Strategic Workplace Culture – Workshop 2 (Know Thyself)
The Appleton Greene Corporate Training Program (CTP) for Strategic Workplace Culture is provided by Ms. Jourdain, MBA and Mr. Nagel, MA, PhD Certified Learning Provider (CLP). Program Specifications: Monthly cost USD$2,500.00; Monthly Workshops 6 hours; Monthly Support 4 hours; Program Duration 12 months; Program orders subject to ongoing availability.
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Learning Provider Profile
Ms. Kathy Jourdain, MBA and Mr. Jerry Nagel, MA, PhD
Kathy Jourdain and Jerry Nagel have extensive international consulting, training, leadership, executive and Board of Directors experience. They are the co-founders of a bi-national consulting company, having created a proprietary system for consulting, learning and development, and facilitation, based in understanding how individual, team and organizational worldviews impact communication and business strategy. This innovative, thoughtful approach to understanding the impact of worldviews on how we each see and interact with the world around us has been well received in a variety of business and community environments, as a general practice and to advance specific issues.
Through direct application of worldview concepts in client settings, Mr. Nagel and Ms. Jourdain developed many planning models and frameworks to make it easy to work with the ideas and knowledge and to achieve results. These models and frameworks include the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework, the CIDA-W Planning Model (Clarify, Illuminate, Design, Act, Worldview Leadership), the High-Performance Teams Model and the SHEER Conversational Planning Model (Stance, Hoped for Outcome, Empathy, Engage, Results/Reflection). They also draw on Systems Thinking and the knowledge from neuro- and behavioral sciences in supporting the implementation of programs and strategies they develop with and for their clients.
They are co-authors and co-creators of many resources including several books, resource guides, articles, and e-learning programs in addition to the in-person and virtual programs they deliver. They are called upon as keynote, conference and session speakers and thought leaders on their topics of expertise.
Mr. Jerry Nagel, MA, PhD
Mr. Nagel received his PhD in Social and Behavioral Science from Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, in 2015. His research and dissertation on worldviews form a strong foundation for this current body of work, which is rooted in theory but grounded in a decade of practical application. Recognizing the profound impact of worldview explorations on the quality of conversations on issues that matter, he and Ms. Jourdain created specific applications for clients based on the nature of the issues to be solved.
Mr. Nagel has a BA and MA in Economics. He taught economics at the University of North Dakota and the University of Minnesota-Crookston. In addition, while at UMC he led several research initiatives bringing in over $5 million in research funds to the campus. He has several years of Executive experience including leading a Congressionally established Federal Commission, a multi-million dollar international trade research project and a Theory-U based multi-year initiative funded by several national and regional foundations.
Mr. Nagel has attended the Senior Executives in State and Local Government program at Harvard University as a Fannie Mae Foundation Fellow. He is a Donella Meadows Leadership Fellow. He has years of Board Director experience. He has served on the Boards and as the Chair of the Greater Minnesota Housing Corporation with assets now over $1B; Prairie Public Broadcasting, the statewide public television and radio system for North Dakota; the US-Canada Trade Alliance, an international trade promotion and policy organization; the North Dakota Consensus Council; and other Boards.
Ms. Kathy Jourdain, BA (Honours), MBA
Ms. Jourdain is an internationally recognized consultant, trainer and speaker with more than two decades of experience. Her practice is steeped in leading change, strategic planning, leadership development and building High-Performance Teams. When companies are looking to develop new strategies, resolve conflict, engage the hearts and minds of stakeholders, or for professional development, they call on her.
She is a mentor for women business owners through The Forum and is currently mentoring one-on-one and a group process for 8 women business owners. She was a driving force behind Envision Halifax (now Engage Nova Scotia): a voluntary organization whose mission was to ignite a culture of civic engagement. She co-designed and co-facilitated the leadership development program, as well as serving an instrumental role on the Steering Committee for 5 years. Her leadership was recognized in 2009 with an Award.
In her prior career as CEO of the Atlantic Division of a major health charity, Ms. Jourdain was the youngest leader across Canada within the national charity. Working with the Board, she streamlined internal systems for finance, volunteer systems and service and advocacy support. As a recognized leader, she served on a number of local and national boards, in a variety of roles including executive positions. During her not-for-profit career, she was a member of the Canadian Society of Association Executives (C.S.A.E.), and was on both the local and national boards. Ms. Jourdain earned the designation of Certified Association Executive (C.A.E.). Her outstanding leadership and contribution in the not-for-profit sector were recognized with local and national awards. This included a scholarship to the Banff Management Center where she earned a certificate in Leading People and Organizational Change and then certificates in Strategic Planning and Change Management.
Ms. Jourdain and Mr. Nagel
Both Ms. Jourdain and Mr. Nagel are practitioners and global stewards of the Art of Hosting Conversations That Matter, otherwise known as The Art of Participatory Leadership, which is a self-organized international network of practitioners and trainers. They have been collaborating and partnering on consulting, training, learning and development work since 2011. They have worked together in the United States, Canada, Bermuda, France, Germany, Switzerland, Australia and Brazil.
Their work with clients and stakeholders includes community and cross-cultural engagement, strategic direction, innovation, addressing teams in conflict and building team coherence, in traditional organizations in the private, public and not for profit sectors, across systems in rural, urban and suburban settings, with social entrepreneurs, across generations and in culturally specific circumstances.
MOST Analysis
Mission Statement
Leaders who are self-aware, know their strengths and their blind-spots, and are open to receiving feedback are more cognizant of how their own behavior motivates and influences others and Workplace Culture. The most authentic leaders are those who show up consistently, no matter what the environment – professional, social or personal. Demonstrating commitment to life-long learning and self-growth sets the stage for others to follow suit. Know Thyself invites participants to reflect on their own growth and development and what they need to be successful in guiding this Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative and then to apply any leadership insights to the next steps in moving the Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative forward.
Objectives
01. Leading Self: Equip participants with knowledge, skills and assessments to identify individual growth and development goals needed to guide and implement the Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative.
02. Worldviews Formation: Understand how worldviews are formed, what their influence is on relationship, communication and conflict and why it matters, generally and specifically to the Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative.
03. Worldviews and Identity: Discern how worldviews and personal, team and organization identity are connected, and the impact of a challenge or threat to that identity.
04. Framework Origins: Appreciate the academic and theoretical foundation of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework and how the Framework has been grounded in practical application.
05. Reality Dimension: Comprehend what reality refers to, what your own reality is, which elements of that reality impact workplace perspectives and behaviors, and how that might be similar or different to a colleague’s.
06. History Dimension: Understand all the aspects of the History Dimension and the impact of historical influences in how you see and experience the world as well as understand how this might contribute to relationship or communication challenges you have with another person or in the workplace. Additionally, understand team and organizational historical influences that may have an impact on Workplace Culture and your ability to initiate change.
07. Future Dimension: Recognize how consideration of the future is an influence on worldview perspectives, the different ways people experience or prepare for the future and how experiences of or visions for the future can contributed to tension or conflict.
08. Values Dimension: Articulate your own values, understand the role they have played in your life’s journey and how they influence workplace choices, including with respect to Workplace Culture.
09. Practices Dimension: Become conscious of the role of practices, both habitual and intentional, in how you live your life and interact with those around you, at home, socially and at work. Consider the role of practices in a Strategic Workplace Culture.
10. Knowledge Dimension: Discern the sources of knowledge that inform your worldview perspectives, beliefs and opinions and those within your workplace.
11. Dimensions Interdependence: Understand the ways in which the Six Dimensions of the Framework are interdependent and how that knowledge can support the implementation of the Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative.
12. Framework Practicality: Comprehend the practicality and versatility of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework and discern how this will be informative in the implementation of the Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative.
Strategies
01. Leading Self: Provide participants with a structure and strategy to reflect on strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for growth and development.
02. Worldviews Formation: Offer a reflection guide to discuss the prevalence and influence of worldviews, personally, professionally and in the work environment.
03. Worldviews and Identity: Demonstrate the connection between worldviews and identity and what happens when a real or perceived threat to identity occurs, personally, within a team or for an organization.
04. Framework Origins: Share the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework origins and provide descriptions of each of the Six Dimensions.
05. Reality Dimension: Describe the Reality Dimension in detail, providing examples and illustrating the implications of differences and similarities in reality experiences – individually and collectively.
06. History Dimension: Describe the History Dimension in detail, providing examples and illustrating the implications of differences and similarities in history experiences – individually and collectively.
07. Future Dimension: Describe the Future Dimension in detail, providing examples and illustrating the implications of differences and similarities in how people anticipate the future – individually and collectively.
08. Values Dimension: Describe the Values Dimension in detail, providing examples and illustrating the implications of differences and similarities in values held by individuals and by the organization.
09. Practices Dimension: Describe the Practices Dimension in detail, providing examples and illustrating the implications of differences and similarities in practices between people or within teams or organizations.
10. Knowledge Dimension: Describe the Knowledge Dimension in detail, providing examples and illustrating the implications of different sources of knowledge in how people perceive the world around them and its contribution to conflict – individually and collectively.
11. Dimensions Interdependence: Describe the interdependence of the Dimensions, providing examples and illustrating how one or more of the Dimensions can influence or shape one or more of the other Dimensions, personally, in a team and organizationally.
12. Framework Practicality: Illustrate the practicality and versatility of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework, personally, in a team and organizationally, by sharing examples and case studies.
Tasks
01. Identify and complete a self-assessment instrument to discover strengths and reflect on how the results inform growth and development goals. Review previous assessments you may have taken as a reminder of strengths and areas for improvement.
02. Use the reflection guide provided to discuss the role of worldviews in the work environment and in the Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative.
03. Identify situations where you had involuntary reactions to an experience or a person and reflect on how your sense of identity may have been challenged in that situation.
04. Use the structure provided to explore and develop an understanding of personal and professional worldviews.
05. Reflect on your reality, how it influences how you see and experience the world and the assumptions you might be making about other people’s realities that may or may not be accurate.
06. Reflect on your history, how or what has shaped your worldview, how this influences how you see and experience the world and the assumptions you might be making about other people’s histories that may or may not be accurate.
07. Reflect on your relationship with the future, how it influences how you see and experience the world in the present and the assumptions you might be making about how other people see or experience the future that may or may not be accurate. Reflect on your team or organization’s relationship with the future.
08. Complete the Values exercise and reflect on how your values influence how you see and experience the world, your decision-making and how you connect with others.
09. Identify habitual and intentional practices you have and how they support you in achieving your life and work goals and whether there are any new practices that would support you in being successful.
10. Identify sources of knowledge or information you regularly rely on and reflect on how they contribute to your worldview perspectives and whether there are additional sources of knowledge that would help you expand your worldview perspectives and experiences.
11. Consider the interrelationships between Dimensions and identify how your history has influenced or shaped your reality and how it might influence your relationship with the future; consider how your values and practices support your reality; or any other connections between Dimensions that occur to you. Consider these interrelationships within your teams and workplace.
12. Identify practical applications for the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework, particularly in how it will be useful in the Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative.
13. Review the actions taken after Workshop 1 and identify the next steps needed for each of these actions, with timelines and accountabilities.
Introduction
Leadership Development Over Time
In a way, leadership development has always existed in some form. Even in ancient times, people developed skills through apprenticeship, mentorship, and experiential learning. However, it was the emergence of the Industrial Age that created a need for effective organizational management and, thus, leadership development and training programs. What they looked like initially is quite a bit different than how they have evolved over the decades.
From the 1920s to the 1940s the focus was on identifying the traits of leaders, believing them to be innate qualities and characteristics, thus leaders are born. The next 20-year period shifted the focus from traits to behaviors, to identify patterns that could be replicated or taught, thus leadership skills can be gained and leaders can be developed.
Following this, the next emphasis was on situational leadership, leading based on the specific context which could include the characteristics of followers, the nature of the tasks and the specific environment. Since the 1980s the focus has been on transformational leadership and a leader’s ability to inspire and motivate followers to achieve extraordinary outcomes.
This current era has witnessed the rise of leadership development programs in corporations, universities, and professional organizations. It has inspired various approaches to leadership, leading self and self-awareness, including executive coaching, mentoring, formal training programs, and experiential learning opportunities.
Focusing on personal growth in leadership development has become more pronounced in recent decades as researchers and practitioners recognize the interconnectedness between self-awareness, personal development, and effective leadership. Today, many leadership development programs integrate elements of personal growth, mindfulness, and holistic well-being, to nurture leaders who can thrive personally and professionally.
Self-Awareness Bodies of Knowledge
These leadership programs, coaches, mentors and trainers also draw on bodies of knowledge like following:
Humanistic Psychology, spearheaded by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, looking at self-actualization and highlighting the importance of understanding oneself as a leader.
Transformational Leadership Theory, developed by researchers like James MacGregor Burns and Bernard M. Bass, focused on a leader’s ability to inspire and empower followers and involving personal development for both leaders and followers.
Emotional Intelligence, popularized by Daniel Goleman and others, looking at the importance of self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy and social skills in effective leadership.
Coaching and Mentoring, offering personalized support and guidance to individuals and spawning a whole new industry that now often requires a lot of training and certifications.
Positive Psychology, founded by Martin Seligman and others, focused on strengths, well-being and flourishing.
Relational Leadership, developed within the Taos Institute, focuses on dialogue and communications to develop shared meaning and the creation of new ideas.
Worldview Intelligence Leadership, created by Kathy Jourdain and Jerry Nagel, emphasizing the role of worldviews, neuroscience and behavioral science on communication, trust and relationship, and patterns of conflict; working with models and frameworks to illuminate worldviews to work with them intentionally.
Increasingly, leadership development programs have incorporated many of these approaches to help leaders cultivate resilience, optimism, gratitude and other positive attributes.
Knowing Self is Foundation to Effective Leadership
Knowing Thyself is foundational to effective leadership. This exploration provides the insight, authenticity, integrity, emotional intelligence, and adaptability needed to inspire, motivate, and empower others to achieve shared goals. Self-awareness, knowledge and growth is central to Worldview Leadership. The more a leader understands themselves and their own motivations, knows what they excel at and where they need support, the better they are able to leverage their own strengths and ensure they hire and promote people who have different yet complementary sets of skills, knowledge and traits, offering a diversity of experience and views for better, more comprehensive strategy development and decision-making.
The more self-aware someone is the less likely they are to blame others for their own short-comings or for issues or challenges that arise and the less likely they are to create or add to conflict. The more self-aware someone is, the more likely they are to engage their own curiosity, to act from a place of humility, to ask thoughtful questions and to stop and listen to the answers once they have asked the question, and the more willing they are to be questioned and challenged on the perspectives they hold. In fact, they invite it, knowing that no one person has all the answers and a diversity of perspectives leads to better decision-making.
Authenticity comes from understanding our own values, beliefs and motivations. Consistent, authentic, genuine actions build trust. Acting from a place of confidence, integrity, compassion and empathy improves communication and builds the capacity to address conflicts in healthy ways.
The Role of Worldviews and the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework
Gaining an understanding of worldviews, how they are formed and how they influence communication, relationship, tension or conflict and Workplace Culture, provides new avenues to awareness – of one’s self, one’s own responses and one’s contributions to communication, relationships and trust and the Workplace Culture, in teams and the organization overall. It also leads to understanding someone else and how they have come to experience the world around them, or a specific issue, the way they do.
Workshop 2 offers the practical, versatile Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework, through which to develop a greater understanding of self and of the qualities and characteristics brought to building trust and relationship, informing communication styles and offering strategies to open explorations or bridge differences between individuals and within the workplace. The Framework is rooted in theory and academic research and grounded in over a decade of practical application in a wide variety of contexts and with people at all levels of organizations. It offers a structure through which people learn about and understand personal and professional worldviews as well as team, department and organizational worldviews. The academic and practical history of the Framework is detailed in this Workshop.
Personal Exploration is Foundational
It all starts with a personal worldview exploration. This makes the experience of understanding worldviews real and practical. The Framework provides a structure for exploration, training and understanding and it is also an analytical Framework. Understanding your own worldviews helps you understand where and how you differ with someone else. The points of difference are often hidden or disguised, looking like something else – a disagreement about facts or a difference in opinion. You can take offence without understanding what it is that has offended you or without knowing how to bring curiosity and compassion to another individual or group, their point of view or a situation. Understanding the role of worldviews opens you up to curiosity and compassion, which are important workplace leadership skills.
