Transcript

[R]evolution: Separateness to Connectedness | Giles Hutchins | TEDxWycliffeCollege

over the next quarter of an hour so we are going to immerse ourselves in a revolution a revolution with profound consequences for ourselves our systems and our civilization and this revolution isn't about digitization or globalization or disruptive innovations or any of the other macro trends that futurists tend to point to no in fact this revolution isn't out there at all it's in here in our own hearts and minds so revolution in consciousness from separateness to connectedness that is ripping up the rulebook about how we view life and our sense of place and purpose within it so let's cut to the chase myriad disciplines are the forefront of Western science such as quantum physics depth psychology facilitation ecology nuove ology many areas are discovering with increasingly sophisticated instruments in experiments we are proving the innate weave and weft of this world in a interrelation allottee of this reality and of course this discovery isn't new it's as fresh as it is ancient because it resonates with a timeless wisdom of prophets philosophers Sears and Shaymin throughout the ages who have long understood this innate interrelation ality of life but today we're proving it with our reductive experiments and it has the potential to change everything because still today we are largely caught up in a worldview that is rooted in separation competition control and domination still today we serve up to our children in our schools to our adults in our business schools a recipe of neo-darwinism that views life through threat tinted glasses separate species struggling for survival in a dog-eat-dog world the whole process of evolution seen through this lens of selfish ascendancy the unit of evolution The Selfish Gene within us and this is a deeply divisive logic and it's woefully inadequate and yet it underpins much of our socio-economic thinking in business politics and beyond this illusion of separation that we've created in our own minds is castrating us from nature from our deeper human nature from each other and from the world around us it creates what Albert Einstein insightfully referred to as an optical delusion of consciousness which creates increasing fear anxiety egotism individualism and consumerism it's this floored worldview this broad way of attending which is actually at the heart of our challenges today and yet so often whilst trying to find solutions to this trilemma of social economic and environmental crises now upon us we apply the very same level of consciousness that created our problems in the first place to our well intended solutions we simply don't have time for this anymore this is humanity's hour of reckoning we need to get radical and deal with the root cause which is this flawed way of attending the good news is as I say forefront of myriad disciplines in Western science we are exploring just this we are dispelling this illusion of separation so that we can sense into the deeper connectedness of our humanity in this more than human world so let me give you some examples now to bring this alive let's take a tree let's say in English oak tree in an English wood root using our old neo-darwinian logic this oak tree would have best be interested in it offspring vehicle but now we know with our radioactive tracings and so forth we can show that the tree is showing nutrients for the holly sapling it's in a different part of the forest areas rich in minerals are sharing with areas poor in minerals and we really struggle to understand what's going on when we apply this old logic take you and I here today we now know that at least 90% of the cells in our bodies aren't even human without the help of these non-human cells you and I would utterly fail at life and when we drill down and look at one of these cells we see that it's surrounded by a semi permeable membrane continuously interrelating with its environment in fact the more we look the more we see that everywhere this interrelation allottee is a hallmark property of life in fact hard line definitive boundaries of complete separation simply don't exist anywhere except in our own minds assumptions of convenience that we've created to help us make sense of atomized compartmentalized categorize and objectify the world around us now this way of attending this ability to objectify an abstract and define is an important part of what makes us human we need it unless these definitions begin to tyrannize over us to such an extent that they actually desensitize us from the very world we're trying to make sense of so let's drill down even further in the cell and look at the genes within the cell not these units of selfish ascendancy as neo-darwinism would have us believe what we actually find a dynamic locality's learning participating with our environment what we thought was 97 percent junk DNA we now realize is continuously interrelating at local and non who levels with its environment transforming our view of meta genetics drill down even further into the cell and you come across the atoms and subatomic particles within the cell not the hard masse impenetrable objects of Newtonian physics no what we actually find a quark strings vibrations of light humming away to their own unique shoes it's amazing it's all inspiring the most fundamental level what we find are these electromagnetic vibrations of light are immersed within an all-pervasive see an ocean what scientists called a quantum vacuum the zero-point energy field the ground of all being and for many of these scientists that sense into this they have mystical experiences for instance david bohm brilliant first-rate british scientist sent into the formlessness that informs all form now a metaphor might be useful here to help convey this so let's take the wave on the ocean h wave has its own form its own fingerprint if you like no two waves are ever the same but the wave is never separate from the ocean and that's the same to these electromagnetic vibrations that make up the appearance of matter to our senses they are immersed in this ocean of into being we are immersed in this ocean of interbeing and what's really interesting is that we can now show with our increasingly sophisticated instruments and expense we can prove what happens when we shift our consciousness from a state of separateness self a separate form and in competition with the world to a state of connectedness of opening up to this ground of being through contemplative and embodiment practices we see what happens physiologically and psychologically we change tissue repair rates improve stem cell reproduction improves hormones change senses liven the sign