I was at a dialogue yesterday in Pasadena hosted by the Business Renaissance Institute. Like BRI, my interest in "spirituality at work" is based on a conviction that quantitative and qualitative outcomes in organizations today call for fundamental transformations in corporate culture. However, I see culture as the emergent consequence of individual decisions and actions, which depend on deeply held values and beliefs that are normally off limits to organizational management (so deeply held that I believe they can only come from that "spiritual" place in each of us).
So I'm curious what you think about the framework I'm sketching out.
-Quality and Aesthetics
-Ethics and Civility
-Hope and Faith
-Loyalty and Trust
-Service (to customers, communities and colleagues)
-Humility and Confidence
-Awareness and Insight (self and environment)
-Empathy and Compassion
-Honesty, Integrity and Transparency
-Diligence, Engagement and Mindfulness
-Creativity and Innovation
In fact, these things aren'ty just considered inappropriate for workplace and management conversations (emotions, beliefs, ego). In some cases, it’s actually illegal to engage on this level.
I've started to work on a framework for how I see these deeply held beliefs and behaviors working their way out from that spiritual place into our personal lives, professional lives and social interactions.
So from the inside out, these successive layers look something like this:
Identity—Who are you? Where do you come from?
Faith—What do you believe about how the world works?
Values—What rules and priorities do you derive from your beliefs?
Integrity—How much do you comport to these values?
Civics—How do you balance integrity to personal beliefs/values with the beliefs/values of others in the community in order to collaborate on common or collective goals?
Comments (3)
Steve,
I share your interest and believe in the value of understanding the spiritual dimension at work in today’s industrialised economy. A great thinker in this area is Christian Schumancher, but unfortunately his work is not known widely enough. His father was EF Schumacher, who wrote “Small is beautiful”. Christian’s background was working at British Steel where he saw first hand the implications of our industrialised economy. A central theme is the fragmentation of work and the need to restore wholeness to the work-place. So often work has been fragmented into meaningless activities, but through linking jobs to the underlying basic transformations, wholeness can be restored. This leads to restoration of individuals, teams and ultimately their role in society.
So to your list I would add the concept of wholeness, because it speaks to the fundamental value of the work itself.
Nicolaas
Posted by Nicolaas Herholdt | February 23, 2010 8:19 AM
Posted on February 23, 2010 08:19
Nicolaas,Thanks so much for this. I really like your suggestion. Do you think that wholeness would clump with aesthetics on the list?
Interestingly, I’ve been reading Christopher Alexander, who has been importing lessons from architecture into complexity. “Wholeness is the key to many naturally occurring events, phenomena, and aspects of system behavior,” he says. “The wholeness is that global structure which pays attention to, and captures, the relative strength of different parts of the system, paying attention both to the way they are nested in one another, and how the pattern of strength varies with the nesting.”
By coincidence, I posted about architecture and complexity during my last stint as CE guest blogger, receiving a great comment by Victoria Ward.
See: Alexander, Christopher. New concepts in complexity theory arising from the study of architecture, 2003. http://www.natureoforder.com
Posted by Steve | February 24, 2010 2:23 AM
Posted on February 24, 2010 02:23
Steve,
I recall Francious Schafer wrote about fragmentation and art http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Should_We_Then_Live%3F Modern art is beyond me, but this contained a fascinating account of how the distortions in todays art represents the fragmentation of our view of man. I can only think there is a link to aesthetics, but I would cluster asethetics as part of wholeness.
Posted by Nicolaas Herholdt | February 25, 2010 8:57 AM
Posted on February 25, 2010 08:57