In most organisations, individuals are often regarded as discrete units whose identity can be fully described by personality profiling tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Insights.

These tools presume that there are only a few types of people and their complete identities are located within specific categories of theoretical pyschological structure.

However, in reality, we become aware of much of our identity and sense of self by the experience of projecting it into our personal space and having it reflected back to us from our environment.  Rather than being an easily quantifiable unit, we create our individual sense of self from the fragments of inner and outer experience.

In his 1999 paper, The Heterogeneously Distributed Self, Stanton Wortham described how contemporary understanding of human cognition had moved beyond merely viewing it as an internal psychological structure.  Rather than the self being located in the individual physical body, it is observed to emerge from various contextual structures such as linguistic, social and cultural activity.

Wortham goes on to describe the processes of distributed cognition where knowledge is distributed across members of a group, and situated cognition where knowledgeable action emerges from non-cognitive artefacts and structures as well the knowledge of others.  He then continues by applying these concepts as a way of describing the self.

However, this would suggest that some of the distributed self may continue to be present in a group context, even if the individual self were no longer present in the group.  It would also suggest that the situated self was still present in the artefact, even if the individual who had previously distributed their self  into the artefact was no longer associated with it.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)