Is your leadership learning bandwidth expanding or narrowing?

Challenging question from Bill Hybels.
He was responding to a Church leader who had boycotted the summit as a protest against the inclusion of Jimmy Carter on the faculty.

It reminded Hybels of parents of kids in his youth group thirty years ago, who banned their kids from going to church to punish them for getting an F on their grade card. To grow as Christ followers, he said, we have to learn how to expand our learning bandwidth, or we are impoverishing the teams we lead, and failing in our discipleship.

He recommended the boycotting church leader do this: come to the summit, and gather his team and say "let's try and turn this whole thing into a learning moment. I have deeply negative feelings about this faculty member and what he stands for. By sheer discipline, let's go in, listen, and afterwards try to see if God was saying anything to us, if we had a learning experience." Don't know what the guy did...

This sounds like a fairly grown up strategy for Republican evangelicals who boycott the leadership summit to protest a Democrat former president they blame for the liberalism of the seventies. Could it apply as practical wisdom to any other context? If we are serious as disciples and leaders committed to christ and our own development, are there any such contexts to which it couldn't apply?