The personal exploration is foundational to the other explorations. This becomes obvious as you begin to imagine how to create the space for multiple worldviews, stories and perspectives to exist within a Strategic Workplace Culture, to fuel generative conversations of discovery or new, more comprehensives solutions to issues of mutual concern or interest. To tease out your own worldviews, what you naturally gravitate towards and to understand what is usually dismissed, opens the opportunity to hold yourself in a position of not knowing, of curiosity, of willingness to hear something you disagree with, without immediately dismissing it, or debating it. It changes the conversation and expands the possibilities. And it is an exploration that you can hold open for as long as you need, even for a lifetime, as your own personal leadership practice. These skills, acquired throughout an organization, support a Strategic Workplace Culture.
In Workshop 2, participants develop a deep understanding of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework, each of the individual Dimensions (reality, history, future, values, practices, knowledge), their impacts, and how they operate interdependently. This offers the opportunity to be more aware of the worldviews of self and others, to reflect on the impact on trust, relationships and communications and to work with this awareness to build a Strategic Workplace Culture.
In this Workshop, the Six Dimensions of the Framework are described with examples, and the relevance of each to communication and dialogue, interactions, leadership, individual growth and awareness. Their contribution to conflicts that individuals and teams experience is made clear. From CIDA-W, both Clarify and Illuminate are drawn upon as participants explore their own worldviews and learn how to apply this to understanding personal, team, and organizational worldviews and interactions. The Framework includes questions crafted for exploring each Dimension in differing personal and professional contexts.
Between Workshops 2 and 3, participants will use the Framework to reflect on other worldviews, which could include another person, their team, department, division or organization overall. They will then test the assumptions they have made about worldviews within the organization, being prepared to discuss the relevance of these discoveries to the design of their Strategic Workplace Culture.
Also, in the Project Studies, participants will begin to design and implement the next stage of the business process that will create the Strategic Workplace Culture.
Executive Summary
The purpose of a Strategic Workplace Culture is to have an environment where employees feel empowered, motivated, and inspired to contribute their best efforts towards achieving organizational goals. This starts with those in leadership positions who have influence in creating and sustaining Workplace Culture and who play a role in establishing, recognizing and rewarding the behaviors, actions and decisions that shape a healthy environment.
Modeling the Way
Leaders who are self-aware, know their strengths and their blind-spots, and are open to receiving feedback are more cognizant of how their own behavior motivates and influences others and Workplace Culture. There is a saying, “What you do speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say.” It is essential that words and actions are in alignment because what leaders do sets the tone for what others adopt as acceptable behaviors in the workplace. This is why the focus of Workshop 2 is Know Thyself.
Leaders show up at all levels of an organization. Some have formal titles and roles and some are informal. Participants in this Program are charged with leading a Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative in their organization. Demonstrating your own commitment to life-long learning and self-growth sets the stage for others to follow. One of the elements of a Strategic Workplace Culture is that learning and development is encouraged and training programs are resourced for this purpose, for individuals and teams.
Strategic Workplace Culture and Worldview Intelligence
The Strategic Workplace Culture Program uses a Worldview Intelligence approach, emphasizing Worldview or Relational Leadership, which is explored more fully in Workshop 3. Workshop 2 connects Worldview Awareness to leading self; outlines how worldviews are formed and why it matters; discusses the connection between worldviews and identity, particularly from a leadership perspective; provides the background to, or origins of, the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework; and then does a deep dive into each of the Six Dimensions, particularly as they relate to personal or professional growth, understanding and leadership. Then, the interdependence of the Dimensions is explored, demonstrating the value, versatility and practicality of the entire Framework.
From CIDA-W, both Clarify and Illuminate are drawn upon as participants explore their own worldviews and learn how to apply this information to understanding team, organization, or another person’s worldviews and interactions as well as the impact on Workplace Culture. Each of the Six Dimensions are described with examples, and the relevance of each to communication, interactions, individual growth and awareness and contributions to tension or conflicts individuals and teams might be experiencing in the workplace or beyond is made clear through case studies and exercises.
The Framework includes questions crafted for exploring each Dimension in differing personal and professional contexts. This offers the opportunity to be more aware of the worldviews of self and others. to reflect on the impact on trust, relationships and communication and to work with this awareness to build a foundation for a Strategic Workplace Culture.
Between Workshops 2 and 3, in addition to identifying the next business process steps, participants will use the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework to reflect on other worldviews, which could include another person, their team, department, division or organization overall. The assumptions made about worldviews within the organization will be tested in conversations with others in the organization. Participants will prepare to discuss the relevance of their discoveries to the design of the Strategic Workplace Culture.
Chapter 1: Leading Self
The most authentic leaders are those who show up consistently, no matter what the environment – professional, social or personal. Self-awareness, knowledge and growth is central to Leading Self. Self-leadership is the ability to influence and direct your own thoughts and actions to successfully reach personal and professional goals and build a satisfying life. A person with high self-awareness gains confidence, enthusiasm and positivity. Chapter 1 explores what Leading Self means and invites participants to reflect on their own growth and development and what might be needed for them to be successful in guiding this Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative.
Chapter 2: Worldviews Formation
Worldviews are the lenses through which we each see and experience the world. Our individual worldviews are unique and they operate largely in our unawareness. We think with them and through them but rarely about them. Making worldviews visible – our own and others – can change and influence the nature of relationships, communication, trust and how we deal with conflict. The same applies to teams, departments and organizations.
We are not born with a worldview but we are born into a multiple of worldviews as our parents or caregivers, extended family, schools, faith institutions and communities all have worldviews. Worldviews are locally and socially constructed, including within the workplace. This Chapter explores what worldviews are, why it is important to know about them and how understanding worldviews contributes to the ability to Lead Self.
Chapter 3: Worldviews and Identity
Worldviews are closely associated with identity. The psychological research shows that when our identity – our sense of who we are as a person, family, team or organization – is challenged, we can respond as if our very life has been threatened. Chapter 3 explores this relationship, the automatic responses that can happen during tension or conflict and offers ideas on how to work with this knowledge and your reactions. Know Thyself invites reflections about how you or your organization respond to situations where automatic reactions are common and also on how your organization responds.
Chapter 4: Framework Origins
The Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework was inspired by the work of Leo Apostel, a philosopher who was based at the University of Brussels and Ghent University. In the late 1980’s he grew more concerned that the world was becoming increasingly fragmented and that people did not know how to talk to each other. He called together a Worldviews Group to develop a Framework or structure for exploring different worldviews so people could have a better understanding of how perspectives are arrived at. It was called the Apostel Framework, which is the foundation of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework.
This Chapter explores how the Six Dimensions Framework is rooted in theory and grounded in practice. The Framework creates the opportunity to learn about and understand personal and professional worldviews, providing a structure for exploration. This sets the stage for the in-depth exploration of each Dimension that follows in Chapters 5 to 10.
Chapter 5: Reality Dimension
Reality is the everyday experiences we all have including our home, work, and social lives. It includes where you live, who you live with, where you work, the kind of work you do, how you travel to and from work, where you shop, socio-economic status and so much more. Physical characteristics like mobility, gender, skin color, age, or the way we dress, are also part of reality or day-to-day experiences.
Reality includes belief systems we each hold, which influence our experiences and how we interpret them. Reflecting on components of our own reality helps us see and understand our personal and workplace circumstances in new ways. Reflecting on someone else’s reality can help illuminate sources of connection and also differences that might impact relationship and communication.
Chapter 6: History Dimension
History is all of the key influences on our worldviews – people, past experiences and more – local and global – that have shaped or influenced how we, individually and collectively, have come to see and experience the world, generally and with respect to specific issues. These influences can include books read and movies watched, conversations with others; basically, anything that has had an impact on how we see and experience things.
Exploring who – family, friends, teachers, mentors, coaches, workplace leaders – and what has influenced and shaped your worldview provides insight into how and why your perspectives have formed and when you have been able to question your views to make intentional choices.
Chapter 7: Future Dimension
The Future Dimension is about how we see, relate to and prepare for the future. The Future will always arrive, is always arriving; whether we are ready for it or not, planning for it or not.
The future is an invitation to explore where you or your organization are going. Your worldview provides you with a way of considering those futures. Because the future is uncertain with more than one possible outcome, this Dimension offers many possible futures, which then offers personal and professional choices to make. Understanding your own relationship to the future will inform your self-knowledge, growth and leadership.
Chapter 8: Values Dimension
Values are the core commitments that influence and guide us personally, as well as our teams and organizations. Values inform our decisions, consciously or not, and our values do have wiggle room. Many people have some awareness of their values but being able to clearly articulate these guiding influences is a powerful personal resource, bringing consciousness to values-based decisions. This Chapter includes a values exercise for participants to reflect on their values and understand how they influence personal and professional choices, as well as leadership style.
Chapter 9: Practices Dimension
Practices are how we live our lives and bring each aspect of our worldviews to life. This includes how we treat people. Practices can be habitual or intentional. Habitual patterns or practices are those we don’t have to give any thought to. This could be morning or evening routines which are the same on a daily basis. Intentional practices are ones that need to be scheduled into a day or week or they might not happen. This could include staying in touch with friends or family members, exercise, meditation or reflection practices. Some practices can be both habitual and intentional – for some people, they cannot get through a day without exercise, whereas for others it needs to be scheduled.
In organizations, practices show up as the patterns of communication and interaction as well as in policies and procedures. Illuminating patterns and identifying needed practices is a key part of sustaining a Strategic Workplace Culture.
Chapter 10: Knowledge Dimension
Knowledge is our understanding of what we know, how we know what we know, what sources of knowledge we trust and how we know our answers to all Six Dimensions are true. This Dimension offers the opportunity to reflect on things you might take for granted and invites you to actively search out sources of knowledge that will help expand your worldviews.
Chapter 11: Dimensions’ Interdependence
It is probably already clear that, while each of the Six Dimensions offers a window into understanding worldviews, they also function interdependently. This provides a broader spectrum of use and invites reflection, for example, on how history informs reality and could inform future. What are the practices needed to be intentional about living your values and creating the future you want, particularly if you are seeking to change something about our life, leadership or relationships? What new knowledge might need to be acquired to support shifts in practices or behavior?
Chapter 12: Framework Practicality
The beauty of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework is its simplicity, even as it provides a coherent structure within which to inform our thinking. The Framework is versatile and practical. The same Six Dimensions can be used to explore the worldview of a team, department, organization, community or Workplace Culture, simply with a different orientation for the questions. And it can be used to compare historical, current and future worldviews. This Chapter explores both this versatility and practicality and offers exercises to stimulate this kind of thinking.
Curriculum
Strategic Workplace Culture – WDP2 – Know Thyself
- Leading Self
- Worldviews Formation
- Worldviews and Identity
- Framework Origins
- Reality Dimension
- History Dimension
- Future Dimension
- Values Dimension
- Practices Dimension
- Knowledge Dimension
- Dimensions Interdependence
- Framework Practicality
Distance Learning
Introduction
Welcome to Appleton Greene and thank you for enrolling in the Strategic Workplace Culture corporate training program. You will be learning through our unique facilitation via distance-learning method, in combination with the monthly in-person modules. This will enable you to practically implement everything that you learn academically. The methods and materials used in this program have been designed and developed to ensure that you derive the maximum benefits and enjoyment possible. We hope that you find the program a good balance of challenging and fun to do.
If you have never been a distance-learner before, you may have some curiosity about the task before you. We will get you started with some basic information and guidance on how you can make the best use of the Workshops, how to manage the materials and what you can be doing as you work through them. This guide is designed to point you in the right direction and help you to become an effective distance-learner. Take time to review this guide and your guide to tutorial support for students, while making notes, before you start to study in earnest.
Study environment
You will need to locate a place to study, where you can focus your attention on the course content. Make sure your space is comfortable and provides a relaxed, pleasant feel. Spoil yourself within your study environment, if possible, with music, good lighting, and pleasant surroundings. This assists with establishing the right frame of mind for studying. If your study space is at home, make sure your family knows when you are studying and understands your study ground rules. The better your study environment, the more productive you will be.
Study tools & rules
You will need to have access to a computer, scanner and printer, and the internet. A comfortable seating arrangement that supports your lower back and posture is advised. A good filing system will help you track all of your course content and work. Make sure that your study tools are up to date.
You might want to consider some study ground rules or principles to help you stay disciplined about when and how you study. This distance-learning guide will help. After you have read it, you can put some thought into what study ground rules or principles will work for you.
You may need to negotiate some study ground rules for your family, friends or anyone who lives with you so they can also be disciplined and support you while you study. It is important to ensure that your family and friends are an integral part of your study team. Having their support and encouragement can prove to be a crucial contribution to your successful completion of the program. Involve them in as much as makes sense to you.
Successful distance-learning
While distance-learning, you are able to study in your own way, at your own pace and for your own purposes. Remember, it is your responsibility, with the distance-learning component of the program, to ensure that you manage your own study contribution. This requires self-discipline and self-motivation skills with a clear will to succeed.
Students who are used to managing themselves, are good at managing others or who enjoy working on their own, are more likely to be good distance-learners. It is also important to keep top of mind the main reasons why you are studying and the main objectives that you are hoping to achieve as a result. You may need to remind yourself of these objectives at times when you need to motivate yourself. Never lose sight of your long-term goals and your short-term objectives. Find ways to encourage and appreciate yourself while you are studying. Make sure that you chart your study progress, so that you can be sure of your achievements and can re-evaluate your goals and objectives regularly.
Self-assessment
Appleton Greene training programs are, in all cases, post-graduate programs. Consequently, you likely will have already obtained a business-related degree and be an experienced learner. This means you likely are already aware of your study strengths and weaknesses. For example, which time of the day are you at your most productive? Are you a lark or an owl? What study methods do you respond to the most? Are you a consistent learner? How do you discipline yourself to study? How do you ensure that you enjoy yourself while studying?
It is important to understand yourself as a learner. Some self-assessment early on can be helpful to applying yourself for best results. One idea is to perform a SWOT analysis on yourself as a student. List your internal strengths and weaknesses as a student and your external opportunities and threats. This will help you later on when you are creating a study plan. You can then incorporate features within your study plan that ensure you are playing to your strengths, while compensating for your weaknesses. You can also ensure that you make the most of your opportunities, while avoiding the potential threats to your success.
Accepting responsibility as a student
Training programs invariably require a significant investment, both in terms of what they cost and in the time that you need to contribute to study. The responsibility for successful completion of training programs rests entirely with the student. This is never more apparent than when a student is learning via distance-learning. Accepting responsibility as a student is an important step towards ensuring you can successfully complete your training program. It is easy to instantly blame other people or factors when things go wrong. But the fact of the matter is that if a failure is your failure, then you have the power to do something about it. It is entirely in your own hands. If it is always someone else’s failure, then you are powerless to do anything about it.
Students study in different ways, because we are all individuals. What is right for one student, is not necessarily right for another. In order to succeed, you will have to accept personal responsibility for finding a way to plan, implement and manage a personal study plan that works for you. If you do not succeed, you only have yourself to blame.
Planning
By far the most critical contribution to stress, is the feeling of not being in control. In the absence of planning, we tend to be reactive and can stumble from pillar to post in the hope that things will turn out fine in the end. Invariably they don’t! In order to be in control, we need to have firm ideas about how and when we want to do things. We also need to consider as many possible eventualities as we can, so that we are prepared for them when they happen.
It is much easier and much more enjoyable if you feel that you are in control and that things are going according to plan. Even when things do go wrong, you are prepared for them and can act accordingly without any unnecessary stress. It is important therefore that you do take time to plan your studies properly.
Plan Management
Once you have developed a clear study plan, it is of equal importance to ensure that you manage the implementation of it. Most of us usually enjoy planning, but it is usually during implementation when things go wrong. Guidelines for self-assessment will help you understand what is and isn’t working and when targets are or are not being met, which can help you be consistent with performance improvement throughout the program. If you manage things correctly, then your performance should constantly improve throughout the program.
Study objectives & tasks
The first place to start planning is to develop your program objectives. These should feature your reasons for undertaking the training program, in order of priority. Keep them succinct and to the point to avoid confusion. Brainstorm for ideas by listing as many things that you want to achieve and later re-arrange these things in order of priority. Finally, select the top five items from your list as your program objectives. Try and restrict yourself to five because it will enable you to focus clearly. It is likely that the other things that you listed will be achieved if each of the top objectives are achieved. If this does not prove to be the case, then simply work through the process again.
Study forecast
As a guide, the Appleton Greene Strategic Workplace Culture corporate training program should take 12-18 months to complete, depending upon your availability, current commitments and progress of the business planning implementation. The reason why there is a variance in time estimates is because every student and project is different. These differentiations can be exaggerated by the fact that this is partly a distance-learning program, which incorporates the practical integration of academic theory as a part of the training program.
