How to think like Shakespeare
On December 21, 1817, the poet John Keats wrote a letter that included a powerful concept: Something he called “negative capability,” meaning when someone “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
The idea is about embracing the unknown and resisting explaining away things we don’t yet understand. It’s a 200-year-old idea that is remarkably relevant today.
In our culture of performance and immediate answers, there is a focus on “positive” capabilities. It leads to an almost unbearable pressure to be fast and decisive. How can we re-embrace the power of negative capability?
Being “capable” doesn’t mean acting decisively or knowing everything immediately
I learned how to be “capable” at a very young age, or at least I thought I did. I learned how to revise to ace exams and get into elite universities. I practiced for hours each week to be an elite swimmer. I learned the skills to write two books in my thirties and to give talks at prestigious events. Throughout my career, society reinforced the idea that capability was synonymous with performance, outcomes, and achievement – what I knew and how well I did things.
It turns out, this is not what capability means.
“Capability,” like “capacity,” derives from the Latin word capax. It means “able to hold much.” It is grounded in the idea of “containing” or “spaciousness.” Imagine the space inside an enormous shipping container. Its internal space, how much it can hold, determines its capacity. As the Tao Te Ching says, “it is the emptiness within it that makes it useful.” Keats used “negative” to describe the space beyond what we know.
Reconnecting with the unknown
“Don’t play what’s there,” Miles Davis famously said. “Play what’s not there.”
Negative capability is a beautiful thing to look for in art, stories, or music. But the “negative” is often overlooked, underappreciated, or taken for granted. Some people — entrepreneurs, adventurers, artists, scientists, performers — have a gift for embracing negative capability as a space of possibility, a doorway to deeper investigation.
For Keats, Shakespeare was the perfect embodiment of his concept. His plays were full of mistaken identities and ambiguous endings with many possible meanings. He muddied the water with the shades of grey, the place in which actual life takes place. The great playwright wrote in the space beyond what we know — that’s where he found beauty, hope, and a new way of thinking.
But for most people, fear of the unknown is one of the greatest fears of all. We like to know how things will end — at the beginning.
Why do we need negative capability in “negative” situations?
Ironically, we need negative capability the most in situations where there is a lack of something. Peter Simpson, an associate professor in organization studies at Bristol Business School, identifies three key types of situations in which we need to use negative capability:
- Not knowing what to do
- Not having adequate resources
- Not trusting or being trusted
In these kinds of circumstances, the pressure to act quickly and decisively, especially for a leader, can be immense. Our “positive capabilities” reflexively kick into full gear. But as we’ve seen in spades since the pandemic, this type of leadership, which avoids difficult questions and represses doubts, can be ineffective, even dangerous. The need for speed and control can make decision-makers jump straight into the chaos without holding the space for insightful action to emerge.
Learning not to do something
When I first came across the term “negative capability,” I honestly thought it was an oxymoron. How can you be negative and capable? The concept sounded incongruous. But Keats used “negative” not in the pejorative sense, but to connote the ability to not to do something:
- To not jump to quick conclusions or impulsively react
- To not give people information or answers that create false certainty
- To not engage defensively with ambiguity or change
- To not neatly shoehorn ideas and experiences into preconceived boxes
For the psychologist, Wilfred Bion, negative capability was about not giving in to the temptation to continually engage with the safety of the familiar.
“Discard the future tense of your desire: forget…both what you knew and what you want, to leave space for a new idea.” Beautiful.
You can only have a positive if there is a negative
As a child, I tried on multiple occasions to cut a magnet in half. I know… I quickly discovered you miraculously get another pair of poles; the positive and negative can’t be separated. Yet in life and leadership, that’s what we try to do.
It’s the negative pole of an electric current that is passive and receptive. It’s the open end that allows us to embrace the world’s mystery, uncertainty, and doubt. The pole requires deep vulnerability and trust to discover the freedom and choice that exists in the unknown.
There’s never a positive space without a negative in science and art, and the same can be said in life. Let’s learn how to reconnect our positive and negative capabilities.
Warmly,
