Managing Leadership^®

Many people, today, refer to the Socratic method as a way of using questions to guide someone – a student, for example – to the “right” answer or solution. On the other hand, Plato may have used it in the Dialogues as a means of setting up and knocking down various straw men representing the unquestioned truisms of his day, trying to discover the real truth these actually concealed. In this way, he emphasized not the Socratic Method as a didactic technique, but the dialogue itself as a means of presentation which highlighted the salient aspects of both sides of the argument, so that the “right” answer would stand out more clearly in the end.

But I think Socrates may have simply used it as a way to learn, and only then to teach. He envisioned every new topic he encountered as riddled with suspect logic – or, more likely and worse, with baseless logic; that is, arguments, beliefs, or practices that were built on sand. His defense against submitting himself to this sort of Socratic ignorance was to launch questions at these various groupings of ideas – some of which served as veritable social institutions – to see if they could withstand the assault.

And while he did that, he paid particular attention to the ground on which they rested, to see whether or not the pressure of his questioning opened any fissures in the assumptions upon which they depended, the veracity of which was appealed to by their supporters as undeniable. If he saw such a crack open up in these edifices or their foundations, he piled right into the breach, opening it wider and repeating the process.

When he finally found a premise that could hold its ground, he submitted that to further examination. But this time, he enquired into its meaning in the context of the current discussion. He then carefully built a new argument on the answers that survived this phase of the critical questioning. This often proved most enlightening to his listeners, and, certainly, most threatening to the guardians of the traditional dogma.

Clearly, then, Socrates was not a Socratic genius – that’s how he described the sort of people who hardly know what they know, and who don’t really know at all most of what they think they know. He, on the other hand, had a very precise and intimate knowledge of what he knew – and what he didn’t know. And he developed that by assuming that he was ignorant of the truth in the first place, and that the representations of it foisted on him by others or by society were unreliable.

He learned to disregard tradition, reputation, credentials, and the powerful communal call to put one’s faith in these, or in those who guarded or possessed them. No catchwords, no truisms, no platitudes were allowed to take the place of his own judgment. He assumed nothing on authority, and demanded that everything he ultimately accepted as valid could stand on its own logical merits. In the end, then, what he knew, he knew from the inside out.

Now, as you develop yourself as a manager, what method do you use?

We’ll be turning to our own examination of that subject, soon.

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Here is a list of all the posts in this popular series:

1. Radiating Imbecility
2. Rays of hope
3. Pulsating inconsistency
4. Radiating confidence
5. Blind faith
6. Mirror, mirror . . .
7. Socratic genius
8. Socratic ignorance
9. Socratic method
10. First principles
11. The Socratic attitude
12. Why we do what we do
13. Recon by fire

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