All of the project studies are real, which means that important decisions and compromises need to be made. You will want to get things right and will need to be patient with your expectations in order to ensure that they are. We always recommend that you are prudent with your own task and time forecasts, and you still need to develop them and have a clear indication of what are realistic expectations in your case.
With reference to your time planning: consider the time that you can realistically dedicate towards study with the program every week; calculate how long it should take you to complete the program, using the guidelines featured here; then break the program down into logical modules and allocate a suitable proportion of time to each of them. These will be your milestones. You can create a time plan by using a spreadsheet on your computer, or a personal organizer such as MS Outlook. You could also use a financial forecasting software.
Break your time forecasts down into manageable chunks of time. The more specific you can be, the more productive and accurate your time management will be. Finally, use formulas where possible to do your time calculations for you, because this will help later on when your forecasts need to change in line with actual performance.
With reference to your task planning: refer to your list of tasks that need to be undertaken in order to achieve your program objectives. With reference to your time plan, calculate when each task should be implemented. Remember, you are not estimating when your objectives will be achieved, but when you will need to focus upon implementing the corresponding tasks. You also need to ensure that each task is implemented in conjunction with the associated training Sections. Break each single task down into a list of specific to do’s, say approximately 10 to do’s for each task, and enter these into your study plan. Once again, you could use MS Outlook to incorporate both your time and task planning, and this could constitute your study plan. You could also use a project management software like MS Project. You should now have a clear and realistic forecast detailing when you can expect to be able to do something about undertaking the tasks to achieve your program objectives.
Performance management
It is one thing to develop your study forecast, it is quite another to monitor your progress. Ultimately it is less important whether you achieve your original study forecast and more important that you update it so that it constantly remains realistically in line with your performance. As you begin to work through the program, you will begin to have more of an idea about your own personal performance and productivity levels as a distance-learner.
Once you have completed your first study Workshop, you should re-evaluate your study forecast for both time and tasks, so that they reflect your actual performance level achieved. In order to achieve this, track the time it takes against the forecasted time. Then consider the reasons that have contributed towards your performance level, whether they are positive or negative, and make a considered adjustment to your future forecasts. Given time, you should start achieving your forecasts regularly.
Being consistent with your time management, ensures your ability to successfully complete this course. Remember, if you are not in control of your studies and your time, they can become yet another cause of stress for you.
With reference to your task management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual tasks that you have undertaken in your study plan; consider your successes with task-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case. Take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning. Consider your failures with task-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning. Re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to task planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure you continue to be realistic about your task expectations. You need to be consistent with your task management, otherwise you will not know whether you are achieving your program objectives or not.
Keeping in touch
You will have access to qualified and experienced professors and tutors who are responsible for providing tutorial support for your particular training program. So don’t be shy about letting them know how you are getting on.
We keep electronic records of all tutorial support emails so that professors and tutors can review previous correspondence before considering an individual response. It also means that there is a record of all communications between you and your professors and tutors and this helps to avoid any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
If you have a problem related to the program, share it with them via email. It is likely that they have come across the same problem before and are usually able to make helpful suggestions and steer you in the right direction. To learn more about when and how to use tutorial support, please refer to the Tutorial Support section of this student information guide. This will help you to ensure that you are making the most of tutorial support that is available to you and will ultimately contribute towards your success and enjoyment with your training program.
Work colleagues and family
You should certainly discuss your program study progress with your colleagues, friends and family. Appleton Greene training programs are very practical. They require you to seek information from other people, to plan, develop and implement processes with other people and to receive feedback from other people in relation to viability and productivity. You will therefore have plenty of opportunities to test your ideas and enlist the views of others. People tend to be sympathetic towards learners, so don’t bottle it all up in yourself. Get out there and share it! It is also likely that your family and colleagues are going to benefit from your labors with the program, so they are likely to be much more interested in being involved than you might think. Be bold about delegating work to those who might benefit themselves. This is a great way to achieve understanding and commitment from people who you may later rely upon for process implementation. Share your experiences with your friends and family.
Making it relevant
The key to successful learning is to make it relevant to your own individual circumstances. At all times you should be trying to make bridges between the content of the program and your own situation. Whether you achieve this through quiet reflection or through interactive discussion with your colleagues, friends or family, remember that it is the most important and rewarding aspect of translating your studies into real self-improvement.
You should be clear about how you want the program to benefit you. This involves setting clear study objectives in relation to the content of the course in terms of understanding, concepts, completing research or reviewing activities and relating the content of the modules to your own situation. Your objectives may understandably change as you work through the program, in which case you should enter the revised objectives on your study plan so that you have a permanent reminder of what you are trying to achieve, when and why.
Distance-learning check-list
* Prepare your study environment, your study tools and ground rules or principles.
* Undertake detailed self-assessment in terms of your ability as a learner.
* Create a format for your study plan.
* Consider your study objectives and tasks.
* Create a study forecast.
* Assess your study performance.
* Re-evaluate your study forecast.
* Be consistent when managing your study plan.
* Use your Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) for tutorial support.
* Make sure you keep in touch with those around you.
Tutorial Support
Programs
Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively.
Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. They are implemented over a sustainable period of time and professional support is consistently provided by qualified learning providers and specialist consultants.
Support available
You will have a designated Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and an Accredited Consultant and we encourage you to communicate with them as much as possible. In all cases, tutorial support is provided online because we can then keep a record of all communications to ensure that tutorial support remains consistent.
You will also be forwarding your work to the tutorial support unit for evaluation and assessment. You will receive feedback on all of the work that you undertake on a one-to-one basis, together with specific recommendations for anything that may need to be changed in order to achieve a pass with merit or a pass with distinction. You then have as many opportunities as you may need to re-submit project studies until they meet with the required standard. Consequently, the only reason that you should really fail (CLP) is if you do not do the work.
Support Process
Please forward all of your future emails to the designated (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit email address that has been provided. Please do not duplicate or copy your emails to other AGC email accounts as this will just cause unnecessary administration. Please note that emails are always answered as quickly as possible but you will need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general tutorial support emails during busy periods, because emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. You will also need to allow a period of up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Please therefore kindly allow for this within your time planning.
All communications are managed online via email because it enables tutorial service support managers to review other communications which have been received before responding and it ensures that there is a copy of all communications retained on file for future reference. All communications will be stored within your personal (CLP) study file here at Appleton Greene throughout your designated study period. If you need any assistance or clarification at any time, please do not hesitate to contact us by forwarding an email and remember that we are here to help. If you have any questions, please list and number your questions succinctly and you can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each and every query.
Time Management
It takes approximately 1 Year to complete the Strategic Workplace Culture corporate training program, incorporating twelve 6-hour monthly in-person workshops. Each student will also need to contribute approximately 4 hours per week, over the course of the year, of personal time. Students can study from home or work at their own pace and are responsible for managing their own study plan.
There are no formal examinations and students are evaluated and assessed based upon their project study submissions, together with the quality of their internal analysis and supporting documents. They can contribute more time towards study when they have the time to do so and can contribute less time when they are busy.
All students tend to be in full time employment while studying and the Strategic Workplace Culture program is purposely designed to accommodate this. There is plenty of flexibility in terms of time management. It makes no difference to us at Appleton Greene, whether individuals take 12-18 months to complete this program. What matters is that in all cases the same standard of quality will have been achieved with the standard and bespoke programs that have been developed.
Distance Learning Guide
The distance learning guide should be your first port of call when starting your training program. It will help you when you are planning how and when to study, how to create the right environment and how to establish the right frame of mind. If you lay the foundations properly during the planning stage, it will contribute to your enjoyment and productivity while training later.
The Distance Learning guide helps to establish learning and study patterns that will contribute to your success. It helps you chart your progress so you can measure your performance and achieve your goals. It explains the tools that you will need for study and how to make them work. It also explains how to translate academic theory into practical reality. If you haven’t already done so, spend some time now working through your distance learning guide and make sure that you have firm foundations in place so that you can make the most of your distance learning program.
There is no requirement for you to attend training workshops or classes at Appleton Greene offices. The entire program is delivered in a meeting space designated by your company and/or undertaken online. Program course manuals and project studies are administered via the Appleton Greene web site and via email, so you are able to study at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office as long as you have a computer and access to the internet.
How To Study
The How to Study Guide provides students with a clear understanding of the Appleton Greene facilitation via distance learning training methods and enables students to obtain a clear overview of the training program content. It enables students to understand the step-by-step training methods used by Appleton Greene and how course manuals are integrated with project studies. It explains the research and development that is required and the need to provide evidence and references to support your statements. It also enables students to understand precisely what will be required of them in order to achieve a pass with merit and a pass with distinction for individual project studies and provides useful guidance on how to be innovative and creative when developing your Unique Program Proposition (UPP).
Tutorial Support
Tutorial Support for the Appleton Greene Strategic Workplace Culture corporate training program is provided online either through the Appleton Greene Client Support Portal (CSP), or via email. All tutorial support requests are facilitated by a designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). They are responsible for deciding which professor or tutor is the most appropriate option relating to the support required and then the Tutorial Support request is forwarded onto them.
Once the professor or tutor has completed the Tutorial Support request and answered any questions that have been asked, this communication is then returned to the student via email by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). This enables all Tutorial Support, between students, professors and tutors, to be facilitated by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM) efficiently and securely through the email account.
You will therefore need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general support queries and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because all Tutorial Support requests are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. This does not include weekends or public holidays. This means you need to put some thought into the management of your Tutorial Support procedure to ensure that your study plan is feasible and to obtain the maximum possible benefit from tutorial support during your period of study.
Please retain copies of your Tutorial Support emails for future reference. Please ensure that ALL of your tutorial support emails are set out using the format as suggested within your guide to tutorial support. Your Tutorial Support emails need to be referenced clearly to the specific part of the course manual or project study which you are working on at any given time. You also need to list and number any questions that you would like to ask, up to a maximum of five questions within each tutorial support email. Remember the more specific you can be with your questions, the more specific your answers will be too and this will help you to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or duplication.
The guide to Tutorial Support is intended to help you to understand how and when to use support in order to ensure that you get the most out of your training program. Appleton Greene training programs are designed to enable you to do things for yourself. They provide you with a structure or a framework and we use tutorial support to facilitate students while they practically implement what they learn. In other words, we are enabling students to do things for themselves. The benefits of distance learning via facilitation are considerable and are much more sustainable in the long-term than traditional short-term knowledge sharing programs. Consequently, learning how and when to use Tutorial Support will enable you to maximize the benefits from your learning experience with Appleton Greene.
Tutorial Support Tips
Students are often unsure about how and when to use tutorial support with Appleton Greene. This Tip List will help you understand more about how to achieve the most from using tutorial support. Refer to it regularly to ensure that you are continuing to use the service properly. Tutorial Support is critical to the success of your training experience, but it is important to understand when and how to use it in order to maximize the benefit that you receive. It is no coincidence that those students who succeed are those that learn how to be positive, proactive and productive when using Tutorial Support.
Be positive and friendly with your tutorial support emails
Remember that if you forward an email to the Tutorial Support Unit, you are dealing with real people. “Do unto others as you would expect others to do unto you.” If you are positive, complimentary and generally friendly in your emails, you will generate a similar response in return. This will be more enjoyable, productive and rewarding for you in the long-term.
Think about the impression that you want to create
Every time that you communicate, you create an impression, which can be either positive or negative, so put some thought into the impression you want to create. Remember that copies of all Tutorial Support emails are stored electronically and tutors will always refer to prior correspondence before responding to any current emails. Over a period of time, a general opinion will be arrived at in relation to your character, attitude and ability. Manage your own frustrations, mood swings and temperament professionally, without involving the Tutorial Support Team. Demonstrating frustration or a lack of patience is a weakness and will be interpreted as such.
The good thing about communicating in writing, is that you will have the time to consider your content carefully, you can review it and proof-read it before sending your email to Appleton Greene. This should help you to communicate professionally, consistently and to avoid any unnecessary reactions to individual situations as and when they may arise. Please also remember that the CLP Tutorial Support Unit (TSU) will not just be responsible for evaluating and assessing the quality of your work, they will also be responsible for providing recommendations to other learning providers and to client contacts within the Appleton Greene global client network, so do be in control of your own emotions and create a good impression.
Remember that quality is preferred to quantity
Please remember that when you send an email to the Tutorial Support team, you are not using Twitter or Text Messaging. Try not to forward an email every time that you have a thought. This will not prove to be productive either for you or for the tutorial support team. Take time to prepare your communications properly, as if you were writing a professional letter to a business colleague.
Make a list of queries that you are likely to have and incorporate them within one email, about once every month, so that the Tutorial Support Team can understand more about context, application and your methodology for study. Get into a consistent routine with your Tutorial support requests and use the Tutorial Support template provided with ALL of your emails. The (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit will not spoon-feed you with information. They need to be able to evaluate and assess your tutorial support requests carefully and professionally.
Be specific about your questions in order to receive specific answers
Write Tutorial Support emails clearly and succinctly so the tutorial support unit can clearly understand what you are asking, or what you are looking to achieve. Be specific about the questions you want answers to. Number your questions. You will then receive specific answers to each and every question. This is the main purpose of tutorial support via email.
Keep a record of your tutorial support emails
It is important that you keep a record of all Tutorial Support emails that are forwarded to you. You can then refer to them when necessary and avoid any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Individual training workshops or telephone support
Please be advised that Appleton Greene does not provide separate or individual Tutorial Support meetings, workshops, or provide telephone support for individual students. Appleton Greene is an equal opportunity learning and service provider and we are understandably bound to treat all students equally. We cannot therefore broker special financial or study arrangements with individual students regardless of the circumstances.
All Tutorial Support is provided online and this enables Appleton Greene to keep a record of all communications between students, professors and tutors on file for future reference, in accordance with our quality management procedure and your terms and conditions of enrolment. All Tutorial Support is provided online via email because it enables us to have time to consider support content carefully, it ensures that you receive a considered and detailed response to your queries.
You can number questions that you would like to ask, which relate to things that you do not understand or where clarification may be required. You can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each individual query. You will also then have a record of these communications and of all tutorial support, which has been provided to you. This makes Tutorial Support administration more productive by avoiding any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Tutorial Support Email Format
You should use this Tutorial Support format when you need to request clarification or assistance while studying with your training program. Please note that ALL of your Tutorial Support Request emails should use the same format. You should therefore set up a standard email template, which you can then use as and when you need to. Emails that are forwarded to Appleton Greene, which do not use the following format, may be rejected and returned to you by the (CLP) Program Administration Manager.
A detailed response will be forwarded to you via email usually within 20 business days of receipt for general support queries and 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Your Tutorial Support Request, together with the corresponding Tutorial Support Unit reply, will then be saved and stored within your electronic TSU file at Appleton Greene for future reference.
Subject line of your email
Please insert: Appleton Greene (CLP) Tutorial Support Request: (Your Full Name) (Date), within the subject line of your email.
Main body of your email
Please insert:
1. Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) Tutorial Support Request
2. Your Full Name
3. Date of TS request
4. Preferred email address
5. Backup email address
6. Course manual page name or number (reference)
7. Project study page name or number (reference)
Subject of enquiry
Please insert a maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Briefly outline the subject matter of your inquiry, or what your questions relate to.
Question 1
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 2
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 3
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 4
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 5
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Please note that a maximum of 5 questions is permitted with each individual tutorial support request email.
Procedure
* List the questions that you want to ask first, then re-arrange them in order of priority. Make sure that you reference them, where necessary, to the course manuals or project studies.
* Make sure that you are specific about your questions and number them. Try to plan the content within your emails to make sure that it is relevant.
* Make sure that your tutorial support emails are set out correctly, using the Tutorial Support Email Format provided here.
* Save a copy of your email and incorporate the date sent after the subject title. Keep your tutorial support emails within the same file and in date order for easy reference.
* Allow up to 20 business days for a response to general tutorial support emails and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because detailed individual responses will be made in all cases and tutorial support emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received.
* Emails can and do get lost. So if you have not received a reply within the appropriate time, forward another copy or a reminder to the tutorial support unit to be sure that it has been received but do not forward reminders unless the appropriate time has elapsed.
* When you receive a reply, save it immediately featuring the date of receipt after the subject heading for easy reference. In most cases the tutorial support unit replies to your questions individually, so you will have a record of the questions that you asked as well as the answers offered. With project studies however, separate emails are usually forwarded by the tutorial support unit, so do keep a record of your own original emails as well.
