“We see the world not as it is but as we are.”
~Talmud
Did you know that women have fewer teeth than men? For almost 2,000 years, this was the accepted wisdom proclaimed by Aristotle in 350 BC. Then one day, someone had an idea: let’s count! We both have the same number of teeth.
How many brains does a human have? One you say? Maybe two? Try three brains: one in our head, small brain in our heart and another in our gut. All three are fully autonomous nervous systems. The brain in the heart and gut were discovered only recently. However, back in the 1860’s, the gut brain was discovered by a German doctor named Auerbach. But it was forgotten and not rediscovered until the late 1990’s by Michael Gerson, an American neuroscientist. “How could medical circles forget the existence of a brain?”
These two examples illustrate the above quote, “We see the world not as it is but as we are.”
I’m reading a book called Reinventing Organizations – A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux, 2014. This is a serious book that begins with the premise that “the way we manage organizations seems increasingly out of date.” This is my second blog in continuing our discussion.
The above examples demonstrate a hierarchical worldview which many organizations still operate from today. We look at things through our own eyes in that worldview, e.g., someone has to be in charge, we need a table of organization flowing from the top down, we allow employees to function autonomously to a certain extent, and that people at the top are the ones responsible to make change.
Laloux contends that “throughout history, the types of organizations we have invented were tied to the prevailing worldview and consciousness.” Laloux states that we are on the cusp of a new stage of consciousness that is changing the way we think about the world, and subsequently, organizations.
What is the new stage of consciousness and organizations? Laloux calls it TEAL – “a capacity to trust the abundance of life . . . and learn to decrease our need to control people and events.”
In my next blog, I will be descriptive as to what this looks like in organizations that are TEAL.
I leave you with this quote by John Naisbitt, “The most exciting breakthroughs of the twenty-first century will not occur because of technology, but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.”