The emerging new Spirited Business practice
Spirited Business:
People and Brands for now and the future
The emerging business practice that is guided by
intuitive insight and a deep sense of planetary stewardship
Most businesses are still organised, and managed, in leadership styles and structures that hark back over three decades. If tried and tested, and found to still be functional, that would be fine – I have a coffee grinder over forty years old.
But with the increasing complexity of global inter-connectedness and facing the existential threat of climate change, there is an urgent need for radical changes in their no longer fit-for-purpose hierarchical structures, and approaches.
In the 1980’s, business consultants McKinsey, Tom Peters and others developed a model of seven ’S's’ to optimise corporate performance. These comprised hard S’s (strategy, structure and systems) combined with soft S’s (style, staff, skills and shared values).
Since then, while organisations incorporating their management philosophy have evolved to some extent, they still reflect the scientific and technological revolutions of the last two centuries, viewing the world as a complicated machine, whose workings they can figure out and control.
Using engineering terms to measure effectiveness, human beings are resources; cogs in the machine. Business plans are blueprints for action, with key performance indicators focused on aligning all parts of their machine to its aims for success; almost completely profit-driven.
This approach is dynamic, often brims with busy-ness, can include team-building exercises (often though to ‘grease the wheels’), has room for creativity, and urges innovation.
It has brought unprecedented prosperity, opened up questioning of authority, individual expression and meritocratic advancement. However, its mechanistic and materialistic world-view of separation and Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ where dominance rules, also competitively and greedily drives over-consumption, environmental desecration and depletion, inequalities, and epidemic levels of stress and dysfunctional behaviours.
When success and a successful life then reflect what such organisations value, money and recognition, people often experience a profound sense of emptiness, lack of meaning, and loss of greater purpose.
Recently, though, inner personal development in the service of self and co-creative leadership, and organisational purpose, are coming to the fore.
In their work on Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, expanding on that by Clare Graves, define progressive levels of human awareness as characterised by various attributes. They see a new level, now emerging, as harmonising empowered, co-creative collectives of individuals focussed on the well-being of all living entities, and our planetary home.
Embodying such awareness includes experiencing our personal selves as part of a larger, conscious and spiritual whole that also supports our individual uniqueness, and nurtures lives of abundant simplicity, within a healthy, global ecosystem.
In Re-inventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux also describes three foundational aspects of leaders and organisations, exemplifying this level of awareness, he denotes as teal.
He, too, emphasises the vital importance of a wholistic word-view, that sees the profound inter-connectedness, and ultimate wholeness, of the world, and behaves accordingly. The Self and Spirited Leadership of such awareness aligns with others co-operatively and co-creatively, rather than through competition and conflict.
Such organisations also embody an evolutionary purpose and the functions required to achieve it, embedding distributed intelligence in the way that all biological organisms, including human bodies and ecosystems, naturally do.
Their inter-woven attributes and behaviours are further described by Dr. Jude Currivan as eight eSSences of Self and Spirited Leadership.
· Servant-Leader
o servereignty of serving the good of the whole, rather than the sovereignty of controlling the whole
· Soul-Model
o authentically embodying the highest coherence of the whole, rather than role-modelling from an ego-based sense of status
· Seer
o perceptive co-creator of the highest purpose, and meaning, of the organization
· Sensor
o sensing what is calling to come through and emerge, and then responding and expressing, rather than controlling
· Shaper
o facilitating the emergent evolutionary ‘shape’ and embodiment of the organization/organism
· Space-Holder
o enabling inclusivity and individual/collective worth, value, and meaning
And sometimes:
· Stirrer
o intervening as, when, and how sensed, to co-enable progressive, and optimal, positive change
· Shaker
o intervening as, when, and how sensed, to initiate (r)evolutionary change
Such spirited businesses are now emerging; making integral decisions, guided by intuitive insights, feeling a deep sense of planetary stewardship and authentically embodying their purpose-led aims in the DNA of their brands.
Their calls to transformational action are vital if we are to collectively co-create the now, and the future, we want for ourselves, and our planetary home.
Based on The Cosmic Hologram (2017) by Dr Jude Currivan, and its WholeWorld-View (www.wholeworld-view.org). The social implications of this potential (r)evolution in human awareness are the primary focus of our growing global Unity Community of change-makers. You can join via the website and Facebook Group, https://www.facebook.com/WholeWorldView/
Spirited Business:
People and Brands for now and the future
Saturday 12 Oct, 2pm -
Tuesday 15 Oct, 12.30pm, 2019 Findhorn, Scotland
Spirited Business:
People and Brands for now and the future
Saturday 12 Oct, 2pm
– Tuesday 15 Oct, 12.30pm, 2019
Findhorn, Scotland
The emerging business practice that is guided by intuitive insight and a deep sense of planetary stewardship
For: everyone from entrepreneurs to passionate players, freelancers, organisation managers, consultants, business leaders, transformational leaders, change makers, career changes, apprentices and interns.
This event is convened by Jarvis Smith and Tabitha James-Kraan and facilitated by Jude Currivan.
Jarvis is the founder of MyGreenPod magazine, the UK's biggest ethical lifestyle publication distributed with the Guardian quarterly and to over six million ethical consumers by email through various brand distribution partners.
Tabitha is Founder & Creative Director, Tabitha James Kraan High Performance Hair Organics.
Jude is a cosmologist, planetary healer, futurist and author.
She was previously one of the most senior business women in the UK, as CFO and Executive Board Member of two major international companies.
Spirited Business ambassadors and attendees include:
Jayn Sterland - Managing Director, Weleda UK
Lord Stone of Blackheath - former Managing Director, Marks & Spencer.