* Remember to be positive and friendly in your emails. You are dealing with real people who will respond to the same things that you respond to.
* Try not to repeat questions that have already been asked in previous emails. If this happens the tutorial support unit will probably just refer you to the appropriate answers that have already been provided within previous emails.
* If you lose your tutorial support email records you can write to Appleton Greene to receive a copy of your tutorial support file, but a separate administration charge may be levied for this service.
How To Study
Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can help you to plan a task list for getting started so that you can be clear about your direction and your priorities in relation to your training program. It is also a good way to introduce yourself to the tutorial support team.
Planning your study environment
Your ability to study and complete the tasks outlined throughout the program are of great importance and will have a direct effect on how much you enjoy your training program. Consider the space available to you to do your work, whether it is comfortable, the degree of privacy you have and whether you are likely to be disturbed. The study tools and facilities at your disposal are also important to the success of your distance-learning experience. Your Tutorial Support Unit can help with useful tips and guidance, regardless of your starting position. Being thoughtful about your study environment creates the conditions for your success in this training program.
Planning your program objectives
Begin by creating a clear list of study objectives, in order of priority, before you start working on your training program. Your Tutorial Support Unit can offer assistance here to ensure that your study objectives have been afforded due consideration and priority.
Planning how and when to study
For the distance-learning part of the program, you are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes and can study in your own way, at your own pace and for your own purposes. It is important to plan how and when to study, so you make the most of your natural attributes, strengths and opportunities. Your Tutorial Support Unit can offer assistance and useful tips to ensure that you are playing to your strengths.
Planning your study tasks
You should have a clear understanding of the study tasks that you will be undertaking and the priority associated with each task. These tasks should be integrated with your program objectives. The Distance Learning Guide and the Guide to Tutorial Support for students can help you here, and if you need any clarification or assistance, please contact your Tutorial Support Unit.
Planning your time
You will need to allocate specific times during your calendar when you intend to study if you are to have a realistic chance of completing your program on time. You are responsible for planning and managing your own study time, so it is important that you are successful with this. Your Tutorial Support Unit can help you with this if your time plan is not working.
Keeping in touch
Consistency is the key here. If you communicate too frequently in short bursts, or too infrequently with no pattern, then your management ability with your studies will be questioned, both by you and by your Tutorial Support Unit. It is obvious when a student is in control and when one is not and this will depend on how well you are able to stick with your study plan. Inconsistency invariably leads to in-completion.
Charting your progress
Your tutorial support team can help you to chart your own study progress. Refer to your distance learning guide for further details.
Making it work
To succeed, all that you will need to do is apply yourself to undertaking your training program and interpreting it correctly. Success or failure lies in your hands and your hands alone, so be sure that you have a strategy for making it work. Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can guide you through the process of program planning, development and implementation.
Reading methods
One thing that can improve productivity is using recognized reading methods. This helps to focus and be more structured when reading information for reasons of importance, rather than relaxation.
Speed reading
You can start by speed reading or skimming through the material. This is not for a detailed understanding, but so your brain will retain a useful overview. This overview will enable you to keep individual issues in perspective, with a more generic picture, because speed reading appeals to the memory part of the brain. Do not worry about what you do or do not remember at this stage.
Content reading
Once you have speed read everything, you can then start work in earnest. You now need to read a particular section of your course manual thoroughly, by making detailed notes while you read. This process is called Content Reading and it will help to consolidate your understanding and interpretation of the information that has been provided.
Making structured notes on the course manuals
When you are Content Reading, make detailed notes, which are both structured and informative. One suggestion is to make these notes in an MS Word document, because you can then amend and update them as and when you deem it to be necessary. Listing notes under the following three headings can be useful: 1. Interpretation – 2. Questions – 3. Tasks. The purpose of the 1st section is to clarify your interpretation by writing it down. The purpose of the 2nd section is to list any questions that arise for you. The purpose of the 3rd section is to list any tasks that you will undertake as a result.
Organizing structured notes separately
You can then transfer your notes to a separate study notebook, preferably one that enables easy referencing. This could be an MS Word Document, an MS Excel Spreadsheet, an MS Access Database, or a personal organizer on your computer or cell phone. Transferring your notes creates the opportunity to cross-check and verify them, which assists considerably with understanding and interpretation. You will also find that the better you are at doing this, the more chance you will have of ensuring that you achieve your study objectives.
Question your understanding
Do challenge your understanding. Explain things to yourself in your own words by talking out loud and writing things down.
Clarifying your understanding
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your understanding.
Question your interpretation
Do challenge your interpretation. Qualify your interpretation by writing it down.
Clarifying your interpretation
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your interpretation.
Qualification Requirements
The student will need to successfully complete the project study and all of the exercises relating to the Strategic Workplace Culture corporate training program, achieving a pass with merit or distinction in each case. All monthly workshops need to be tried and tested within your company. These project studies can be completed in your own time and at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office, recognizing that you may be working with a team and have team accountabilities as well.
There are no formal examinations. Assessment is based upon the successful completion of the Project Studies. They are called Project Studies because, unlike case studies, these projects are not theoretical, they incorporate real program processes that need to be properly researched and developed. The Project Studies assist us in measuring your understanding and interpretation of the training program and enable us to assess qualification merits. All of the Project Studies are based entirely upon the content within the training program and they enable you to integrate what you have learned into your corporate training practice.
Strategic Workplace Culture – Grading Contribution
Project Study – Grading Contribution
Reflection Exercises – Past, Future, Practices – 15%
Social System Mapping – 10%
Employee Pulse Survey Review – 20%
Vision Review through the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework and Gap Analysis – 15%
Identification of goals and strategies to bridge gaps – 20%
Identification of Initiatives for possible implementation – 20%
Qualification grades
A mark of 90% = Pass with Distinction.
A mark of 75% = Pass with Merit.
A mark of less than 75% = Fail.
If you fail to achieve a mark of 75% with a project study, you will receive detailed feedback from the Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and/or Accredited Consultant, together with a list of tasks which you will need to complete, in order to ensure that your project study meets with the minimum quality standard that is required by Appleton Greene. You can then re-submit your project study for further evaluation and assessment. Indeed you can re-submit as many drafts of your project studies as you need to, until such a time as they eventually meet with the required standard by Appleton Greene, so you need not worry about this, it is all part of the learning process.
When marking project studies, Appleton Greene is looking for sufficient evidence of the following:
Pass with merit
A satisfactory level of program understanding
A satisfactory level of program interpretation
A satisfactory level of project study content presentation
A satisfactory level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
A satisfactory level of the practical integration of academic theory
Pass with distinction
An exceptional level of program understanding
An exceptional level of program interpretation
An exceptional level of project study content presentation
An exceptional level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
An exceptional level of the practical integration of academic theory
Preliminary Analysis
Self-Awareness and Growth
The focus of Workshop 2 is Know Thyself. As one of the people who will be guiding the Workplace Culture Initiative in your organization, others will be looking to you as a leader. An essential characteristic of good leaders is a willingness to do the self-reflective work required to identify their strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for growth. They are interested in lifelong learning, growth and development. They are ready to take a hard look at whatever aspects of their personal and professional development they need to accept responsibility for, to identify their own growth goals, adjust patterns of behaviors and actions to demonstrate the characteristics and ingredients of a healthy Workplace Culture. They are willing to acquire the skills needed to support and sustain the elements of the Vision for a Strategic Workplace Culture.
Review Progress on the Project Studies Goals from Workshop 1
The approach taken throughout this Program is based on worldviews and Worldview Intelligence, which you have already been introduced to in Workshop 1. Workshop 1 provided an overview of the entire Program and had a significant focus on obtaining baseline measures from which to track progress, including the distribution of the Strategic Workplace Culture Assessment and identifying other specific measurements the team has decided to track. Additionally, you adopted a Commitment Pledge which you then asked others, whose support is needed for success of this Initiative, to sign, and you have begun to collect input on the draft Vision.
Before attending Workshop 2, the team should have a clear sense of where you are on your goals and action steps coming out of Workshop 1 and have updated any timelines and accountabilities required. Your work and the status of it, should have been uploaded to the portal for review. As part of Workshop 2 Project Studies, you will be progressing the business process for your Strategic Workplace Culture. This will include identifying the specific projects to be implemented in support of the Vision you are creating and establishing a project plan for this purpose.
Workshop 2 Preparation
In preparing for Workshop 2, review the information on worldviews and the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework contained in Workshops 1 and 2 Course Manuals. If you haven’t done so already, reflect on the role of worldviews in your life and relationships, personally and professionally, within your teams, department or organization. Use the journal prompts provided in Workshop 1 for this purpose.
During Workshop 2, you will be reflecting on your own worldview as a starting place for further explorations. You may want to consider how your worldview and perspectives align with the Vision for your Strategic Workplace Culture, where you think you might be challenged and the contributions you will be able to make.
Review Other Assessments You Have Completed
If you have completed other kinds of assessments that have given you information about you, your leadership style, learning style, communications style or other personal or professional insights, you might want to review them to have your own strengths and areas for improvement in your mind as you layer in worldview knowledge and awareness. Many people say that Worldview Intelligence enhances other methods and practices, providing different skills and alternative ways of viewing the material and methodologies. Examples of other instruments or methodologies include Emotional Intelligence, Communication or Conflict Styles assessments, Myers-Briggs, Enneagram Personality Test, True Colors, Integral Theory Quadrants, Spiral Dynamics, Strength Finders or any other of a host of such assessments.
What Do You Want to Learn from a Worldview Intelligence Approach
Leadership starts with self-leadership or knowing yourself. As you reflect on your skills and abilities in engaging others, inviting perspectives different from your own, listening ability, ensuring that people who work with you feel able and safe to speak up, or what makes you uncomfortable, where do you see your own growth and development opportunities? What do you want to learn from Worldview Intelligence and the knowledge of worldviews that will make you a better leader?
The next step in the Program, Workshop 3, is focused on Worldview Leadership and will look at types of leadership, myths of leadership and how you express leadership with others and within your organization. We know that an individual, organization or community that is worldview aware offers greater leadership potential, more inclusive, welcoming workplaces and the creativity that arises from the interaction of multiple worldviews. This more often leads to innovative ideas or solutions and greater workforce engagement.
An Invitation to Curiosity
As with Workshop 1, you are invited to bring a curious and open mind to the Know Thyself exploration.
Some Resources
Books
Barry Johnson, Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems; HRD Press Inc; 1992 and 1996
James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge: How to Get Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations; Josey-Bass Inc, 1987
Blog Posts
Worldview Intelligence in its Most Basic Form Click Here
The Origins of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework Click Here
The Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework Click Here
The Importance and Power of Presence in Hosting and Facilitating Click Here
Transforming Difficult Conversations with Worldview Intelligence Click Here
You Can’t Policy Relationships Click Here
Course Manuals 1-12
Course Manual 1: Leading Self
The most authentic leaders are those who show up consistently, no matter what the environment – professional, social or personal. This consistency is grounded in the practice of self-leadership. Self-awareness, knowledge and growth are central to Leading Self. Self-leadership, then, is the ability to influence and direct your own thoughts and actions to successfully reach personal, professional and organizational goals and to build a satisfying life.
Leading self is a continuous learning journey, one that is to be celebrated. The more knowledgeable you are about yourself, personally and professionally, the better leader you are. The more aware you are of your tendencies and preferences, the greater your ability to be intentional about the choices you make – in your life and career. In all the circumstances in which you show up, the work you do, the ability to lead others or to be part of healthy teams or in creating a healthy and Strategic Workplace Culture, you are the most powerful instrument you have. The more consistent and self-aware you are, the more others can rely on you and trust you.
Leaders who know their strengths and where they need to improve, are more self-confident and open to receiving advice and input when dealing with blind-spots or areas for improvement. They are more cognizant of how their own behavior motivates and influences others. There is a saying, “What you do speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say.” As a leader in your organization, it is essential that your words, articulated worldviews and actions are in alignment. What you do sets the tone for what others adopt as acceptable behaviors in the workplace. This is why the focus of Workshop 2 is Know Thyself.
The higher your self-knowledge, the greater your confidence, credibility, enthusiasm and positivity. This Chapter explores what Leading Self means for you personally and as a leader in your organization. It invites you to reflect on your own growth and development and what other skills, abilities, knowledge or insights you might need to develop, desire or seek out to be successful in guiding your Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative.
Leadership Influence in Creating a Strategic Workplace Culture
The purpose of a Strategic Workplace Culture is to create an environment where employees feel inspired and motivated to contribute their best efforts towards achieving organizational goals. This starts with leaders in positions of influence who play a role in establishing, recognizing and rewarding the behaviors, actions and decisions that shape a healthy Workplace Culture.
Leaders show up at all levels of an organization. Some have formal titles and roles and some are informal. As a participant in this Program, you are charged with being a leader in designing and implementing a Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative. Demonstrating your commitment to life-long learning and self-growth sets the stage for others to join you in the process.
Understanding and demonstrating the qualities and characteristics that contribute to healthy relationships and a Strategic Workplace Culture generates the conditions and models behaviors for others to adopt. Some of these qualities and characteristics are covered more fully further on in this Workshop and they include empathy, listening, the ability to engage others, relational leadership, clarity and sound decision-making. These are practices that can be learned or more fully developed in you and in others.
Effective Leadership Foundation
Knowing Thyself is foundational to effective leadership. This personal exploration provides the insight, authenticity, integrity, emotional intelligence, and adaptability needed for you to inspire, motivate, and empower others to achieve shared goals. The more you understand yourself and what motivates you, the greater your understanding of what you excel at and where you need support and the better able you are to leverage your strengths.
When you know your own strengths, you can use them to their fullest. Knowing which skills, abilities or knowledge you are not strong at opens the door for you to surround yourself with people who have different yet complementary sets of skills, knowledge, interests and traits and the greater your ability to make diverse hires in the organization overall. Together you bring a diversity of experience and views for better, more comprehensive strategy development and decision-making.
The Role of Unconscious Bias
The ability to identify who should be on your team or in your workplace or professional circles is sometimes hindered by unconscious or implicit biases. This is the human tendency to form perspectives, judgments or opinions about others without having enough relevant information to base them on. Biases can stem from stereotypes, preconceived notions, past experiences, or gut instinct. These biases can also be based on recent events, advertising, or media that may affect how you think of things now. It also means that we tend to gravitate towards people who are like us. Without being intentional about seeking out difference, we may surround ourselves with people more like us than not and lose out on the benefits of a diversity of views or worldviews.
The more self-aware you are the greater your ability to mitigate unconscious biases. Also, the less likely you will be to blame others for your own short-comings or for issues or challenges that arise and the less likely you are to create or add to conflict. Engaging your own curiosity, acting from a place of humility, asking thoughtful questions and stopping to listen to the answers once you have asked a question, are all traits that are amplified with self-awareness.
Leading Self also creates a willingness to be questioned and challenged on perspectives, opinions or positions you hold. You will invite the challenges, knowing that no one person, including you, has all the answers to any challenge, dilemma or opportunity, and that a diversity of perspectives leads to better decision-making. The ability for people to speak up, challenge the status quo, and ask questions are all characteristics of a Strategic Workplace Culture and behaviors that are encouraged by anyone in a leadership role or within a team.
Case Study – Mistaken Worldview Assumptions
A team of four trainers was working together to deliver a three-day program. They had a late entry into the facility they were using and when they arrived in the rooms, they decided to reorganize them to be more conducive to the learning environment they wanted to create. This meant scrambling to move chairs between rooms, get registration started and make coffee and tea available for arriving participants. The entire team was involved in this. As participants arrived, they joined in re-setting the room. When ready, everyone took a collective breath and got started with the opening introductions. During the day teaching on several elements of human nature and group dynamics was delivered, including on worldviews and worldview awareness.
One member of the team was a 60+ year old, African American man, 6 feet+ tall, with a football player’s build. He often dressed casually and that day wore a leather baseball cap with the brim turned towards the back. During the final session of the day, he sat next to a young white woman. She turned to him with tears in her eyes and shared her worldview shift experience from that day.
She said to him, “When I arrived here this morning and saw you moving furniture, I thought you were the janitor. Then, when we began the session, I thought you were a participant. When you facilitated the opening introductions, I was shocked to realize you were part of the training team. I am embarrassed and ashamed. I had no idea this is how my brain was working. This has been an important moment for me, and I needed you to know.”
The team member was gracious in his acknowledgement of this heartfelt sharing and afterwards, the training team, recognized even more fully, the importance and power of exploring worldviews.
Being Worldview Intelligent offers you the opportunity to short-circuit unconscious messaging and to consider how to focus on healthy exchanges, relationships and communication. It does this by providing awareness, knowledge and skills to press the pause button, to be curious about your interpretations, so you can act more mindfully, intentionally or strategically and to invite others to do so as well. All of this contributes to creating and sustaining a healthy and Strategic Workplace Culture.
Consistency and Authenticity
Authenticity comes from understanding your own values, beliefs and motivations as well as what people, situations or circumstances evoke reactions from you and why they do so. It comes from understanding your leadership style and how you show up int he workplace. Knowing this, you can develop practices to manage strong negative reactions and enhance positive ones. Authentic, genuine actions build trust. They let other people know they can rely on you and that they can expect consistency from you, no matter what issue, concern or opportunity they bring to you.
Acting from a place of confidence, integrity, presence, compassion and empathy improves communication. Being present, demonstrated by being focused and engaged and not distracted or mentally absent, when meeting with someone, indicates to them that you care about and value them. This generates loyalty, deepens trust and relationship.
Ability to Deal with Conflict
Good leaders do not turn away from conflict. Knowing what kinds of situations, circumstances or events you react to and why contributes to your capacity to remain calm in the face of uncertainty, tension or conflict and to find healthy ways through it.
Conflict, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, especially if it is based in differing ideas, perspectives or opinions. This can fuel creativity and innovation. Having the ability to work through competing ideas leads to better decision-making and lasting commitment to the decisions that are made. If ideas are not openly shared and thoroughly discussed, people, including workplace colleagues, may not feel like their perspectives, doubts or questions have been heard. Once people know they have been heard, they can be surprisingly willing to modify or let go of an idea they may have had and support what is collectively agreed to.
The ability to deal with conflict emanating from personality clashes, negative attitudes or disputes between individuals or groups is even more important. It becomes essential to find ways to disarm conflicts to maintain or build trust, relationship and a Strategic Workplace Culture. Ignoring or turning away from conflict doesn’t make it go away, it simply drives it underground, sparking discontent and dissatisfaction that will only find other ways to surface, contributing to an unhealthy Workplace Culture and low psychological safety.
Understanding and working with your own reactions to conflict offers ideas and strategies for moving through it. Most of the Workshops in this Program identify different sources of conflict – person-to-person or within teams or groups – and provide different ways to address it.
In support of your personal and professional self-awareness journey, there are many online, free assessment tools that you can access. High5, SSQ-72, Wingfinders, 16Personalities, the Harvard Implicit Association Tests are a few examples and there are many more offered at modest cost.
Case Study – The Negative Impact of Groupthink
In 2011, researchers at the University of Michigan and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management conducted a study called Set up for a Fall: The Insidious Effects of Flattery and Opinion Conformity toward Corporate Leaders. They had a theory that “flattery and opinion conformity” makes CEOs overconfident, resulting in “biased strategic decision-making”, which resulted in failed strategies, decisions and investments, costing into the billions of dollars. The study determined that CEOs who surround themselves with “yes-men” engaged in groupthink. This resulted in a greater likelihood to maintain the status quo and implement or stick with ill-conceived strategies.
While everybody’s aware of the danger of only hearing from people who will tell them what they want to hear, CEOs and business leaders are still forever falling victim to it. The question emerges: how can companies avoid the problem of “yes-men” and groupthink? One of the authors of the study, Ithai Stern, offers chief executives the following advice: “Remember that the higher you are, the more likely you are to be ingratiated, and therefore you should make sure you get advice from people who do not depend on you.”
Healthy leaders know to surround themselves with the best and brightest talent they can find. People who will tell it like it is and do what’s right for the company, no matter what. And leaders who fit that description know when someone’s “ingratiating” them and how to avoid insidious groupthink. This points to the necessity of self-awareness and the confidence to hire people who are willing to offer perspectives that disagree with their own.
Exercise: Reflections on Leading Self and Personal Leadership
• What does self-leadership mean to you? How does that correlate with what it means inside your organization?
• How do you define personal leadership?
• What strategies do you, or your organization, use to develop self-awareness?
• How do you handle and navigate your emotions in challenging situations?
• What practices or habits do you employ for self-improvement and personal growth? How does your organization support these practices or habits?
• How do you prioritize and manage your time effectively?
• Describe a situation where you had to demonstrate self-discipline or self-control and how you did that.
• What steps do you take to maintain a healthy work-life balance?
• How do you handle setbacks or failures, and what do you learn from them? How does your organization?
Course Manual 2: Worldviews Formation
Worldviews are the lenses through which we see, experience and interpret the world. They are different for each of us. They provide a symbolic system of representation in which you can place your own experiences. It is important to recognize that you don’t have just one worldview but that you can have many, usually interrelated, worldviews.
Worldviews influence communication, relationship and conflict or tension, often without us knowing, because they work largely in our unawareness. Most people think with their worldviews and through them, but rarely about them. Not only do individuals have worldviews, but families, communities, teams, departments, organizations, cultures and countries all have worldviews. A Strategic Workplace Culture is a worldview in and of itself.
Where do worldviews come from? How are they formed? Why does it matter? These are all questions that are explored in Chapter 2: Worldviews Formation.
The Foundation for Worldview Exploration
What is your worldview? How do you know? What impact does your worldview have on your relationships, communication or the challenges you experience? What is your starting point for any interaction or communication? What is your organization’s worldview? How do you know? Why do your answers to these questions matter?
Most of us have given little, if any, thought to these questions. A personal worldview exploration allows you to begin to understand your worldview, what has influenced how you have come to see and experience the world around you and your perspectives on specific issues. It allows you to discern your starting point in a conversation or situation. This exploration also holds true for your organization.
The Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework, introduced in this Workshop on Know Thyself, provides a simple yet elegant structure for these explorations. It will help you illuminate patterns, assumptions, beliefs and consequences of actions that seem obvious once they are made visible but otherwise are running in the background, impacting you, your communications and relationships, in unconscious ways. Knowing your own worldview and being curious about other worldviews makes a difference in the workplace, with your colleagues and in your leadership.
Becoming knowledgeable about your own worldview helps you understand where and how you might differ with someone else. Points of difference can be hidden or disguised. They can look like something else, most commonly a disagreement on facts or a difference in opinion. It may, for example, more fundamentally be a values clash, how you see and experience the future or something in your history that is still alive in this moment. It is not uncommon to take offence without understanding what it is that has offended us or without turning to curiosity and compassion to listen to another individual, their point of view or a situation.
The personal worldviews exploration is essential to all other explorations, including your organization’s worldview. It is the foundation of ‘Knowing Thyself.” You can begin to imagine how to create the space for multiple worldviews, stories and perspectives to co-exist, to fuel generative conversations of discovery or new, more comprehensive solutions to issues of mutual concern or interest. Understanding your own worldviews is a starting point to being able to understand or invite other worldviews. Becoming knowledgeable in inviting and exploring a variety of worldview perspectives is a vital leadership skill and one of the keys to creating and sustaining a Strategic Workplace Culture.
Personal, Professional and Other Worldviews
Each of us has a personal worldview that influences how we act with family or friends. Most of us have a professional worldview that impacts how we think and act at work and in professional situations. We might also be influenced by a cultural worldview that is prominent in our family or community. There is also a societal worldview that influences how we act with, view, or treat others in social settings, our community and our country.
The Story of the Fish
It’s a beautiful day and there are three young fish swimming and playing together, minding their own business. Along comes an older fish who greets them, commenting on what a lovely day it is and asking them, “How’s the water?” before continuing on his way.
The three young fish keep moving in the other direction but are puzzled. Finally, one looks at the other two and says, “What’s water?”
Worldviews are like the water the fish are swimming in, without the conscious awareness that they were doing so. They are invisible, like the air we breathe, and yet our worldviews have a vitality to them that infiltrates who we are, how we act and everything we do. We think with them and through them and that is why they are actively influencing how we see, experience and interpret the world around us. As this Anaïs Nin quote indicates, we don’t see and experience the world the way it is, we see it the way we are.
Generally, the impact of worldviews is unknown prior to conscious exploration. It is quite common to be unaware of your own contribution to challenging dynamics in relationships, conversations or conflicts, which means you may be equally unaware of how much power you have to influence the situation positively and strategically.
The Formation of Worldviews – Socially and Locally Constructed
How are worldviews formed? You were not born with a worldview, but you were born into a multitude of worldviews. Your parents, family, culture, community, faith institutions and schools all have worldviews.
Worldviews are socially and locally constructed. Socially constructed means constructed in relationship with and to other people. Your first interactions are with parents, family members or other caregivers. It is in relationship with them that your first worldviews take shape as you unconsciously assume the perspectives of those around you. Conversations and relationships throughout your whole life will have you continually constructing and reconstructing your worldview, even as you may be unaware of the process. Interestingly, founders of companies carry these personal worldviews into the company during its formation.
Locally constructed means that place has a role in shaping worldviews. Where you were born, where you grew up, where you live now or have traveled to, all inform your worldview. The physical characteristics of where you grew up can impact your worldview, whether rural or urban, marine or prairie, with 4 seasons or in hotter climates, in what area or country.
The worldviews of place, people, organizations, culture and systems are communicated in many ways. Some of this is communicated in obvious and overt ways, but most of it is subtle, operating invisibly and impacting us internally. Your worldviews become what you know or how you act.
Think of a place you’ve travelled to, where you knew right away, this place is different. It might have been another country, a different part of your own country, a different size city or town, more rural or more urban. How did you know it was different? Most people notice it “feels” different, but what generates that feeling? What are the components that contribute to the whole that generates that “feeling”? It could be the landscape, architecture, road design, the interactions and behaviors of local people or any of several other things.
Family members, neighboring communities, similar businesses, workplace colleagues, churches within the same faith, teachers in the same school, can have similar or differing worldviews depending upon, among other things, local circumstances and social and family experiences. These worldviews can be an invisible part of your conversations, relationships or any tension or conflict you may be experiencing. Values differences, impatience with different sources of knowledge or different relationships with the future may all be sources of conflict, as we explore in subsequent Chapters in this manual.
Case Study – What Cross Walk Behaviors and Patterns Tell Us about Local Worldviews
One of the ways worldviews of place are unconsciously interpreted is by watching how local people cross the street. Most visitors or tourists will pattern their own behavior after what they witness. What is witnessed reveals a lot about the hierarchies or priorities in a place.
Generally speaking, in France, pedestrians have priority. Vehicles routinely stop for pedestrians and people regularly begin crossing the street before the light turns green. They will cross even during a Do Not Cross light if there are no moving vehicles in sight.
In Germany, generally, pedestrians take their life in their hands if they dare to step off the curb. No one moves until the Pedestrian Walk light appears. Vehicles take precedence.
In Amsterdam there is a proliferation of cyclists and they are the priority, above vehicles and pedestrians. If you are on foot and not paying attention, a bicyclist just might take you out.
In Geneva, with a more global population, the signals are mixed. It is not clear who has priority and it is that much more important to pay attention to what is happening around you.
Worldviews are Not Fixed
Worldviews are not fixed. They continue to be socially constructed over the course of your lifetime. Individually, worldviews are influenced by the contexts in which you grew up, choices you’ve made and the life path that unfolded and continues to unfold, as a result of those choices. As you age, mature and/or grow, your worldviews often also grow or expand, as one of the ways in which you make sense of your experiences. Alternatively, some experiences may cause worldviews to contract, creating a desire to withdraw or isolate, possibly making you less open to other perspectives. This can happen for someone who has experienced violence or someone who has developed considerable anxiety or fear after being inundated with news stories about wars, protests or other forms of violence.
Just like individual worldviews are not fixed, neither are teams, communities or organization’s worldviews fixed. They are constantly changing over time, but often without conscious awareness.
Worldviews in Action – Faster Than the Blink of an Eye
You are constantly creating stories and making decisions at lightning-fast speeds, most of the time without knowing you are doing it. When was the last time you sat at a café or in an airport, watching people go by? Have you ever created a story about someone you saw? What about the first time you met a new workplace colleague or a new customer or had a new leader within the organization? Of course, you have. It is a natural, normal, typical human behavior. We all do it. The story appears in our minds fully formed, without words, carrying many assumptions about who that person is.
Where did that story and those assumptions come from?
Much of the research on how fast our brains process information is funded by marketing companies and political parties. They are interested in ensuring their messages influence you and your thoughts, beliefs and actions, in a particular direction. A study done at MIT on brain processing showed that from the time we see something, interpret it, make conclusions related to it, and determine an action, less than 13 milliseconds will have passed. That is faster than you can blink your eyes. Less time than it takes for you to read this sentence. And the only reason it is 13 milliseconds is because that is as fast as it can currently be measured.
Your eyes are finding concepts, and your brain is trying to understand them all day long. Even after the image has disappeared, the concepts may linger for processing in your brain, adding more interpretation, reinforcing belief systems about people, ideas and situations.
This rapid processing helps keep you safe. It enables you to recognize complex patterns so you know instantly who familiar people, places and/or situations are, helps you develop habits to move through your days quicker and be more productive. This is valuable. Having patterns for recognition and decision-making allows you to accomplish most routine actions quickly – like getting out of bed and getting ready for the day or doing workplace tasks efficiently. However, you can get in trouble when your interpretations, conclusions and reactions are wrong. It gets you into deeper trouble when you believe everyone thinks and processes information in the same way you do. They don’t.
Your worldview, the way you have come to see and experience the world, influences even what you see or pay attention to. It shapes your interpretation of what you see and any meaning that you add, the conclusions you arrive at, reactions you have and any decisions or actions you take. If your past experiences were different, you may reach a very different conclusion and act in a completely different way. When considering the pace of change and the lightning-fast speed with which this processing takes place, it is easy to see how misunderstandings, and in some instances conflict, occur.
Here are some things you can do when you notice you have climbed the Ladder of Inference:
1) Practice naming assumptions you are making and their possible influence on your actions.
2) Separate the data or evidence from the conclusions. Notice the types of conclusions you might be mistaking for facts.
3) Become curious about how to expand the data pool or your awareness of the data you habitually select.
4) Notice the story you tell as you add meaning and draw conclusions.
5) Develop a practice of acting mindfully.
Exercise – Examining the Ladder of Inference Response
1) What assumptions did you make and how might those assumptions have influenced your decisions or actions?
2) What data were you observing and what story did you make up that may have influenced the conclusions you reached? Were there any conclusions you might have mistaken for facts?
3) How could you expand the data pool or your awareness of the data you to go beyond what you habitually select?
4) Notice the story you tell as you add meaning and draw conclusions and how that might shift, change or expand with new meaning.
Case Study – The Formation of Three Different Worldviews
Cultural or social groups throughout the world have an idea – a worldview – of what are proper social relations between its members and of the reality these relations represent. Here, as examples, are three different cultural worldviews regarding the concept of the individual and the society.
The core question explored is: Which is primary, the individual or the society? The answer is: it depends on the culture. In Western cultures, individuals exist, thus society is created. In most African cultures, society exists, thus the individual exists. The same can be said about Native American and First Nations cultures. How this is manifested will vary amongst the Native Nations, so it is important not to lay over all of indigenous cultures (or Western or African or any culture) a single worldview regarding the primacy of the individual or society. Here is a quick look at three different perspectives or worldviews on this issue.
An American (Western) Worldview
American worldviews have been identified by many sociologists and anthropologists in the Following ways. The sense of time is futuristic. The sense of nature involves mastery over the natural world. The sense of human nature is that it is basically good or mixed. The social sense is individualistic. The sense of the proper way of being is to value doing.
In practice, this means that time for Americans is focused on the future rather than the past. There exists a need to plan; and youth is valued more than age. Americans believe they should be able to control nature; that nature is here for them to use to their benefit and that they are separate from it. They also believe in the inherent goodness of people; that given a chance, they can count on people to do the right thing; and that control of people should be limited.
Americans believe that the individual’s wishes, needs and aspirations are more important than the group’s and that it is okay for an individual to move away from and function independently of the group. Finally, they believe that what one does or accomplishes is more important than the way one conducts themselves in society, except, perhaps, for most criminal behavior and one’s relative value in society is mainly determined by one’s job. The core here is that in American society, the individual is more important than the group.
Relational Worldview in Africa
Orville Jenkins in his booklet Dealing with Difference: Contrasting the African and European Worldview offers a clear picture of the relational view of the world that exists in East African Cultures. Jenkins lived and worked in radio and television and as a linguist in Kenya for 25 years, traveling regularly throughout North and East Africa. He has written extensively on the topic of worldviews, language and culture.
