How to orient toward a new paradigm - a couple of frameworks

Our recent elections here in America have revealed that social unrest is on the rise and, it seems, also in many countries in the west. We are seeing a battle waging between the old world with its increasingly controlling behaviors to maintain its relevance, and a populace who struggle under pressure from worsening economic and political conditions.

As has happened countless times throughout history, we will muddle our way from the old into the new, and somehow survive the transition. But on the way it feels like an exercise in brinkmanship, a tightrope walk, where we have no idea how we’re going to make it without inadvertently bringing about the worst case scenario.

Businesses and organizations today could play a special role in helping us all navigate through this time of transition — if only they recognized their potential to do so. 

The stakes are high for businesses and they are ripe for disruption in order to stay relevant and profitable. This is why you’ll see real investment in how to best support organizational culture as a resource for constant innovation. And there lies the opportunity: organizations are observing that culture lies at the heart of successful transition from old to new and for healthy growth. 

But navigating a transition from the old ways to new ways is challenging mostly because it’s ridiculously easy to snap back into the old habits of familiarity and safety. In general, we are all risk averse.

But there is a conceptual instrument to guide us across the challenging terrain that spells out a sequential learning process: orientation, implication, and application.

Orientation, implication and application

We have to take some pains to orient ourselves into a truly new paradigm before we try anything, otherwise we risk inadvertently reinforcing the old. Orientation comes before we can truly understand the differences between the old and the new. When you have the right concepts that help you adjust and orient to the new, they will work in you in such a way that you’ll get a feel for the lawful movements of the new paradigm — and at the same time the discord and destructiveness of the old.

Then you’ll start to see all the implications of a new paradigm. For example, you learn to see that attempts to create social change in any context are like paper boats floating on an ocean of culture. It is the culture of a society, of an organization, that really dictates everything else.

And finally application becomes viable and successful when you’ve done the work of orienting, and understand the implications of a new paradigm.

So there is a path of learning from orientation, to implication, to application. With these articles I’m working to orient you into what I see as a new paradigm trying to be born, and today I can also bring some more detail. 

The inner life is where the paradigm shift happens

In my view, it’s in the inner life that we find the true leverage to create change, whether that’s on an individual level or in a culture or society. And so today we’re going to get to know it a bit better and I’m going to share a couple of frameworks that fit together into a lens that can become a tool for understanding and insight.

At least, it has yielded much fruit for me and so I want to share it with you too.

I’m going to start with the nature of the lens that has defined our modern civilization, and where we need to go from here. 

We collectively have lived under the pervasive belief-umbrella of a science that is built upon a materialistic worldview. Under this meta-set of implicit assumptions we have an inner life that is ruled by our biology. 

If only we understand our brain better we will understand consciousness. But your feelings? It’s hormones. Or the thyroid. 

In other words, your inner experiences are brought about by your bodily organization. Or is it the brain?

I try here to point out the confusion about the hard problem of consciousness: from where does consciousness arise? Until we sort this out, we design our management interventions and methods based on implicit — meaning, unconscious — biases about what the human being is. 

We think in numbers, data points, and mechanistic approaches to changing human behavior. We continue to believe that studies of animal behavior will tell us something about the inner life of a human being.

I would like to also point out that we don’t always realize that consciousness and the inner life are one and the same thing. 

This implicit bias of materialism is also playing out at work in how we think about management. We talk about systems, but we should really mean the people that perpetuate the systems. 

Or more specifically, the kind of thinking that exists in a collective consciousness across the system — which is generated and thereafter maintained by people.

As a colleague and mentor David Wertheim Aymes asks, do the concrete products in the warehouse stack themselves, or does the forklift? 

Neither, actually. 

The forklift does not drive itself, obviously; the driver does. It lies in the thinking of the forklift driver where and how neatly the bricks get stacked. 

But we forget this all too easily.

The master idea reigning in the minds of many persons

We forget that everything we see happening in business is the product of a thought, a “master idea reigning in the minds of many persons” as Emerson said in his essay called War.

Instead, we chalk things down to some abstract thing causing whatever we see. It could be just the economic, or the social, or the political system. 

When we look at organizations and how people are managed, you can see the master ideas playing out from a materialistic belief about what the human being is. 

This materialistic belief leads us to assume that people, being biological machines, require tight control and enforcement - either through the carrot or the stick or both. We can observe the tools and methods we use to approach humans borne out of this belief. 

Now, I do understand that we need organizing principles in companies. Otherwise we won’t be able to move in disciplined ways toward the goals and mission of a company and make a profit. Of course.

