Peoplerise participated in an encounter last Saturday, May 19th. “The Teal Paradigm and U Theory: towards a new ecosystem of living organizations” was one of the events hosted by the Complexity Fest. Flavio Fabiani, a co-creation designer at Peoplerise was there with Francesco Mondora, co-founder and co-CEO of the Mondora Benefit Corporation, and Aurelio Ricciolo, software engineer of the Italian Department of the Social Threefolding Institute of Berlin.
Flavio emphasizes the fact that “…being part of events like these hosted by the Complexity Fest are very important to us because they offer people attending a chance to go through an experience – albeit brief – that we like to think could be life-altering. We want to contribute to an awakening of an ecosystemic view of the world of organizations. Only a direct experience can make this possible and we believe it to be an essential part of the learning process”.
This is also the belief of Francisco Varela, one of the founding fathers of neuro-cognitive science, and of Goethe as well – who was convinced that transformation can only take place after exposure to a phenomenon.
Flavio continues by stating: “The issues we touched upon in Parma last Saturday are related to the possibility of carrying out a developmental programme on an individual and a group basis. It’s also what we do every day with our clients. In fact, this approach makes it possible for those who seek to transform their organization (in terms of leadership, work processes, approaches to the market and culture) to embark on an intense journey. The people who participate in our programmes raise their awareness of the inner condition that is the source of our attention and intention and, consequently, of individual and collective actions.”
In fact, Theory U is the method developed by Otto Scharmer which departs from individual awareness and continues towards the destination of social change while the Teal Paradigm teaches how companies of any size can adopt self-organization and the cultivation of fulfilment on the job to transform their model of a hierarchal pyramid into one of distributed leadership.
Flavio concludes by saying that “…these topics are closely related to the issue of complexity since a profound journey into personal development is never linear and organizations are not machines. They resemble living beings more than anything else. Therefore, within organizations, there is no sense in applying the principle of causality. Leadership, innovative processes and the involvement of the people or the culture of a company cannot be planned in terms of actions to carry out in order to attain certain results. And this ties in closely with one of the stages of the Theory U programme called co-sensing”. It’s like saying “…what I’m doing here is going to change and I’m going to change along with it thanks to this interaction, thanks to this contact”. The transformation of both is inevitable but it cannot be predicted based on the direct and linear cause-effect ratio. That’s why the transformation will be ‘complex’!
