Quick Takes: The Prudent Leader

Alan Jacobs, in his commonplace book, quotes David Brooks on prudence in leadership.

From Brooks via Jacobs

What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.

How is prudence acquired? Through experience. The prudent leader possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and who can’t, what has worked and what hasn’t.

And Jacobs comment

—David Brooks is exactly right. However, he should add one more point, a point which complicates everything immensely: experience does not guarantee prudence. The Senate is full of people with many, many years of legislative experience who have no wisdom or discernment at all. One of them may even be a candidate for Vice-President. So the Big Question is: How do we identify, among the experienced, the marks of prudential wisdom that will translate well into the executive arena?

The ancients included prudence in a list of virtues under a larger category called wisdom.  Experience is not simply living long enough to have a lot of influential relationships and stories to tell. Experience that produces prudence is born from suffering and struggle.  It is the result of seeing the world as it is, not as we wish would be. Only from this more "stoic" perspective does prudence emerged to be the wisdom that leaders need.