ABSTRACT
Work life can be frenetic and pose challenges for how we prioritize time and effort. It is therefore useful to ask are we too busy to learn, to be mindful, and to be wise? This chapter explores a knowledge-intensive service sector organization that explicitly states a desire to be wise and examines its curious barriers to learning. Faucher, Everett, and Lawson (2008) correctly say that hierarchical models of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom are flawed and that “messy” social interactions in complex social systems create knowledge. Faucher et al. also say that wisdom develops in these complex interactions when the interactions create higher forms of understanding. We argue that mindfulness is a mechanism in wisdom that turns the messiness into wisdom by grounding learning. Wisdom is an important concept for addressing a wide range of issues around organizational effectiveness (Kolodinsky & Bierly, 2013), and learning. The organization in which this study took place adopted wisdom as one of its core values: its other core values were high competence, enthusiasm, and being hands-on.
