myAIPMLeaders Need to Harness Aristotle’s 3 Types of Knowledge
Roger L. Martin , Richard Straub and Julia Kirby | Harvard Business Review
"If you’re working to improve your leadership capability, what exactly should you be trying to develop? The experience of the 2020 pandemic offers a powerful lesson: A critical skill a leader must bring to the table is the ability to figure out what kind of thinking is required to address a given challenge. Bring the wrong kind of thinking to a problem and you’ll be left fruitlessly analyzing scientific data when what’s desperately needed is a values-informed judgment call. Or, just as bad, you’ll trust your instincts on a matter where a straightforward data analysis would expose how off-base your understanding is.
Mistakes like this happen all the time, because different kinds of human effort require different kinds of knowledge. This is no novel claim of our own — it’s only what Aristotle explained more than 2,000 years ago. He outlined distinct types of knowledge required to solve problems in three realms. Techne was craft knowledge: learning to use tools and methods to create something. Episteme was scientific knowledge: uncovering the laws of nature and other inviolable facts that, however poorly understood they might be at the moment, “cannot be other than they are.” Phronesis was akin to ethical judgment: the perspective-taking and wisdom required to make decisions when competing values are in play — when the answer is not absolute, multiple options are possible, and things can be other than what they are. If you’re a farmer designing an irrigation system or a software engineer implementing an agile process, you’re in the techne realm. If you’re an astronomer wondering why galaxies rotate the way they do, you’re in the epistemic realm. If you’re a policymaker deciding how to allocate limited funds, you’re in the phronesis realm.
The reason that Aristotle bothered to outline these three kinds of knowledge is that they require different styles of thinking—the people toiling in each of these realms tend toward habits of mind that serve them well, and distinguish them from the others. Aristotle’s point was that, if you have a phronetic problem to solve, don’t send an epistemic thinker."
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Leaders Need to Harness Aristotle’s 3 Types of Knowledge, Roger L. Martin , Richard Straub and Julia Kirby, Harvard Business Review, 2020
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