Drawing from John Berger’s “Bento’s Sketchbook” to discover a philosophy of presence, precision, and ethical leadership
When John Berger draws a cluster of purple plums, he isn’t just creating an image. He is entering into a relationship—one that demands his complete attention.
Berger’s book Bento’s Sketchbook documents this relationship through encounters with the world, each drawing becoming a record of patient observation, ethical commitment, and what he calls “a form of probing.”
Reading Berger’s reflections—part philosophy, part memoir, part meditation on art—I wondered: What if leadership followed this pattern? What if we began by paying exquisite attention instead of performance metrics and strategic plans?
Berger never frames his book as leadership advice. Yet his approach to drawing reveals a deeper wisdom about how we might lead others with precision and humanity. From his meditations, I’ve distilled five practices that have transformed my research, strategy, and facilitation approach.
1. The Moral Discipline of Return
Early one morning, Berger sets out to draw a cluster of plums. His first attempt fails. So does his second. Frustrated, he abandons the effort, only to return hours later to try again.
But he can’t locate the same cluster in the changed afternoon light. He circles the tree repeatedly, fighting the temptation to settle for a different bunch. “Something in me obstinately refused,” he writes. Finally, he spots a tiny black-and-white snail he’d noticed that morning—thirty centimeters away, from his original cluster.
“Drawing is correcting,” Berger notes. Each correction requires persistence and a deeper quality: fidelity to the original moment of attention.
In our efficiency-obsessed culture, we seldom grant ourselves permission for this kind of return. We move quickly to the next task, the next solution, the next metric. Berger suggests something more demanding: resisting the urge to substitute convenience for precision.
Try this: In your next challenging conversation, notice when you begin to rush toward conclusion. Instead, circle back to your initial point of fascination or concern. What patterns emerge when you resist closure? What new possibilities appear when you return to your original attention?
2. Accompanying the Invisible
When Berger’s friend Marie-Claude dies suddenly at 58, he spends hours drawing irises to place near her coffin. With black ink, colored rice paper, and his saliva as medium, he works until the drawing “stops being a heap of signs and becomes a presence.”
The drawing will be buried with her.
That same week, he learns that a small sketch he donated to charity has sold for £4,500 to benefit asylum-seekers. Through these parallel experiences, Berger recognizes that drawing serves a purpose beyond representation:
“We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.”
This insight transforms leadership. If you work in healthcare, education, policy, or community organizing, your metrics and deliverables are never the whole story. Behind them lies something invisible—human dignity, justice, or healing—that your work accompanies without fully capturing.
Try this: Identify the invisible dimension of your current project. Perhaps it’s a person whose life will be changed, a possibility not yet realized, or an unspoken grief. How would acknowledging this invisible dimension change your decisions? How might it alter the way you present your work to others?
3. The Ethics of Precision
Berger introduces us to Luca, a retired aircraft mechanic living outside Paris. For decades, Luca calibrated the controls of Air France jets, testing every system before certifying them airworthy. His signature guaranteed safety for 2,500 flying hours.
Now retired, he keeps a meticulous calendar documenting daily life: weather patterns, repairs completed, and work observed in his neighborhood. For poorly executed work, he reserves “violent adjectives,” seeing carelessness as “a reminder of the farce that life risks becoming.”
What’s striking is that Luca’s precision isn’t motivated by perfectionism but by care. For him, precision is a form of respect for reality—an acknowledgment that details matter because people matter. When Luca’s wife develops Alzheimer’s, he calculates that his savings will last exactly 1,095 days in a quality nursing home. After that, “we’ll have nothing left,” he writes in his calendar, adding his signature as if certifying his own life’s airworthiness.
In leadership, we often talk about excellence but rarely about precision as an ethical stance. Luca shows us that meticulous attention isn’t merely about getting things right—it’s about honoring the reality of others’ dependence on our work.
Try this: Identify a task that seems mundane but significantly affects others. Approach it with unusual attentiveness, not to be perfect, but to respect those who will encounter your work. Observe how this shift in motivation changes both the process and the outcome.
4. The Choreography of Revelation
Berger describes attending two dances in the same alpine valley within days. At a Moroccan-Algerian wedding, women dance in a style that suggests more than it reveals, each movement hinting at concealed power. Days later, at a French birthday party, he witnesses the opposite approach: bodies moving outward, showing rather than suggesting.
This contrast leads Berger to distinguish two narrative strategies: those that work through concealment (the “introverted” dance) and those that work through revelation (the “extroverted” dance).
“Both are sexy and enticing,” he writes, “but their strategies and ontology are opposed. It’s the difference between hiding and displaying… It’s a question of the priority given to the hidden or the displayed, to the invisible or the visible.”
Leaders face similar choices in communicating vision and strategy. Some situations demand transparency, laying everything bare at once. Others require gradual revelation, creating space for mystery and discovery. Neither approach is inherently superior, but confusion between them creates discord.
Try this: Examine a communication challenge you’re facing. Are you trying to draw your audience toward a mystery they’ll help solve or offering complete visibility? If you’ve been struggling with a particular message, consider whether you’ve chosen the wrong dance for the moment.
5. The Quiet Resistance of Ethics
Among Berger’s most moving reflections is his tribute to Erhard Frommhold, a publisher he knew in East Germany. Frommhold released politically challenging books during the Cold War until he was accused of promoting “bourgeois decadence” and demoted to gardener’s assistant in a public park.
He accepted this punishment without protest and continued working. What struck Berger wasn’t Frommhold’s political stance but his ethical presence—his “small, undemonstrative, persistent hope” and unwavering commitment to truth amid historical forces that seemed overwhelming.
Frommhold’s example offered what Berger calls a “touchstone for distinguishing between the false and the genuine”—not through dramatic gestures but through “an endurance that was not passive but active.”
In an age where ethical leadership is often equated with public declarations, Frommhold reminds us that true ethical presence manifests in consistent, principled action when no audience is watching and no reward is forthcoming.
Try this: Consider a value you hold deeply but have never articulated as part of your leadership identity. How do you already enact this value quietly, through daily decisions? Rather than announcing this value, how might you intensify its presence in your work through consistent action?
The Discipline of Presence
Throughout Bento’s Sketchbook, Berger interweaves his observations with quotations from the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (nicknamed Bento), who earned his living grinding optical lenses. Spinoza’s philosophy rejected dualism, seeing mind and body as aspects of a single substance. Similarly, Berger refuses to separate observation from ethics, aesthetics from politics, precision from compassion.
The resulting philosophy of attention offers no formulas or frameworks. Instead, it suggests a way of being with reality simultaneously precise, open, disciplined, and receptive.
“Drawing is a form of probing,” Berger writes. “And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, plot points, place things and place oneself.”
This same impulse—to locate ourselves and others accurately within reality—lies at the heart of ethical leadership. It is not the loudest voice or the cleanest metric, but the most honest attention, the clearest intent, and the most patient care.
We lead, like we draw, not simply to make things visible to others but to accompany something invisible to its destination.
What invisible dimensions does your work accompany? Where have you found that precision serves a deeper purpose than efficiency?
