[R]evolution: Separateness to Connectedness – activating the new paradigm

In this short article, and supporting 17min TEDx talk at Wycliffe College, we are going to immerse ourselves in a revolution:  A revolution with profound consequences for ourselves our systems and our civilisation.

This revolution isn’t about digitisation, globalisation, disruptive innovation or the other macros-trends futurists often point to.

NO.

In fact it’s not out there at all.

It’s in here, in our hearts-and-minds , a revolution in consciousness that is ripping up the rule book about how we view life and our sense of place and purpose within it.

I have been in business for more than twenty years now, and yet it has been many more years of my life that I have deeply felt that what lies at the root of our plethora of challenges and crises – from mental health through to rampant consumerism, from climate change through to the widespread degradation of life on Earth – is dis-connection; dis-connected from ourselves, from each other, and from the world around us.

‘There is a tendency in our age to rush to change the manifest effects of wrong actions without seriously considering the root causes.’ – Joseph Milne

This dis-connection pervades our outer world through our dominant socio-economic narrative, and the way we behave in business today. It pervades our inner world through the quality of our attention and the perceptual filters we habituate and acculturate.

This is what this 17min TEDx talk addresses.

Einstein’s over-used and now heavily-hackneyed insight, we cannot change our problems with the same level of consciousness that created them is bang on the money, a perfect insight for the manifold problems we face and our way beyond them.  Yet, we so often find ourselves doing exactly this, applying the very same thinking that created our problems in the first place to our well-intended solutions. We simply don’t have time for this anymore. This is humanities hour of reckoning. It’s time to get radical and deal with the root cause, this pathological dis-connection.

The TEDx talk explains how we are now manifesting new ways of operating in business and beyond that work with connectedness rather than separateness.  The potential is huge, and the time in now.

As the well-respected business futurist John Naisbett notes,

‘The greatest breakthroughs of the 21^st century will occur not because of technology, they will occur because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.’ – John Naisbett, futurist

Now I love that, to be involved in this expanding concept of what it means to be human, to helps us live up to our name as Homo Sapiens, wise beings, in a deeply wise, interconnected and sentient world.

What is stopping us? What is holding us back?

As the great Sufi mystic Rumi notes,

‘Why do you stay in prison, when the door is wide open?’ – Rumi, mystic

This is perhaps our greatest challenge, to notice our own constricted lenses of perception and to learn to cleanse them: to reach beyond our small selves into something much deeper, much wiser.  To embrace each day as a learning vehicle to become more conscious, more connected, more coherent. As John Macey, CEO of Whole Foods puts it,

‘Perhaps the greatest change that we humans are experiencing is our rising consciousness. To be conscious means to be fully awake and mindful, to see reality more clearly’  John Mackey, CEO Whole Foods

To see reality more clearly and to create the conditions for others in our organisations to see reality more clearly- this is the defining factor for future-fit leaders.

To explore ‘the new paradigm’ further, join the Face Book community here

To watch the TEDx see: