly than conscious reflection would allow.

Embodied intelligence can also be seen as skilled spontaneity. This is the faculty that is responsible for the experience of driving to work in the morning and not remembering familiar aspects of the journey, such as changing gear, or stopping for a particular traffic light.

Leaders and facilitators of change can develop skilful ‘spontaneous’ ways of dealing with certain types of group situations, and not be able to explain them, because the explaining is like asking a concert pianist to explain how their fingers move across the keys – one of the key attributes of embodied intelligence is that it breaks down under conscious reflection.

A concert pianist having to explain how they play the piano would likely be halting and hesitant in explaining it, and would certainly perform the piece relatively poorly if they had to think about each finger on each key rather than ‘going with the flow’.

This embodied intelligence works best when it is not noticed. For example, in tennis, I have experienced someone commenting to me that my serve is going well, only to find that this made me think about my serve with the consequence that it broke down completely.

Embodied intelligence can also be thought of as ‘unconscious competence.’

Itis difficult to articulate, and Benner suggests that this difficulty in articulation is one reason why embodied intelligence has been undervalued in western society, compared to rational thinking.

It could be helpful for leaders to consider that both the leader’s gesture and the employee’s ‘resistant’ response will have an element of embodied intelligence, some element of skilled spontaneity that is habitual and learnt, and is outside of the individual’s awareness. 

The next posts will discuss Benner’s ideas about background meaning, concern and situation.