actual connections in our brain enhance brainwave frequencies change the left and right brain hemispheres interrelate more readily the head the heart and the gut in train we become more human our ability to empathize and see different perspectives increases our ability to sense into subtly knit synchronistic pathways in our midst all enhances our ability for compassion wisdom and intuition all improves the very qualities that we need to lead and change and adapt in these times of fast-moving volatility all come on screen and my work is mainly in business and in the corridors of power corporate boardrooms and conference halls that I speak and advise that I sense winds of change flowing through challenging the structures and strictures by which we operate and organize and now I'd like to share with you how this revolution in consciousness is manifesting in business perhaps the most powerful human creative force on the planet today essentially what we're seeing is a shift in perspective from viewing the organizations and machine top-down hierarchical owed sweating its assets for short-term returns one of those assets being Human Resources to realizing the organization is actually a living system a living system that interrelates intimately interrelates with the living systems of society which intimately interrelate with the living systems of our more than human world and that's quite a big shift for how we lead and operate and the good news is we can take inspiration from living systems within us and all around us to help us with this shift as much that we can learn from nature these days to help our organizations become more phew fit and I'll share with you now one key principle which is that of divergence and convergence so divergence is opening up and convergence is binding together and out of that tension comes the third which is emergence the way in which we find our flow the way in which we become more of who we are we find our niche in an ever-changing ecosystem we realize our evolutionary potential really important what we now know what helps our organizations become more resilient more vibrant more future fit in these times of volatility is that we need to encourage that divergence encourage that divergence to decentralize decision making distributed decision-making that empowers teams to make change happen at the local level so they can locally attune to the ever-changing environment without having to rely on hierarchies of bureaucracy in control and that divergence also comes with diversity celebrating diversity not just in terms of age creed culture and gender as important as that is in the workplace but also in terms of perceptual horizon how we see things bringing different people from different parts of the silos in the business so those silos permeate more readily bringing different people from different parts of the stakeholder ecosystem so that organizational membrane permeates more readily and that divergence needs to be balanced with a convergence otherwise the organization becomes too amorphous too chaotic and that convergence has traditionally come through power based hierarchies of control and domination there's a whole philosophic and historic reason for that born out of a militarized mind rising patriarchy the ego explosion culminating in this scientific revolution with its focus on rationalism and materialism which still underpinned so much of our scientific management theory in business today and there's really useful aspects in that that we need going forward certainly but as a dominant power dine its unfit for purpose for the world that we're now in and what we're now seeing is that convergence is being replaced with a resonant sense of purpose and we can enhance this resonance sense of purpose when a threshold of people within the organization deeply resonate with the organization sense of purpose and some sociological studies show us that there can be as little as 10% of people in the organization when they deeply resonate with that organizational sense of purpose a tipping point is reached a threshold is crossed work on the consciousness of the organization comes alive it becomes easier for us to let go of those power based hierarchies of control or run them in parallel and allow more self-organizing more emergent more empowering a more human ways of operating but what's really interesting is what we can see to deepen this resonance in times of fast-moving change the organizational sense of purpose needs to touch our humanity as meaning seeking purposeful creatures of we are and so the organizational sense of purpose needs to be more than maximizing profits or becoming number one in the marketplace what we're realizing is that sense of purpose needs to be about enhancing life creating the conditions conducive for life to flourish leaving the garden which of them we found that improving Society the environment and the economy and that's why we now see in business these four piece purpose people planet profit profit flows on that purpose not the other way round and this isn't some kind of utopian dream some nice to have vision to be attained with in times of Plenty but discarded as soon as the going gets tough no what we're now realizing is this this is essential to what enables our organizations to become future fit to thrive in these times of increased volatility and we can see this manifesting in business right before our very eyes now with the exponential growth of movements such as the purpose movement teal evolutionary conscious capitalism he corpse let's take B corpse for instance as an example started off with a handful of mission driven businesses in North America now over 2000 organizations around the world signing up to change their legal Constitution voluntarily away from short-term returns to shareholders to creating value for all stakeholders including society in the environment and not seeing this as some kind of moral burden or duty but realizing this creates the very vitality the very purposeful mission driven entrepreneurial creative life force that the organization needs to thrive in these times of fast-moving change and so it's a very exciting time to be involved in the future of business and so I'll finish on a quote from the well-respected business futurist John Nesbitt who says that the greatest breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology they will occur because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human now I love that to be involved in this expanding concept of what it means to be human to help as human beings live up to our name as Homo sapiens wise beings in this deeply wise interconnected and sentient world thank you very much [Applause]