Jenkins describes the East African view of the world as relational. Events and relationships are seen as the primary components of reality. People and their social relationships and obligations are the principal consideration. People also define their relationship with ‘things’ in the same way that they see themselves in relationship with other human beings.
He notes that in East African culture, an individual’s identity is based on who they are related to and how they are related. The relationships between individuals, and any roles they may have had in events, are more primary than the individuals themselves and the separate identities.
East Africans see the world as dynamic and active. Things are alive; things are moving; things are changing. They are not mechanical; they are not set. Even “non-animate” entities are understood in dynamic terms and evaluated for their relational import. Attention is focused not on controlling things (reality), but on adapting, adjusting, or relating to reality.
A very important aspect of East African culture is that all of reality is viewed as a unity and all parts of creation are interconnected or interrelated into one whole or “total reality.” Thus. East Africans, with everything dynamically interrelated, do not expect the same results under the same circumstances each time they might occur.
Jenkins offers that in the East African view, the focus is on the event in which they are presently involved. The ‘now’ or the present is primary, not the future. Additionally, for Africans, the world is basically uncontrollable, because there are many factors and entities in the world which cannot be controlled. Because of the perspective that everything is interrelated, then everything in the world is involved in cosmic events. Thus, event and relationship are the key factors in African orientation to life.
He suggests that this East African worldview could be considered basically religious. If all things are interconnected and everything is a unity of existence, then each individual is part of this unity and everyone is connected to everything that happens. Even though God, as the Creator, is far away, everyone and everything is still interconnected. Thus, according to Jenkins, in this worldview, all that exists is ‘spiritual’, a part of one unified Whole.
This relational view of the world that East Africans hold is also held by other cultures throughout the world. In North America, the indigenous populations that have lived there for centuries hold, with some differences at the local or individual society or nation, a view of the world that the Creator and creation, all animate and inanimate objects, are interconnected.
A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview
Many indigenous cultures have a worldview centered on the interconnectedness of all. For the Ojibway it is dineamaganik meaning, “I belong to everything” or “all my relations.” For Hawaiians it is aloha meaning the sharing of breath. And for the Navaho it is k’e meaning the concept of being tied together in a weaving of relations. In his book Tsawalk, E. Richard Atleo, a member of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations located in British Columbia, Canada, describes in detail the Nuu-chah-nulth worldview.
The Nuu-chah-nulth worldview describes the basic character of creation as a unity which is expressed as heshook-ish tsawalk, which means everything is one, or everything is connected. A Nuu-chah-nulth core belief about reality could be stated as everything is one. However, for the Nuu-chah-nulth, this unity does not mean that individuals are denied a separate existence; on the contrary, individualism is a very strong value. The Nuu-chah-nulth believe that, while in the creation design of the Creator, all things are interconnected, there is also a strong sense of individuality or biodiversity and that this needs to be recognized and celebrated.
Heshook-ish tsawalk also perceives a reality that is inclusive of both physical and metaphysical reality. Central to this belief is a valuing of realities, objects, situations just as they are or just how they exist. In practice this means letting go of control of situations and leaving them to their own destinies, with each situation’s own capabilities of reaching conclusion.
Another central component to the Nuu-chah-nulth worldview of unity is a deep respect for all the earth’s inhabitants. Humans are bonded with their ecosystem. There is a belief in the value of qualitative relationships between and among humans and between humans and other life forms, such as plants and animals. These respectful relationships are based on the recognition that all life forms have intrinsic and sacred value. In fact, in the Nuu-chah-nulth worldview, each animal is like a person.
The Nuu-chah-nulth worldview of unity carries into community life. The Nuu-chah-nulth see cooperation within community as foundational to the creating and maintaining of relationship. Their belief in interconnectedness is manifested by a spirit of generosity, compassion, and sacredness that is woven into each individual and into their society, community, and relationships.
A core community practice for the Nuu-chah-nulth is one of giving and of hospitality. They view giving as natural to creation, in effect a law of life. And, based on their view of the interconnectedness and the reciprocal flow of nature, they practice reciprocal hospitality. When the Nuu-chah-nulth look at nature, they see a system where the “heavens give rain to the mountains and earth, which give water to the rivers and streams, which fill the oceans, which return the water in the form of vapor to the heavens.” They see a system of interdependence and interrelationships within the natural world that reflect the interdependence and interrelationships of all life forms. Thus, the act of giving is believed to be necessary to life and consequently its absence was considered to be equivalent to death.
Socio-Cultural Processes Rooted in Local History
As these descriptions of three different worldviews indicate, how people experience the world and make sense of it is primarily the product of socio-cultural processes that are rooted in local history. Our ways of meaning-making are inherently embedded in socio-cultural processes and are specific to particular times and places. It is natural to expect that differing worldviews would emerge out of differing socio-cultural processes located in different places and historical contexts. The meanings of particular events, and our ways of understanding them, vary over different situations.
Exercise: Local Worldview Influences Reflection Questions
Course Manual 3: Worldviews and Identity
Our worldviews are closely associated with our sense of identity, our sense of who we are, which, like worldviews can operate mainly in our unawareness. The psychological research tells us that when your identity is challenged in some way, you can react as if your life has been threatened. This can evoke strong and often unexpected reactions to something said or done or a situation.
These responses can look like lashing out, emphatically defending your own views or dismissing another person or their views. This explains why some people respond to seemingly small things out of proportion to the event they experienced. Perhaps it explains your own response to something where you feel you were overreacting but didn’t know how to pull back.
Exploring Worldviews and Identity in this Chapter provides explanations for reactions, creates the grounds for self-awareness around worldview reactions and provides ideas and strategies to stay grounded and present in the face of these reactions. A Strategic Workplace Culture is one where people learn to catch their own worldview reactions early and change their responses. Workshop 6 is dedicated to Informative Neuroscience and will revisit the idea of worldviews and identity while going more in-depth into the research the fields of both neuroscience and behavioral science have been doing which connect to worldviews and Worldview Intelligence.
Identity
Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, or expressions that uniquely characterize a person, organization or a group. For individuals, identity emerges during childhood when, as children, we start to comprehend our self-concept, and it remains a consistent aspect throughout every stage of life. Your identity is how you define who you are; it is also how others define you. Not surprisingly, these definitions are often not the same.
Identity is the sense of who you are, both as an individual and in relation to others and society. It is tied to your self-esteem, your wanting to feel good about yourself, which psychological research has found to be a common human characteristic across cultures globally.
The social roles you play are also a part of your identity. Identity involves defining oneself as both unique and similar to others within the social context. While you assume some aspect of your identity through family, friends and external circumstances, similar to how worldviews are formed, you have choices in other aspects of identity. This includes what you choose for an occupation, hobbies and political affiliation. It also includes your role as a leader in your organization. Core identity is made up of the attributes that make you unique such as behaviors, values, skills, and items from your given and chosen contexts.
It is interesting to note that organizations also have an identity and this identity is influenced by place the organization was founded, the founders and what the organization does or produces.
In the article: The Neuroscience of Identity, published in Psychology Today, Nicklas Balboa and Richard D. Glaser, Ph.D., note that the three main constituents of identity are: how you view yourself, how others view you, and how you judge or act based on others’ perceptions of you. Interestingly, thoughts about self and thoughts about others are processed in different parts of the brain.
The same would be true for organizations. There is the identity related to how the organization views itself, how others view it and how the organization judges or acts based on other’s perceptions and also perceptions of itself.
Case Study – The Role of Identity in Mental Health
A study of college students from 31 sites examined the roles of identity formation and moral identity in predicting college student mental health. Specifically, it looked at anxiety and depressive symptoms, health-risk behaviors like hazardous alcohol use and sexual risk taking, and psychological well-being, mainly self-esteem and meaning.
The study results suggest that both identity formation and moral identity can be risk or protective factors for a number of health outcomes. The study showed fairly consistent, and reasonably strong patterns of relations between identity and health, which attest to the salient role identity plays in health and well-being, at least for college students in the United States.
Further, the identity formation and moral identity seem to interact in meaningful ways. Identity formation may have more positive health effects when based on moral identity contents than when based on amoral or even immoral contents. Moral ideals and commitments can more powerfully motivate healthy living when a part of a mature and coherent identity than when they are merely a haphazard part of an immature or diffused identity.
In fact, even after controlling for identity formation, moral identity was predictive of all six health outcomes; individuals higher on moral identity reported lower anxiety and depressive symptoms and lower levels of hazardous alcohol use and sexual risk taking, and higher on self-esteem and meaning.
Thus, people who have a strong sense of self (i.e., they have decided certain things are important to who they are), ideally through a process of exploration, tend to engage in fewer risk behaviors, have fewer mental health problems, and experience greater psychological well-being.
The Role of the Brain
The primary role of the brain is to keep us alive. As such, its functioning has not changed dramatically since people lived in caves or on the open savanna. It still fires the same impulses and neurons, reacting to stimuli, doing constant threat assessments, to be able to fulfill its purpose. The problem is that the environments in which we now live have changed dramatically. The nature of threats has also changed. Because the brain doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what is imagined, between what is factual and what is made up, it can react strongly to perceived threats even when there is no actual danger. In working to keep us alive, the brain values speed over decision-making accuracy.
The brain is constantly emitting neurochemicals, which are essentially molecules, in response to stimuli. If something is perceived as good, the brain emits pleasurable feeling neurochemicals which register as actual physical feelings of pleasure or comfort. If something is perceived as bad, the brain emits neurochemicals to back that up and we experience physical discomfort. This could be in response to external situations or internal stimuli like thoughts.
When the brain perceives that your identity has been challenged, it emits neurochemicals that make you feel bad. Additionally, it could trigger an amygdala hijack, evoking a freeze, flight or fight response. When this happens, the amygdala overrides slower forms of information sharing, short circuits logical responses and produces either a strong emotional reaction or a trauma response, because of the need to quickly respond to anything life threatening, real or not.
We are vested in our identity. Every day we make choices and decisions that resonate with our identity, reinforcing our connection and attachment to it. Since we feel that our identity and all that is associated with it is who we are, when someone challenges any aspect of our identity, it can feel like a threat.
The Driver of Group Identity
From the dawn of time, the survival of the human race has depended on our ability to be part of groups. In a harsh and unpredictable environment, individuals found safety in numbers. An individual on their own was prey to many dangers, ranging from being food for large animals or packs of animals to being prey for other humans. By banding together, people could defend against predators and collectively overcome challenges such as natural disasters or hostile neighbors. Being part of a group also ensured that basic needs, like shelter and food, were met more effectively than when individuals fended for themselves.
Transitioning from more nomadic lifestyles to settled communities marked a significant shift in human history. It paved the way for the emergence of complex societies, characterized by agriculture, trade, and governance. At the heart of this transformation lay the formation of organized groups, tribes, and communities which offered many benefits, including increased survival and security, a division of labor and specialization, cultural exchange and innovation, political organization and governance, and social cohesion from which worldviews and identify are shaped. Organizations joined associations to gain political influence or address issues that could impact their future or their survival, where there was greater strength in numbers.
Division of Labor and Specialization
As early communities grew larger and more organized, the division of labor and specialization advanced. Within a group, individuals could specialize in tasks based on their skills, interests, and aptitudes. In addition to allowing for greater efficiency in resource allocation and production, with specialization came more diversity in terms of identity. What one excelled at became part of an individual, family or group identity whether that was hunting or agriculture or skilled craftsmen or healers. These skills or vocations were often passed down through generations, furthering reinforcing individual and collective identity and worldviews. This specialization also led to advancements in technology and trade. Through collaboration and the exchange of goods and services, early civilizations flourished economically and culturally.
Cultural Exchange and Innovation
Interaction within and between groups facilitated cultural exchange and innovation, driving intellectual and technological progress. Through trade, exploration, and communication, early civilizations exchanged ideas, technologies, and cultural practices. This cross-pollination of knowledge and experiences sparked innovation in agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, and other fields, laying the groundwork for further advancements. The diversity of perspectives within a group fostered creativity and problem-solving, leading to new discoveries and improvements in quality of life and often to new or expanded identities.
Political Organization and Governance
Groups formed the building blocks of early political organization and governance structures. Tribes and city-states developed systems of leadership, governance, and justice to regulate communal life and resolve conflicts. Leaders emerged to provide direction, resolve disputes, and coordinate collective action. By establishing rules and norms, early societies maintained order and stability, ensuring the smooth functioning of communities. Additionally, group cohesion and solidarity were essential for defense against external threats and the expansion of territory. Members of groups became more strongly attached to their individual and group identities.
Social Cohesion and Identity
Belonging to a group provided individuals with a sense of identity and belonging, fostering social cohesion and solidarity. Shared customs, rituals, and beliefs bind members together, creating a sense of community and collective purpose. This shared identity strengthened interpersonal bonds and facilitated cooperation, essential for the functioning of early societies. Moreover, group membership provided emotional support and a sense of security, buffering individuals against the uncertainties and challenges of life.
Belonging and Identity
Belonging is the human emotional need to be an accepted member of a group. Whether it is family, friends, co-workers, the workplace, a religion, or something else, we have an inherent desire to belong and be a part of something greater than ourselves. Belonging offers a feeling of security and support, especially when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity as a member of a particular group.
People often join a group because some aspect of what the group represents resonates with them. They do not necessarily have to agree with all of what the group professes or believes. However, if the group is challenged, people will often find themselves defending or agreeing with more aspects of the group philosophy because of the association with their personal identity. This dynamic is often seen within families or communities. Members of a family or community may disagree with each other, sometimes quite vehemently. But, if that same argument comes from outside of the group, its members will present a more united front and defend their family or community. Part of every individual’s identity is derived from being a part of groups.
A team, department, division or organization has a group identity. When a new person is hired, someone is promoted or a new team is formed, elements of existing identity are shaped and reshaped. This could show up in healthy or unhealthy ways. The sense of belonging that comes from being part of a group is an essential characteristic of a Strategic Workplace Culture. If someone truly feels like they belong, they feel invited and supported to bring their authentic self to work. When employees feel like they don’t belong or are not included, welcomed or valued, their performance, health, levels of stress, and even their personal lives suffer. Creating genuine feelings of belonging for all is a critical factor in improving engagement, motivation, collaboration and performance. It also supports business goals.
Exercise: Self Identity, Who Am I?
• What are your greatest strengths?
• What are some examples of how you demonstrate these strengths? How can you capitalize on them more?
• What are your weaknesses or areas for growth?
• When have you experienced these weaknesses?
• How can you work on improving them?
• Are there any skills or qualities you would like to develop further?
• What activities or subjects do you find most engaging and fulfilling?
• When do you feel most energized, motivated, and alive?
• How can you incorporate more of your passions into your daily life or career?
• What are your short- and longer-term career goals?
• Why are these goals important to you, and what steps are you taking to achieve them?
• How do you typically respond to stress, conflict, or difficult emotions?
• Are there any recurring emotional patterns or triggers in your life?
• What activities or practices help you maintain emotional balance and well-being?
• How can you develop healthier emotional management strategies?
• What do these relationships mean to you, and how do they impact your life?
• Are there any relationship dynamics that you would like to improve or change?
Defending Your Worldview
Identity is fundamental to who we are as individuals and to our self-esteem. As mentioned previously, identity is closely associated with our worldviews. When our worldviews are challenged, we can feel the need to defend ourselves. This is often an automatic reaction. Understanding what happens when we jump to defence rather than curiosity provides insight into why arguing doesn’t help people change perspectives and how this is antithetical to opening exploratory conversations that make connections, build bridges and find new ways forward on the issues, concerns or opportunities that are important to make progress on.
When you find yourself feeling like you need to defend your perspectives, it can cause you to come to an oppositional position with someone else. If someone offers a different or contrary perspective or view to your own, the most common reaction is to debate rather than reflect on what was said. The more you defend your views, the more attached you become to them and the harder it is to be curious about why someone has a different view or how they came to see the world the way they do.
Of course, the same thing is true of the other person you are in an argument or debate with – they become more attached to their worldviews and perspectives. This attachment to worldviews makes it hard to find points of connection or common ground. When worldviews are made explicit, yours and that of others, you create the opportunity to draw upon them for generative, creative, and innovative actions to positively impact workplace relationships. And when practiced throughout your organization, it becomes part of the Workplace Culture.
You can see how this would also apply to your organization. When challenged, organizations are more like to defend their views or perspectives than they are to publicly change their views, or apologize if that is appropriate to the circumstances.
