Leading from Experience: Finding Your Negative Capability

During moments of uncertainty, how do we draw upon and make use of our living, embodied experience? What happens when we open the channels to our emotions and anxieties and register what they are telling us before we can consider what to do about it? For the poet John Keats, this way of working—what he called negative capability—was the capacity to remain ‘in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ How do we recognize and work with the anxiety that arises when the future feels unclear?

In many parts of the world, we are witnessing a moment in which individuals have exercised acts of leadership on behalf of their communities in the face of authoritarianism and overlapping organizational crises. These acts demonstrate that leadership can arise from any position, whether or not one holds formal authority. However, these acts may often carry real risks and varying degrees of danger. Turning toward one’s own emotional experience can become a powerful and often vulnerable expression of citizenship—helping us discern when and when not to act amid moments of social uncertainty.

Registering one's internal experience offers valuable insights into being part of any group, whether it be work, family, or society. Every member of a group has a unique window into the group’s dynamics. Recognizing and naming that experience can help the group reflect, reorient, and reengage its capacity to work on its task. This kind of attention to experience is itself an act of leadership—one that can emerge from anyone.

This workshop is designed to strengthen participants’ ability to exercise leadership in a broad range of work roles through finding one's negative capability and taking up a consultative stance. Participants learn to recognize the value of their inner experience - thoughts, feelings, associations, fantasies, daydreams, pre-occupations - and to articulate them to further the group’s purpose and task, be it in a work, community, or family context.