A number of dreamers in Scotland have been sharing their dreams about impending fuel shortages. Due to a disagreement between the owners and the workforce, the refinery at Grangemouth will be closing for a two day strike.

When we dream about fuel, we are often dreaming about the source of our creativity and how our creative spirit can fuel our journeys of self exploration.  If that essence is in short supply, we may feel that our creative potential is being frustrated and our progress has come to standstill.

Although politicians have urged drivers not to panic buy, long queues have been forming at the pumps and some fuel stations are running dry.  While this may appear to media-fuelled mass hysteria, listening to the dreams gives a quite different perspective.

For the individual drivers and dreamers, filling up their fuel tanks is more of a silent protest at how a small group of people who should be serving them by refining and providing their creative inspiration have actually let them down.  However, in their dreams, the faces of the group who continue to disappoint and abandon them are not the refinery workers, but those of their political leadership.

One of the foundational pieces in Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory is the concept of the holon.  The holon was first postulated by Arthur Koestler in his 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine,  to describe an entity that was both complete in itself and part of something else.

In Ken’s model, and its augmentation by Fred Kofman, a key assumption is made about the nature of individual holons by declaring them to be sentient or insentient.  This leads to many anomalies and discrepancies in this supposedly unified theory, such as  any group of isolated individual or collective holons, including sentient humans, can be regarded as ‘a heap’.  A heap is defined as a random collection of items.

However, one person’s apparently random collection of items can be another person’s curated art exhibition or a compelling market perspective.  The holonic theory also seems to disregard any changes in context for a holon. When the Trojan Horse was wheeled in through the gates of Troy, it included forty holons inside it in the form of Greek soldiers.

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In the Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom, the official unit of currency is the Pound Sterling, also known colloquially as the ‘Quid’. Children’s author J.K. Rowling has accumulated hundreds of mllions of quids through the sale of her epically popular Harry Potter stories.

In creating the Harry Potter series, Joanne Rowling was heavily influenced by a number of other authors and their creative works.  These include Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, Lewis’s ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’, White’s ‘The Sword in the Stone’, Murphy’s ‘The Worst Witch’ and Ibbotson’s ‘The Secret of Platform 13′, to name but a few.

Joanne has borrowed motifs and fragments from all of these works and woven them into the adventures of Harry Potter, and is currently embroiled in a tense legal battle with mild mannered librarian Steve Vander Ark over his project to borrow her characters for his Harry Potter encyclopedia.

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Recently I have been having conversations with a variety of clients about using Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory as a structure for creating a business and generating growth.  The basic concept of Integral Theory is that there can be a unified and comprehensive understanding of the universe in a single theory.

The idea of a unified theory of everything that enables us to make sense of the entire cosmos is a very seductive thought.  However, as we have all experienced, theory and reality often differ.  In theory, there is no difference between theory and reality, but in reality there is often a big difference between theory and reality.

In creating Integral Theory, Ken has drawn heavily on the work of Don Beck and Chris Cowan with their theory of  Spiral Dynamics.  In Spiral Dynamics theory, it is proposed that humans express themselves through a series of discrete behaviours, known as memes.  These memes are currently colour coded from beige through to platinum, depending on whose differing version of the universal theory you are most attracted to.

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Steve Denning  is now actively proposing Wisdom Management as a service.  This has been causing some controversy on the ActKM forum and with knowledge management experts such as Dave Snowden, Patrick Lambe and Matt Moore.

Wisdom often appears as a specific individual perspective that embodies a more archetypal significance.  It is also usually context dependent; a wise choice in one situation may be an unwise choice in another.

It will be interesting when Steve describes what would a Wisdom Manager’s role might involve, and how they might gather and disseminate appropriate wisdom.

Will a Wisdom Manager be like Mr Grimsdale advising Norman Pitkin how to dig up a road, or perhaps more like Norman himself influencing the direction of a chosen client group?

Perhaps Steve should look to Norman for some Wisdom in this situation and realise that if you are digging yourself into a hole, the wisest option is often to stop digging.