Disarming Worldview and Identity Threats – Remaining Curious
The best formula for disarming worldview or identity threats is to remain curious and reflective, to be in inquiry about your own or others reactions and to remind yourself that the brain doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what is imaginary and thus is not a real threat. Curiosity invites in a pause, activates the slower thinking part of the brain which is where you can access evaluation and rationality. The more you pause, the more you create the opportunity for another person to pause and the space to move forward together.
Case Study – The Impact of Company Identity in Mergers
Up to 90% of mergers and acquisitions fail due to poor planning, culture clash, or unrealistic expectations. A factor not well accounted for is company identity or worldview and creating the conditions to align worldviews.
A healthcare company in the US is growing through mergers and acquisitions. One of its mergers revealed an identity or worldview clash. The acquiring company had a worldview described as “ready, shoot, aim” and the acquired company had a worldview described as “ready, aim, aim, aim….”, leading to the question, “what were we aiming at again?” The first company was willing to take more risks and deal with the consequences while the second company was quite risk-averse.
This worldview clash was an indication of other fundamental differences that might exist in values, norms, and operating styles, leading to conflicts, resistance to change, and a lack of cohesion among employees. Mapping out the historical influences within each company, the day-to-day realities and belief systems, values and practices, and pointing everyone to a shared future to align around can make a dramatic difference in the success of mergers.
Not only do the companies have their own identity, but the people who work within them also have a sense of identity associated with the company, their department and their roles. Recognizing this, in addition to meticulous planning and execution of integration strategies across various functional areas, including finance, operations, human resources, and technology, the nature of planning for success takes into account the role of individual and shared identity and what the ask is of the people being asked to change, collaborate in new ways or discover their role in a new environment.
Exercise: Your Group Identities
• How does being part of this group influence your worldview and your sense of who you are?
• What commonalities and differences do you see across the groups you identified?
Course Manual 4: Framework Origins
Why Illuminating our Worldviews Matters
As noted earlier in this manual, our worldviews operate primarily in the background, in our unconscious, and we are pretty much unaware of them. We go about our daily lives seeing the world through the lenses of our worldviews, behaving in culturally acceptable ways, and making assumptions or drawing conclusions about things we see. We don’t even think about it. We don’t stop to ask ourselves where these views come from. We rarely question why we made the assumptions or drew the conclusions we did or where the knowledge to make those choices came from. Whether consciously thought about or unconsciously in the background, our worldviews influence everything we do.
We can describe this as ‘living out of a worldview perspective” which we do whether we can articulate what our worldview is or not. If we want to understand our own or another person’s worldview, rather than looking at individual responses to specific events or situations, look for the overall patterns or character of our lifestyle.
Worldviews are Needed to Navigate in the World
Our worldview – anyone’s worldview – is too important to ignore. Worldviews are needed, even when unconscious, so we can navigate in the world. Our worldviews meet the very practical need of providing us answers to questions, even if the answers are naïve, lacking in experience or wisdom. The idea of making our worldviews visible, to be conscious of our choices and decisions, is so important that we, as knowing, thinking human beings have an obligation to examine, articulate, refine, communicate, and consciously and consistently apply our worldviews. During the trial of Socrates in ancient Greek times, he is quoted as having said, “… the unexamined life is not worth living …”
With each of us having our own worldview and our own interpretation of reality, discovering what our worldview is, is a powerful step toward self-awareness, self-knowledge and self-understanding. This includes identifying our worldview’s unique features and how we answer questions about why this is our worldview, given the many options available to us, and why we think it is right. This holds true for our organizations as well.
One way we become aware of our own worldview is when we experience another culture on a deeper level, often by living there or traveling there regularly, then returning to our own culture and seeing it with outsider eyes. It enables us, if we wish, to see our culture from a different belief and value system.
Case Study: Clash of Civilizations
We get into trouble when two or more different worldviews meet and both make uninformed and unaware assumptions about the other without having ever questioned why? Worldviews collide and the results generally have negative consequences for one or both of these colliding worldviews. When worldviews are not in our awareness or acknowledged, stronger parties in a conflict often will impose their worldviews on others, generally to destructive effect.
Take for instance the case of the European worldview coming to North America and the efforts to force that worldview onto the civilizations that were here. The results have been devastating to many of those nations and the now dominant culture has also paid a price for its actions. We’re seeing similar scenarios being played out around the world today, to no less devastating consequences.
In his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order Samuel P. Huntington suggests that in our geopolitical world the most important sources of conflict among human beings will no longer be ideological, political, or economic. They in fact have become cultural. He said: “Peoples and nations are attempting to answer the most basic question humans can face: Who are we? And they are answering that question in the traditional way human beings have answered it, by reference to the things that mean the most to them.” And the things that mean the most to most people are their ancestry, language, history, values, customs, institutions, and especially religion. At the heart, then, of our current cultural wars – whether at a local, national, or international level – is a clash of worldviews.
The Case for Intentionality
If we are not fully conscious of what our worldviews are and fail to live by the core commitments or beliefs and values within our worldview, then we open ourselves up to the whims of our impulses, emotions or reflexes. However, when people make life choices inconsistent with their core commitments, they often bear the consequences that could include harmed relationships, damage to trust or finding themselves on a life path that causes them grief or discomfort.
When we are not thoughtful about our worldviews and what shapes or influences them, we are at risk of conforming to social and cultural norms and patterns of thought and behavior, regardless of their merit, or simply to follow the crowd. We have seen for millennia that acceptance of social norms can manifest in behaviors that are destructive to other people, cultures, nature and to ourselves.
Each time we find ourselves acting on decisions that prove our assumptions or actions wrong, or challenge our beliefs, it is essential that we take time to reflect on why we thought and acted the way we did. If we want clarity about our own worldview, we must reflect and profoundly consider how we actually behave. Awareness of our worldviews does not necessarily mean we make different choices, but we make our choices with intentionality rather than by default. This is also a good practice for organizations.
This depth of self-awareness is essential to authentic leadership. A deep awareness of our worldview informs us about what our core commitments in life are and how we hold them or manifest them whenever engaged in conversations or work that matters.
How to Know Your Worldview
How can we know what our worldviews are? In their business strategy book The Rules of Victory, Jim Gimian and Barry Boyce drew inspiration from Lao Tzu’s The Art of War. They described how the book suggests that we each have a worldview and that View influences our actions in the world. Actions, in turn, inform our worldviews. This needs to be a conscious choice. If the information arising from the results of actions, is consistent or aligned with what we believe our worldviews to be, we easily accept it. It could even help us expand our worldviews. However, if the information challenges our worldviews, we may end up with the responses described in the previous Chapter on Worldviews and Identity.
Gimian and Boyce offered that the bridge between Worldviews and Actions are the Practices we choose to turn View into Action, as illustrated by this simple diagram.
The Worldview Intelligence approach offers a more robust description of the bridge and a clearer way of understanding worldviews, which is the Six Dimensions Framework. The new diagram incorporates all Six Dimensions.
Origins of the Framework – Leo Apostel and the Worldviews Group
In 1990, the Belgium philosopher, Leo Apostel had a dream of developing an integrated worldview that could bridge the gaps caused by what he perceived as a growing fragmentation in the world. To pursue this dream, he created a non–profit organization in Belgium called the Worldviews Group.
At that time, Apostel and his colleagues proposed that our complex and rapidly evolving world was becoming extremely fragmented in the social, business, political, cultural and scientific arenas. The result is we often have the impression that what remains of the world is a collection of isolated fragments, without any structure or coherence. Our personal “everyday” world seems unable to harmonize itself with the global world of society, history and the cosmos.
The Worldviews Group believed that the tasks that have to be undertaken to be able to orient ourselves in a meaningful way in our world, that slowly is becoming the whole universe, were more urgent than ever. As our understanding grows that our world is not our land or Europe or North America or another continent, as individuals, businesses or governments, we have to learn to live and think on a planetary scale. The Worldviews Group believed that the urgency of a global worldview would become even more obvious.
Addressing Fragmentation and Uncertainty
To address this concern about fragmentation and the need for a global approach to worldviews, Apostel and his colleagues in the Worldviews Group embarked on a research initiative to construct integrated worldviews. The goal was to provide a framework in which the worldviews that were developing in various fields of culture, economics and science could enter into dialogue with one another and overcome the situation of fragmentation. They imagined this framework would be a basis for understanding society, the world, and our place in it, which could help us make critical decisions that would shape our future. In developing this picture of the whole it was thought we would be better able to understand and work with complexity and change.
To be clear, the goal was not to develop one single imposed worldview, which is neither attainable nor desirable. It was simply to understand better what is going on globally and to do the best we can to consider the world as coherently as possible. The Group was certain that the “task of our time is to search for worldviews in which different systems of interpretation and ideals can be incorporated and can converse with each other. This task is urgent, not only for the multi-cultural societies and businesses now found in all major cities of the world, but also for those communities, countries, and global and local organizations, in which a variety of cultural patterns, with quite different histories, are striving towards a certain synergy.”
The Worldviews Group began by asking seven questions, that they saw as the basic elements that must be accounted for in every worldview.
1) What is the nature of our world? How is it structured and how does it function?
2) Why is our world the way it is, and not different? Why are we the way we are, and not different? What kind of global explanatory principles can we put forward?
3) Why do we feel the way we feel in this world, and how do we assess global reality, and the role of our species in it?
4) How are we to act and to create in this world? How, in what different ways, can we influence the world and transform it? What are the general principles by which we should organise our actions?
5) What future is open to us and our species in this world? By what criteria are we to select these possible futures?
6) How are we to construct our image of this world in such a way that we can come up with answers to 1, 2, and 3?
7) What are some of the partial answers that we can propose to these questions?
The Group then offered a framework for constructing and deconstructing a worldview that consist of six components. Each component seeks to address or answer six worldview questions that correspond to the presumed “big” philosophical questions of western humankind.
The Six Dimensions of the Framework
The six worldview questions are:
• What is?
• Where does it all come from?
• Where are we going?
• What is good and what is evil?
• How should we act?
• How do we know what is true and what is false?
The first three questions help describe the world. How you ask these questions can change over time as your understanding of the world changes. These questions can often overlap with science. For example, questions on the nature of matter have changed significantly in the past 100 years. How you formulate and answer these questions can be influenced by other disciplines.
The answers to these descriptive “is questions” can vary significantly between differing local contexts or realities. Something as simple or complex as the nature of life can vary between cultures. For example, one culture may see trees as having life but not sentience and another may see them as having something more than just life.
The fourth question invites an exploration of values, such as what is good or evil. You could also ask two additional questions: How do I live a good life? And, how can I contribute to a good society? Or, how can my organization best contribute to a good society?
The fifth question takes you to the practical and addresses “act questions”. Once you’ve developed your model of the world or your understanding of reality and established a values system to guide you, then you can ask, “How can I act?” This is the domain of methodology or practice, which can be mixed with fields like operational research, problem-solving and decision-making methods and management sciences. In the work you do, this would include the variety of practices you draw on to engage with workplace colleagues in needed conversations, in building trust and relationship and in creating and sustaining a Strategic Workplace Culture.
If the first five questions invite direct exploration of what your world is and how you choose to interact with it, then question six invites an exploration of how you know the answers to all questions are correct. It is in this domain that the study of human structures, experience and consciousness, individualism or agency and the relationship between power and social behavior exist.
Case Study: Practice Communities and Scientific Fragmentation
As consultants, researchers, and change agents, our approach is to be in an inquiry about how to work with people to create possibilities for social transformation, including people in the fields of practice of government or public services, community and international development, organizational consulting, counselling and therapy.
Practitioners of various disciplines often view “research” as something only scientists do. Using a different word, like the more everyday term “inquiry”, can feel more connected to the daily practices of those who do not think of themselves as scientists and seems to imply an orientation more towards exploration. This opens up the senses and a curiosity and openness to what might be. The term “science,” on the other hand, often implies the use of a reliable method or technique for objectively discovering the facts.
People will often speak of their orientation towards their own practice as managers, consultants, therapists, professionals or change agents, recognizing that different paradigms or communities have very different ideas about what counts as research. This Workshop is written from the standpoint of a focus on interests and practices that a particular community of practice – a workplace culture for example – allows, invites and legitimises.
The reference to “practice communities” implies that there is more than one “human science paradigm”. Indeed, recent years have witnessed an increasing fragmentation or multiplicity within the human sciences. In his seminal work, Thomas Kuhn (1970) spoke of different “coherent traditions of scientific research,” where each is characterised by a bundle of interrelated but different assumptions, different interests, different ways and means of doing things. He further suggested that identification with a particular “tradition” is effectively a matter of becoming a member of a particular professional community.
The simultaneous presence of different traditions with different norms, values and interests suggests the need to closely consider and be sensitive to the different premises and interests – the different coherences – that define each tradition. Without such sensitivity there is the risk that one set of community-based constructions may dominate, mute, obscure or devalue practices that have their own, different intelligibility in relation to a different tradition.
A defining quality of our tradition is that it puts relational processes at the center. Relational processes construct particular, local-historical, community-based understandings. To begin from this presumption suggests that we also acknowledge that other communities are engaged in similar processes whereby they construct (often) very different particularities.
(Excerpted and edited from Chapter One draft of Research and Social Change: A Relational Constructionist Approach by Sheila from McNamee and Dian Marie Hosking.)
Having this understanding, of different ways to construct meaning, or differing worldviews, sets the stage for using a framework, like the Apostel Framework or the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework, to create new reference points for understanding.
From Philosophy to Practice, the Practicality of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework
While deeply philosophical in its origin, the Apostel framework becomes useful when the language shifts to the practical. The Six Dimensions Worldview Intelligence Framework now are:
Reality, which has two components: daily reality or experiences and meta-reality, which is belief systems.
History, which is how we have come to see and experience the world the way we do, especially key influences.
Future, which is how we see and relate to the future.
Values, which are moral or core commitments.
Practices, which are the way we bring each aspect of our worldview to life.
Knowledge, which is our understanding of how we know what we know, the practice of how we acquire knowledge or information, what sources of knowledge we trust; and how we know our answers to the Six Dimensions are true.
Exercise: Reflection Questions
Course Manual 5: Reality Dimension
The Reality Dimension – Every Day Experiences
Reality is the first of the Six Dimensions in the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework. It denotes all that is real to us as individuals, families, communities, disciplines, teams, businesses or organizations and systems. It includes relationships, places, events, daily experiences, objects or things and structures – actual and conceptual. At a meta level it includes belief systems, whether visible or not.
At an experiential level, reality is your everyday experiences, whether in your family, at work, in your social life or other occurrences as you interact with the world around you. This also includes your community, cultural group or someone else’s community or cultural group.
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It is how physical characteristics like skin color, age, the way you dress or whether you are able bodied or not shape your daily experiences, as well as your gender or sexual orientation. It is the ways in which income and social status impact how you live, work, and move about. Anything that influences how you see yourself and how others might see or interact with you on a regular basis is all part of reality. To try to understand someone else’s experience you could use these elements mentioned in this paragraph to consider their reality.
Case Study – Influences on the Reality of a Distinguished Lawyer and Judge
Alan Page was a professional football player, playing 15 seasons with the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears. He was the first defensive player in NFL history to win the MVP Award and only one other player has done it since. He is a member of both the College Football Hall of Fame (1993) and the Pro Football Hall of Fame (1988), and is considered one of the greatest defensive linemen ever to play the game.
Page attended law school while he played professional football. He earned a B.A. in political science from the University of Notre Dame in 1967 and a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1978. He practiced law in the off-season and after he retired from football he became very successful as an attorney. Page served, with high distinction as an associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court from 1993 until he reached the court’s mandatory retirement age of 70 in 2015.
Photo Credit: Alan Page, 2020, Self-created photograph by Jonathunder – Own work, GFDL
He and wife were strong supporters of the arts. They gave significant support for scholarship programs for minority students. At age 78 he remains active in community programs supporting youth. It would be difficult to be more accomplished. Yet, Mr. Page, like many people of color, often had the experience of being followed by security guards while shopping because he is a 6 feet 4 inch tall African American male. This is part of his daily reality, his lived experience. Something most white males will never experience.
Local-Cultural Relational Realities
In everyday life, many local-cultural ‘relational’ realities operate. They include social, workplace, cultural or community norms, local slang, ways of dress or other behaviors that are acceptable within a social group. These local realities are closely tied to the values of social groups and values is another of the Six Dimensions. Realities are communally agreed upon, usually implicitly, sometimes explicitly. What is meaningful for you comes to you primarily as a result of your relationships with others, whether it be within specific communities or groups, professions, workplaces, faith traditions or your family. It is one way you know and understand yourself, in addition to being a contributing factor to personal or professional identity. These all are examples of the local and social construction of worldviews.
