Most businesses are still organized and managed in leadership styles and structures that hark back over three decades. If tried and tested and found to still be functional, that would be fine. But with the increasing complexity of global inter-connectedness, the urgent need for major socio-economic transformation and facing the existential threat of climate emergency, there is an urgent need for radical changes in their no longer fit-for-purpose hierarchical approach and operations.

In the 1980s, business consultants McKinsey, Tom Peters and others developed a model of seven ‘Ss’ to optimize corporate performance. These comprised hard Ss (strategy, structure and systems) combined with soft Ss (style, staff, skills and shared values).

Since then while businesses incorporating their management philosophy have evolved to some extent, they still in many aspects reflect the scientific and technological revolutions of the last two centuries, viewing the world as a complicated machine, whose workings they can figure out and control. Using engineering terms to measure effectiveness, human beings are resources; cogs in the machine. Business plans are blueprints for action, with key performance indicators focused on aligning all parts of their machine to its aims for success; almost completely profit-driven.

This approach has brought unprecedented prosperity and meritocratic advancement. However, its mechanistic and materialistic world-view of separation and Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ is based on and rewards dominant structures, relationships and processes. Unchecked, these perspectives competitively and greedily drive over-consumption, environmental desecration, depletion and pollution, inequalities, and epidemic levels of stress and dysfunctional behaviors.

Recently, though, inner personal development in the service of self and co-creative leadership and organizational purpose are coming to the fore.

In their work on so-called Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, expanding on that by Clare Graves, characterize progressive levels of human awareness by various attributes. They see a level, now emerging, as harmonizing empowered, co-creative collectives of individuals focused on the well-being of all living entities and our planetary home. Embodying such awareness includes experiencing ourselves as part of a larger, conscious and spiritual whole that also supports our individual uniqueness and nurtures lives of abundant simplicity within a healthy global ecosystem.

In Re-inventing Organizations Frederic Laloux also describes three foundational attributes of organizations exemplifying this level of awareness he denotes as teal and which others are characterizing as ‘conscious’ businesses.

The leaders of such conscious businesses have and enact a wholistic world-view that sees the profound inter-connectedness and ultimate wholeness of the world, and behave accordingly. Such perception guides its embodiment in an evolutionary purpose in how they operate and their sense of direction. This naturally then supports their embedding distributed, holarchic and collective authority and intelligence and guidance from such inner awareness to their outer manifestation.

However, until recently, the mainstream scientific paradigm has continued to support the hegemony of hierarchical organizational structures and operations. It has considered the seemingly separate and material appearance of the Universe as being its essential, and sole, reality. And has held that consciousness somehow arises from the brain as a result of random occurrences that enable evolutionary emergence, based solely on the survival of the fittest.

Now, a radically different understanding is emerging. Leading edge scientific evidence across all scales of existence and across many fields of research is discovering that our Universe is fundamentally inter-connected; existing and evolving as a unified entity and exquisitely fine-tuned to evolve from simplicity to complexity. It shows that its material appearance is not its fundamental nature but arises from deeper non-physical realms of causation. And, vitally, that mind and consciousness aren’t something we have, but rather what we and the whole world are.

This new scientific paradigm converges with profound spiritual insights and experiences of all ages and traditions. Its integral model invites and empowers a renewed realization of the inherent sanctity and universal worth and value of all existence. Crucially, it offers meaning and purpose to our existence and evolutionary purpose and that of our entire Universe.

The wholeworld-view of such unity awareness, naturally aligns people and organizations with others co-operatively and co-creatively, rather than through competition and dominance.

It also stimulates transformational change from the inside out, engendering distributed intelligence throughout organizations and expanding relationships from the individual Me, to the organizational WE and a planetary perspective and stewardship of All. In doing so, it also ushers in a balance of the best and continuing benefits of the past, predominantly masculine, organizational behaviors, with feminine attributes in an emergent evolutionary integration.

I describe the inter-woven characteristics of such feminine behaviors, which of course can be embodied in both women and men, as eight eSSences of Self and Spirited leadership, as follows:

• Servant-leader - servereignty of serving the good of the whole rather than the sovereignty of controlling the whole

• Soul-model - authentically embodying the highest coherence of the whole rather than role-modelling from an ego-based sense of status

• Seer – perceptive co-creator of the highest purpose and meaning of the organization

• Sensor – sensing what is calling to come through and emerge, and then responding and expressing its purpose rather than controlling

• Shaper – facilitating the emergent evolutionary ‘shape’ and embodiment of the organization

• Space-holder – enabling inclusivity and individual/collective worth, value and meaning

And sometimes:

• Stirrer - intervening as, when and how sensed to co-enable progressive and optimal positive change

• Shaker – intervening as when and how sensed to initiate (r)evolutionary change.

The emergence of such conscious and spirited businesses and organizations, whose embodied wholeworld-view is foundational to their purpose and operations, is accelerating around the world. Making integral decisions, guided by intuitive insights, feeling a deep sense of stake-holder community and planetary stewardship, they are authentically exemplifying their purpose-led aims in the DNA of their brands.

In their integration and re-soulution of the relational seven masculine and eight feminine attributes and behaviors, they synergize the emergence of a ninth attribute; a ‘child’ like empowerment of free-flowing, co-creative and joyful innovation.

Their soul-modelling of transformational action and ways of consciously enacting business, are vital if we are to collectively co-create the now and the future we want for ourselves and our planetary home. And heeding their calls to link up and lift up invites us all to come together in a global movement of hope in action.

By Dr. Jude Currivan