However, our current ways of managing others is not the only way, and in fact as I’ve said elsewhere, we need to grow out of them altogether.

Systems of destruction

Something we can observe in the world just about anywhere is that the systems that run our lives are operating out of such a strength of inertia that they can appear to be like hydras - chop one head off and you suddenly have two more in its place. Changing them becomes a herculean effort. 

I would even go so far as to say it’s impossible. You cannot change a system that has become too big and too entrenched. I’ve watched well-resourced projects and have been part of the support system of teams trying to do this, and the best you can do is maybe move the needle on the dial, and even then there will be unintended consequences that likely outweigh what good you did.

Render the old obsolete

Buckminster Fuller, the American engineer and architect, famously said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”.

And so, as Emerson pointed out earlier for us, the way to achieve this is to change the master ideas reigning in our thinking.

What I mean is we need a new worldview, that replaces the one driving materialism and the reduction of the human being to a biological machine.

I think the way there is to see the old system in all its ongoing calamity, exploring what kind of thinking has kept us so tied to business as usual. 

And once we shake ourselves somewhat free from the old paradigm, we can find clues for what is emerging as a new paradigm, but only if we have some kind of conceptual framework, or lens, through which to observe. 

No matter what, we are going to have a lens, a perspective, that is built out of our cultural, familial, and societal influences and worldviews. The work of inner development and self-actualization is to learn to see the lens. We have to get to know the lens and take back the projections we put upon what we look at thanks to the lens - in this case the projection of materialism.

We take back the projection by seeing it, being awake to it, and cognizant of all its implications. 

And then, once this begins to be operational in our consciousness, we can try on some new lens through which to observe. 

We’re going to need a new lens, otherwise we are a pair of eyes with no concept to bring to the perception. Concepts are an inevitable part of being human making sense of the world, and we can use concepts as a tool to refine, sensitize, and hone our observations.

Concepts as garden-variety tools

And so I want to give you two conceptual frameworks to use. I’m not trying to lay out some abstraction to add to the confusion. I want to take concepts and make them into tools. 

I’m bringing only what has helped me and I’m only interested in what is practical. I prefer the good old garden variety of concepts that are built for endurance, and have spiritual substance because they’re truthful and objective. 

You’ll know it has those qualities when it does the work for you. Live with the concept long enough and it works on in you, transforming your thinking over time.

With that end in mind, the conceptual framework I’d like to lay out is about the inner life of the human. 

I want to contradict the implicit bias of a materialistic science that denies us an inner life, or denies that we have a spiritual nature — we might, and we certainly can’t say for sure that we don’t. Or better said, we will only deny the existence of spiritual realities if we are wholly taken in by materialism.

I want to do this because we are going to need a new idea of what makes up the inner life of a human being, and of what a social field consists. If we have a conceptual framework, then we can explore the new implications for how we design our work together, and finally get some more appropriate ideas for how we organize, get work done, and how we manage people.

Framework one: Thinking, feeling, and willing

The first framework is this: the inner life consists of three main activities: thinking, feeling and willing. I cover this quite extensively in the magenta.fm podcast. 

I’d like to propose that these three activities make up the total of inner experiences. They are archetypes that all humans share in common.

By thinking I mean thoughts, beliefs, conclusions, worldviews. By feeling I mean all emotions both positive and negative. And by will I mean the source of our actions and behaviors — our motives essentially.

The interesting thing we can observe is that thinking is actually the originating source of what we feel; and what we think and feel drives our motives for doing what we do. 

There is an order in terms of places to intervene. For example, if you wish to intervene in your inner life because you struggle with negativity or depression, then observing the kinds of thoughts you harbor and what they are telling you — and what you are believing — is a fairly easy place to see the consequences on your feeling life based on your habitual thoughts.

And if you suffer in this way from chronically negative thought patterns making you feel terrible, then it naturally follows that motivation becomes more difficult and your will power is undermined.

The place to intervene, therefore, is in the thinking, and what drives the thinking — the beliefs and the worldview that drives those beliefs. If you can do that, then everything else is downstream of it, including the anxiety, or depression, or however the checkmate of the inner life is expressed.

I have found that trying to intervene in the feeling life without a fundamental shift in the thought life is not effective and the will even less so.

And while this is a simple example, it hold true for a great many inner struggles we have. I’ve taught variations of this idea to people struggling with C-PTSD, generalized anxiety, depressive states such as Dysthymia, and ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) among other examples. You can also find this idea showing up in a treatment approach for anxiety disorders called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

The inner experiences of thinking, feeling, and willing have potential trajectories of development, from what has been given to you by gift of heredity or education, to cultivating and honing them into organs of perception, facing out into the world and receiving information from the world that can guide you in exact and wise ways. This is the soul transformed into a truly empowered and free human being. 

