“ECUTO” Evolution of Consciousness in Understanding and Transforming Organizations

Knowledge Collection Culture
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#1

I hypothesize that individuals and organizations may create enriched realities and reinvent themselves in today’s world.  The evolution of consciousness is the first step to achieve this important goal.  The second step is to comprehend and utilize “the forces” of the system: power, knowledge, ethics, needs, and technology to create a new reality.  I also propose a methodology to measure, through the analysis of specific situations, how a new reality may transcend new levels of complexity. This methodology might help us comprehend the process of creation and transformation of complex systems.

Key Words: fiction, system forces, evolution of consciousness, transcendence.

New levels of awareness appear to lead organizational evolution and create enhanced discourses that shape personal and institutional realities. Visionaries, individuals with a higher level of consciousness, have the responsibility to provide guidance and to support new ideas that can re-author impoverished fictions. These visionaries analyze organizational strategies and identify whether these strategies repress or contribute to the evolution of organizational systems.

Through fiction, organizations and individuals envision their own metamorphosis to adapt themselves to changing organizational environments, and strive to become the personal or organizational personae projected in the fiction.

In order to influence realities we need to understand the levels of forces we use to create fictions. These forces that affect our every day life are the elements that we use to build realities, and are a combination of energy expressed through needs, knowledge, ethics, power and technology. Needs provoke the movement of consciousness, generating the interactions between  knowledge, ethics, power and technology. Needs create experiences and objective facts that individuals conceptualize through knowledge and justify through ethics. Power validates these concepts created by individuals and organizations making them applicable and influent in a specific situation. Technology accelerates the process of creating new realities. By consciously using these forces, creating fictions, and affecting realities, individuals have the power to create transformations and make them realities.

#2

Not sure I get it

Hey Andres, I am not sure I understand what you are saying. Why do you speak about organizations? Are you trying a new approach to communication?

I am also not sure that your “fictions” is the equivalent of my “narratives”, though at a first glance it might seem so. The main difference is that narratives are first and foremost a sensemaking tool, used to overcome paralyzing uncertainty, whereas fictions seem to be a communication tool. Also, narratives are not really authored by individual people: there is a limited repertoire of very old stories (the highest and most beautiful of the angels rebels and is brought down in dark splendour; a trickster prevails over a much stronger being by using cunning; the hero tries to dodge his destiny, but destiny comes knocking at his door etc.), all authored by humanity as a whole.

Can you make an example?

#3

Rigth

Thanks for your comment! and let me tell you that I agree,  we express the same things but with a different terminomogy.

I see this as a cycle: Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) defines metamorphosis  by looking at the cycles of all individual and organizational transformation as ascending (rebirth) and descending (death) that, through humor, accomplishes an organizational transformation (see Boje & Cai 2004). Which can also be applied to storytelling and narratives.

Fiction is defined as the emplotments of characters into a storyline that shapes the material conditions of organizations. Fictions populate today’s world and are created through a process that modifies realities into becoming history (cenrtanly a com Fictions are expressed through language that feeds narrative discourses with arguments at different levels. These narrative create also fictions  and “personas” that represent the image of an organization. Utilizing mechanisms of control, narrative - discourses - (fictions) are imposed on populations through socialization and marketing or by shaping one’s character to pursue a personal career or lifestyle.

Is exaclty the cycle of a created myth, that will be re-used in the future with certain modifications. A cycle of Observation, assimilation, transformation, and evolution defined here as interactive in all levels of an ascending spiral.

#4

I’m in - Think I have to work with you story editor people

I’ve been wriggling in this territory for some 20 years when I first launched the Institute for Non-toxic Propaganda; (This would be one of Andres’ fictions.)  a massive idealistic organisation that would welcome anyone working along a parallel path.  Often the vaugeries of life required me letting the vision slip, but I would often return to this strategy. Entering the realm of metaphor releases the imaginative power exponentially.

At one point I started called these creations FiNGOs - for fictive NGOs.  Entering an invented, limitless hierarchy  allow great freedom to the participants.  (Check bembodavies.com to find the Baghdad Osijek Friendship Society.)  Sketching the resultant understandings into the graph of the problem, I devised a proposal of ‘Culture First’; while we couldn’t solve the massive global problems that we were addressing overnight, but entering them through a fiction, we could explore the emotional reality and culture of people who had got beyond the barrier of helplessness.

Of course, I am a theatre person…

#5

On the same page

It is so exciting, I have been working in a model for 8 years which is exactly a tool to identify potential discourses/fictions/narratives/stories or FINGOS :wink: that can contribute to society. How to develop this potential?

Individuals create and shape languages to communicate and share experiences, to produce order and assemble other individuals around a common goal.  Individuals of higher status can influence or manipulate others by utilizing language.  Awareness of complexity is found at different levels in organizations: through words, arguments, and narrative discourse individuals can create new realities from lower to higher levels in organizations. These organizational levels are defined by the degree of influence and control that some individuals have over others.

Individuals with higher levels of consciousness are able to deeply observe the world, their relation with other individuals and their interaction among organizations. Observation is the first step before we absorb ourselves into the system. When we are able to identify ourselves as a part of a whole we can contribute to or modify the whole, creating new fictions. As a result, we experience evolution of consciousness.

Observation, assimilation, transformation, and evolution are defined here as interactive in all levels of the ascending spiral of the evolution of consciousness.  These are the conditions that individuals should attain to create new fictions. This difficult task is impeded by the social standards or the cultural center of gravity that acts like a magnet on individual development. If you are below the average level of consciousness it tends to pull you up. If you try to go above it, it tends to pull you down (Wilber, 2000).

Once individuals attain a higher level of consciousness they feel obligated to add to the whole a representative part of their own existence. The creators of fiction have the duty of creating or contributing to the global meaning, or sense, of the whole system, since organizations are created not only to serve a function, but also to achieve transcendence.  A meaningful organization is the result of its individual member’s comprehension.

#6

On the same page

It is so exciting, I have been working in a model for 8 years which is exactly a tool to identify potential discourses/fictions/narratives/stories or FINGOS :wink: that can contribute to society. How to develop this potential?

Individuals create and shape languages to communicate and share experiences, to produce order and assemble other individuals around a common goal.  Individuals of higher status can influence or manipulate others by utilizing language.  Awareness of complexity is found at different levels in organizations: through words, arguments, and narrative discourse individuals can create new realities from lower to higher levels in organizations. These organizational levels are defined by the degree of influence and control that some individuals have over others.

Individuals with higher levels of consciousness are able to deeply observe the world, their relation with other individuals and their interaction among organizations. Observation is the first step before we absorb ourselves into the system. When we are able to identify ourselves as a part of a whole we can contribute to or modify the whole, creating new fictions. As a result, we experience evolution of consciousness.

Observation, assimilation, transformation, and evolution are defined here as interactive in all levels of the ascending spiral of the evolution of consciousness.  These are the conditions that individuals should attain to create new fictions. This difficult task is impeded by the social standards or the cultural center of gravity that acts like a magnet on individual development. If you are below the average level of consciousness it tends to pull you up. If you try to go above it, it tends to pull you down (Wilber, 2000).

Once individuals attain a higher level of consciousness they feel obligated to add to the whole a representative part of their own existence. The creators of fiction have the duty of creating or contributing to the global meaning, or sense, of the whole system, since organizations are created not only to serve a function, but also to achieve transcendence.  A meaningful organization is the result of its individual member’s comprehension.