Creativity in Organizations (Part 2 of 9)

cycles

There are many maps and models of human development that illustrate how individuals function in relation to their community — and how they co-evolve.

Spiral Dynamics, published in 1995 by Don Beck and Chris Cowan, provides a glimpse at how communities and their values unfold in stages — from magic (tribal) to mythic (literal) to mental (modern) to integral (post-modern) and beyond. 

In 2018, we saw the emergence of memetic tribes — the idea that increased cultural fragmentation has made it impossible to describe people (particularly in America) in categories of left/right or red/blue. Each of these tribes or communities exist in a digital bubble that reinforces their biases and beliefs and goads them into responding to various manufactured crises. In some cases, it’s secularization (and the crisis of meaning) or atomization (and the crisis of belonging). For others, it’s stimulation and the crisis of sobriety. But every tribe has a battle to wage, and they mean to win it.

Unfortunately, soon after this phenomena reared its dangerous head, we experienced a worldwide pandemic that saw people hunkered down in their homes and reinforcing these digital bubbles with the unforgiving brick and mortar of cognitive bias and propaganda. Some of them have still not emerged.

From 2010-2020, I led an interspiritual community and became involved in the global interfaith movement. I traveled the world speaking about the future of spirituality and the peace-making potential of interfaith dialogue. I saw first hand the plight of people committed to personal and social transformation. I witnessed those doing the sacred work of pulling people out of their filter bubbles and bringing them to the table for actual conversations that would transform hearts, neighborhoods, and communities.

​The four paths of “Creation Spirituality” were made popular among Progressive/Mystical Christian circles in 1983 when Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox published his book, Original Blessing. 

The paths are as follows:

• Via positiva (the path of awe and wonder)
• Via negativa (the path of emptying and mystery)
• Via creativa (the path of birth and generativity)
• Via transformativa (the path of justice and transformation) 

Like the four seasons of the calendar, this wheel is one of many religious lenses (Eastern, Western, Native/First Peoples) with which we may view community cycles through time. These wheels, models, and metaphors are how members of the community know it is the right time to plant, harvest, grieve, and celebrate.

Whichever maps or models you are using, this shared vision of the world is the cosmology of the organization – how it views the universe. This is where I remind you that all organizations are cults – with their own beliefs and values. I’ve helped countless businesses write their core values, identify the behaviors that support those values, and profess publicly what they believe. And I’ve done it long enough to know that this is what William James meant by the “inclusivity principle” and what Ninian Smart meant by the “Doctrinal Dimension” in his book Dimensions of the Sacred. These beliefs hold groups together.

There are many other maps of specific processes that move through time. 

Some examples include:

• Bruce Tuckman’s 1965 Team Dynamics model (forming, storming, norming, performing)
• The Dunning-Kruger effect (a.k.a. “the change curve”)
• Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ stages of grief
• The Design Thinking process (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test)
• Otto Scharmer’s Theory U (levels of listening, presencing, “leading from the future as it emerges”)
• Jungian Psychology (birth, deconstruction, ego-death and rebirth) 

In my consulting life, the most well-worn of these has been Ichak Adizes’ Lifecycle of a Business, which we delve into here.

And, there are meta-theories (theories of everything) such as Integral Theory (popularized by Ken Wilber in 1995) or the Theory of Process (laid out in Arthur M. Young’s The Reflexive Universe in 1976) that attempt to explain how all of the theories and metaphors throughout time fit together.

One thing all of the models share is a holistic kind of symmetry that balances the outer, empirical world with the inner, subjective experience; and draws a straight line between the conditions for change in the individual and the broader evolution of groups or communities.

READ PART 1

READ PART 3