But this is a long path of development, and a little known one that, once prized by the initiation temples and centers, has been almost entirely forgotten in the face of the last 500 years of our materialistic age.

However, there are western esoteric streams of knowledge that have preserved this insight, in particular Steiner’s Anthroposophy which is where I draw it from. 

We can use this because if we know what the medium consists of within an individual — and, because the inner life is fractal, also in the social field — then we can observe that the place to build and grow a better quality culture (the expression of the collective social field) in an organization is in what and how people think. 

Everything flows out from there: the tone and atmosphere of the culture (the feeling life), as well as the initiative and creative agency of the people (the life of will).

Framework two: body, soul and spirit

If thinking, feeling, and willing describe the gamut of inner experiences of the human being, then body, soul, and spirit describe the vertical striving, or path of development, from lower to higher. This 2nd framework also describes another take on an anatomy, if you will, of the inner life that we all have in common. 

By body I mean the physical body as the home of our individuality. In this time and place, we have incarnated into a body that provides a focal point, a home for our soul and spirit. 

The soul is a word I borrow from religion (and from Steiner) though I use it in a merely utilitarian way and as a short cut for describing the inner life of thinking, feeling and willing. It is the place of praxis, where the rubber hits the road in the school of life. Our bodies were given to us as a gift from the godhead, our soul has similarly been given to us but only half formed. It is up to us to continue the work of cultivating and developing our soul life, our life of thought, feeling, and will.

In my world, the spirit is an aspect of the make up of every human being but only in potential. It is the “I Am”, that part in us that is truly unique. It is also the part in us that lives in a rent-free place, where wound and trigger and brokenness don’t touch. It’s just that we aren’t aware that we have this in our makeup - in potential. 

The potential of the spiritual in us is activated in the quality of our thinking, feeling, and motives — of what we choose to cultivate in our soul life. 

We can either experience our soul as being influenced by our bodily nature through our instincts, reactions, and natural ways of being and doing without thought or awareness, or we can experience our soul as being imbued with spiritual substance that gives us more consciousness and a sense of a purer and freer purpose and way of being in the world.

My goal is to support the awakening and activating of the spirit in all of us. This, in my view, is what business and the development of culture in a business should also do.

Let me give you an example. On my path of development, I have striven to grow out of old and internalized ways of behavior that have become force of habit. These old ways were learned from my family and culture of origin, with my own personal spin of dysfunction. I had to become conscious of the habits and fight their inertia by turning my soul away from my typical behaviors and toward more productive and healthy ways of being and doing.

This work necessitates the activation of the spirit in me, the part of me that isn’t wholly taken up in the stuck patterns and is capable of objectivity, such that I, with time and practice, could have an empowered choice about how I was going to respond to life. A quote usually attributed to Victor Frankl goes: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”.

This is what activation of the spirit in us really means to me.

Does this sound ordinary to you? Good, because that is what I intended. I don’t want you to think I mean something vague, new age-y, or touchy-feely when I bandy the word “spirit” about. We need to understand each other, and I need to help you see how practical setting up the conditions for the activation of the spirit in you really is.

Bring it home now

The horizontal axis of thinking, feeling, and willing playing out in space and time, and the vertical axis of body, soul, and spirit as a path of development create a framework for how to understand the major influences and forces playing out in the inner life. 

Its complicated, aye!!

This is what you’re actually dealing with, when you’re managing a workforce, when you are working in an HR department, or when you’re talking to another person. People are complex beings with a rich inner life on a trajectory of development that, whether they know it or not, they are participating in. Life pulls you along kicking and screaming while dealing out its lessons. Or, you can go as a volunteer, ready to participate more consciously. 

In business there can be room for both.

You can step onto a path of self-realization, and you can also set up the conditions at work to support that kind of work while at the same time leaving people free to participate or not according to their disposition. If you are working with humanity toward its proper and spiritual development, then you must be armed with this kind of knowledge. 

Otherwise you will inadvertently work against the path of development that is healthy for the collective social field and you’ll know it by uneven results, expensive attrition, and fragility in the face of chaotic market conditions.

I am going to touch more on what a path of development looks like at work, and how that can be supported in future articles. 

But for now, I’ll leave you with one more thought: the more you experience your own path of self-realization (getting to know that nature of your lens), the more you will understand what is needed to support your people at work. It doesn’t go the other way. The more personal work you’ve done, the more you understand the inner nature of the human being and can design wisely and accordingly in your sphere of influence. 

So find a good coach and get going 🙂