Your personal reality can be considered from two perspectives: how you experience the world around you in your daily life, in essence your physical reality; and your belief systems. Each of these two components can be explored through sets of questions that can help you further develop your personal worldview awareness. Since we are multi-dimensional human beings, you could also explore your personal, professional or leadership realities. Not only can you begin to understand yourself better, you can use the same questions to understand someone else’s experience or reality too.
Belief Systems as Part of Reality
Meta-reality refers to belief systems. Belief systems are operational on many levels. Meta-reality includes your perspectives on the nature of the universe. What do you believe about whether there is a spiritual aspect to your experience? What beliefs do you hold about the nature of a deity or supreme being? This could also include questions regarding the existence of consciousness within nonhuman or natural phenomena like rocks, trees, the earth. What do you believe about the consciousness of nature?
You might ask yourself, what beliefs do you hold about the degree to which the “Truth” is valid across situations? Is there universal truth where the “Truth” is true always and everywhere, what we might call a “capital T Truth”? Or is truth relative and the “truth” varies in its accuracy and applicability by situation? How is “truth” viewed within your workplace culture?
There are many beliefs or perspectives that you could hold in relation to the nature of creation, higher beings, human nature or the basic orientation or tendency of people. How you view people deeply impacts your reality. For instance, your beliefs about the fundamental nature of human beings, whether you believe we are basically honest or trustworthy, or dishonest or something else on that continuum, will influence how you interact with friends, co-workers, customers or competitors, whether you are welcoming, hesitant or fearful. It informs your stance, or starting point, for interacting with others.
The beliefs you hold about the human species relative to other species and to nature will shape your sense of relationship to nature. Do the rights and privileges of human beings have priority over nonhuman species or do humans and nonhumans share equivalent rights? What do you believe with respect to whether people are at the mercy of nature, a part of nature or have dominion over nature? This will influence your perspective on whether nature is to be exploited for the benefit of wealth creation, your views on climate change or the need for reparations. This is playing itself out right now in disputes over pipelines, mining, energy development, access to natural sites deemed sacred by some or of national significance, and dumping plastics and other garbage in the oceans or landfills.
What are the prominent belief systems in your team or organization? How well do they line up with the creation of a Strategic Workplace Culture? How do your own beliefs align with your Workplace Culture? What beliefs could or will influence the Strategic Workplace Culture you implement?
The Role of Language and Vocabulary
Workshop 1, Chapter 2 described the power of language and why it matters to a Strategic Workplace Culture. Essentially, we move in the direction of the words we use. Words can create worlds. This is also true for the influence language has on individual and shared realities.
Shared language or vocabulary is part of an unspoken agreement with those around you that is part of your own reality and part of a shared reality. The language and vocabulary you choose to use to describe your reality influences the description. This makes you an active participant in the construction of your reality, whether you realize this or not.
Since language and vocabulary are part of a shared reality in your family, community, business, team or organization, you can become conscious of the language and vocabulary you and those around you use. Are there particular concepts that are part of your shared reality? How do you become aware of them? Most teams and organizations have a long list of acronyms that can function like a secret code. If you know it, you’re in; if not, you’re excluded, or are an outsider.
When you consider a team you are part of or lead, what are the words used to describe the team as a whole or individual members of the team? These words and images influence how you approach your communication or relationship with them and their reality or experience within the workplace.
Millennials are often described by older generations as entitled, lacking work ethic or loyalty. If you are part of an older generation, is that how you think about the younger members of your team? If so, how does this belief influence you before you are even in a conversation with them? On the other hand, if you believe Millennials are hardworking and focused and value their time off because of the desire and preference for work-life integration, that may influence your relationship and communication in a different way. If you are part of the Millennial generation, what assumptions do you carry about Baby Boomers or Gen Z you might be on a team with or report to? How is that influencing your communication and relationship?
Each of us, consciously and unconsciously, makes a reality commitment. We each hold a perspective on reality – or a worldview. Philosophically your reality provides answers to some of life’s biggest questions and another person’s reality may do so in a different way, if their belief systems or experiences are different.
Shared Realities
Reality is not just an individual experience. Realities are also common concepts shared by a family, team, department, business or organization, community or cultural group. These communities and groups can be societal, religious or spiritual, geographic, organizational or professional. They can vary by discipline, topic or focus. They can be quite local such as a department in a company, or quite broad such as national identity. They can be groups of people who convene online about something that is important to them, whether they have ever met in person or not. These shared realities become, in effect, shared worldviews contributing to identity, most of which operate in the individual or collective unawareness.
Because of this, perspectives on reality are not always held or manifested in the same ways within a specific social, cultural, business or organizational group. For example, the marketing department in your organization could have a different reality than the finance department. Each group’s reality or culture can be self-contained and adequate in the sense that it provides for them a coherent worldview as they perceive and experience it. The marketing department’s daily reality might generally be more frenzied if they stage public events or have significant customer interaction. The finance department’s daily experience might be more subdued, except when it comes to the preparation of required financial reports, perhaps with limited interaction with clients or the general public. A group’s sense of what is real to its members is deeply embedded in their history, practices, culture, purpose and place in a larger culture or the organization.
This shared experience of reality is usually not articulated, operating as it does in the unconscious. This collective sense of reality can be so deeply internalized that nobody questions where it came from. Realities or worldviews become so embedded within a group, organization, institution or society that it isn’t necessary to even speak of them. Everybody already knows them and accepts them without question and acts or behaves based on them. They become part of the shared experiences of the group and contribute to the ongoing formation of the group. They are shaped by, and shape, organizational and community cultures, which become self-perpetuating and generally function below the surface. We can view an organization, institution, cultural group or society as the sum of its collective experiences, values, beliefs, history, and practices.
Reality Commitment
As a member of or leader in your team, organization or community, it becomes important to recognize that you, consciously and unconsciously, have made a reality commitment. You hold a perspective on reality. While your reality may provide answers to some of life’s biggest questions or to more immediate dilemmas, another person or even another society may have different perspectives or worldviews on the same questions. Your challenge is to be aware of the role that language plays, especially the language you use in constructing realities.
By knowing thyself, you become more self-aware and leadership-aware in ways that support the various realities that are naturally part of any team, organization or community, through both individual and shared experiences. A way to be intentional about realties is to create ways to support constructive or generative dialogue, enabling individuals and teams to use their collective experiences to achieve the outcomes expected of them.
Case Study – A Simple Act of Defiance Can Improve Science for Women
Excerpted from the April 26, 2024 New York Times Opinion Page
By Dr. Toby Kiers
They don’t tell you beforehand that it will be a choice between having a career in science or starting a family. But that’s the message I heard loud and clear 17 years ago, in my first job after completing my Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. During a routine departmental meeting, a senior academic announced that pregnant women were a financial drain on the department. I was sitting, visibly pregnant, in the front row. No one said anything.
I took a leave of absence when that child, my daughter, was born. Two years later, I had my son. That second pregnancy was a surprise, and I worried that taking another leave would sink my career. So, I pressed on. When my son was barely 3 weeks old, I flew nine hours to a conference with him strapped to my chest. Before delivering my talk, I made a lame joke that the audience should forgive any “brain fog”. Afterward, an older woman pulled me aside and told me that being self-deprecating in public was a disservice to women scientists.
It felt like an impossible choice: to be a bad scientist or a bad mother.
The data suggests I wasn’t alone in feeling those pressures. A study published in 2019 found that more than 40 percent of female scientists in the United States leave full-time work in science after their first child. In 2016, men held about 70 percent of all research positions in science worldwide. For field researchers like me, who collect data in remote and sometimes perilous locations, motherhood can feel at odds with a scientific career.
How have I addressed the problem? Through an act of academic defiance: I bring my kids with me on my scientific expeditions. It’s a form of rebellion that is available to mothers, not just in the sciences, but also in other disciplines that require site visits and field work, such as architecture and journalism. Bringing your kids to work with you doesn’t have to be something you do only once a year.
Female scientists are right to fear being seen as unprofessional. How we talk, how we dress, is constantly under scrutiny – and so many of us mirror our male colleagues. Any deviation from that standard is often considered suspect. The primatologist, Jane Goodall, famously placed her young son in a cage so that he could safely join her in the field, and it is still a point of controversy, decades later.
At its core, feminism is about having the power to choose. For female scientists, this means having the ability to bring children into the field – or the full support to leave them at home. The pressure is acute because, as research shows, women on scientific teams are significantly less likely than men to be credited with authorship. For me, it is crucial to keep collecting data with my own hands.
We are taught that good science requires detachment. But what if being a mother – with all the attachments that entails – allows you to explore different but equally fruitful scientific narratives? Last year, an article by the editor who oversees the Science journals argued that scientists should not be “afraid to acknowledge their humanity”. We should take that sound advice a step further and challenge the ideal of detachment. Perhaps by exposing our vulnerabilities – such as the children we are raising – we can change the system.
Exercise: Reality Reflection Questions
2. Reflect on some of the people you work with. What might their realities be? How might this create a different experience for them in contrast to your own? How might this be influencing your communication and relationship with them?
3. Notice the language you use. For yourself, how do you categorize, name or describe things, actions, outcomes or people? In your team or organization, what is the nature of the language and vocabulary you use? How does this create or contribute to the shared reality of your team or organization?
Course Manual 6: History Dimension
Like with reality, you have your own unique history of influences on your worldview, including shared experiences within your family, community, groups, teams, departments and organizations. There are also larger regional, national and even global events that have contributed to your worldview perspective. This Chapter on the History Dimension takes a look at these various influences on how you have come to see and experience the world and situations the way you do.
How Your History Shapes Your Worldview
If reality reflects what is real for you in your daily, lived experiences in the present moment, history provides you with an explanation of how you got to your reality. Your personal history helps explain how you have come to see and experience the world, events or situations the way you do. It offers an explanation for who you are, who you are becoming and why. Knowing your history at a deeper level is an important step in knowing yourself.
Where reality focuses on the now, history, of course, is past focused. Obviously, history is inextricably linked to the present because your path, your experiences, your choices have brought you to this point in time. Exploring your history offers an opportunity for you to move beyond just experiencing or knowing your reality to trying to understand or explain how you arrived at this particular reality and not some other reality.
Exploring your history helps answer questions like: Why is your world the way it is and not different? Why are you the way you are and not different? What is the origin of the reality in which you find yourself? How did your history contribute to this? Why are your perceptions of why your Workplace Culture is the way they are and not different? Why do you experience the workplace the way you do?
History provides a model of the past. You have your own model of your past and your own model of “the” past. You and your history do not exist in isolation. Minimally, your history situates your experiences within a network of relations that you have interacted with over time – family, personal, social networks, professional and Workplace Culture.
All of the above also holds true for your team, department and organization.
Who or What Has Had an Influence on Your Worldview?
As has been previously mentioned, you are not born with a worldview, but you are born into many worldviews. These represent your childhood history influences – the worldviews of your parents, family, other caregivers, your community, schools and faith institutions. Everyone experiences the influences of significant individuals in their life, on their identity and worldview. People often recall the influence of parents, a special aunt or uncle, grandparents, teachers, other role models and good friends on how they see the world.
Individuals who have an influence on your history do not need to be personal acquaintances. They can be professional sports figures, actors, business or political leaders, other publicly known people, including people who are no longer alive but who have attracted your attention either for positive or negative reasons. Additionally, fictional characters, books, movies, documentaries or other series of shows might have influenced your thinking and your views in significant ways. The range of history influences on your worldview can be quite broad.
Shared or Collective Influences on History
While we each have our own uniqueness in our experiences, individually and locally, we, as individuals and our organizations, are also impacted by collective patterns, trends, and events that have influence regionally, nationally and globally and that touch our individual and collective consciousness. These could include global events like technological advancements, social movements, wars, economic trends, or the influence of social media as well as workplace events like leadership changes, change initiatives, culture changes, job responsibilities or transfers.
These shared experiences explain how we have come to see and experience the world, events or situations in a collective sense. Individuals can relate to the same experiences, share stories of events and assign their own meaning in relation to the collective sense. These shared experiences remind us that at any given present moment there can be a multiple of realities or interpretations in play as people respond differently and tell their own versions of history, even when shared. Each of these realities has their own historical constructs and ways of explaining how that moment was arrived at. The model of a collective or shared history can and does vary by culture, region, sub-region, community, city, social system and country. This variability exists within all our interactions. You can imagine how this is influencing and shaping the workplace culture.
Understanding History and Experience Through Story
What takes precedence in your own history and your understanding of any collective history you were a part of and why? It depends on the stories that capture your attention and imagination, and it depends on the stories you tell and the way you tell them. The stories could be shared in conversations with family, friends, co-workers or customers, be part of an internal dialogue or written out as reflections.
Story is one of the ways we make sense of our experiences. You are constantly telling stories about what happened to you, whether you think about it this way or not. This could be in the way of grumbling about something that happened, grappling with new information that has an effect on you, or trying to understand the actions and behaviors of others or some dynamic that you are involved with.
Remembering that language matters and that we move in the direction of the words we use, the way you tell your stories helps shape your understanding of your experiences. Do you choose stories that amplify the negative or positive parts of the experience? Do you focus on what you have learned through the experience? Are you interested in finding ways forward or do you prefer to be attached to a particular moment or situation in the past? Being conscious of the way you tell your stories is one way of Knowing Thyself.
There are also things that happen that you might take no notice of. This could be something in your daily experience or something that happens in a larger context. Our worldviews filter information out and let other information in – which we explore more fully in Workshop 6 on Informative Neuroscience. Think of a relative or friend who shares a story of a past incident that you have no recollection of, even though they include you being there.
There are other events you do remember but how you recall them and how someone else recalls them can sometimes be radically different. Why is that? It has a lot to do with your worldviews, what gains prominence in your experience and becomes a memory and what doesn’t. How many animated discussions are because of a different recall of past events? How many of these are friendly and how many are heated? What determines the nature and tone of these discussions? In what ways might these types of conversations or the stories told be impacting your Workplace Culture?
When explored with curiosity and not defensiveness or the need to be right, this can lead to a deeper and broader understanding of the shared experience. With awareness and practice you can examine when your explorations have been generative and when they have been challenging. It can help you understand where the conversations sometimes go off the rails and how you can prevent this from happening. This can result in fewer angry or defensive exchanges and more open, frank and collaborative ones. You can also recognize your own role in exchanges that haven’t gone as well as you would have liked and focus on where you and the other person each have your own individual responsibility. This practice contributes to Knowing Thyself and a Strategic Workplace Culture.
Repetition, Story Nuance and Different Relationship with Stories Over Time
You likely have had some experiences that stick in your consciousness, that you speak of repeatedly. Soon after something significant happens – a life event like a wedding, birth of a child, an accident, death of a good friend or family member, a divorce, new job, job loss or any event or situation that has caused some kind of change or disruption in your life or how you have come to see and experience the world or your own reality. Initially, you may revisit this narrative frequently, adding or subtracting nuance or adding in or subtracting details. This may or may not vary over time.
It is common to forget something that happened until something or someone reminds you of it. Then the memories may come flooding back. Just to note, the problem with memories is that they are not actual representations of the experience we had, they are the stories we have created about what happened, and these stories do change over time. It is important to note that stories told about or in your workplace behave in the same way as personal stories do and have the same impact or influence.
Some stories stay with you, running in the background even when you are not aware of them. Becoming aware of them is important to Knowing Thyself. Are they stories of positive or negative reinforcement? Are they stories that lift you up or bring you down? How are these stories impacting workplace relationships?
You don’t always “hear” your own thoughts. You want to discern this voice because, if it is what is sometimes refer to as the “itty-bitty-shitty committee” sitting on your shoulder giving you bad advice and negative reinforcement, you have the ability to disempower that voice.
How you or your organization relate to an experience right after it happens is often different than how you relate to it a week later, a month later, or years later. This can be true of your organization as well. Your relationship to your story might expand or contract your worldview, might help a relationship flourish or might impede it, might nurture trust or not. Your experience of communicating on a particular issue or with a particular person might influence how well or poorly you are able to do so. Your experiences with trust or your propensity to trust may well shape how trusting you are and how you respond when trust is compromised. It might contribute positively or negatively to your team, department or Workplace Culture.
While it is common to not take the time to reflect on how the experiences in the past have influenced how you have come to see and experience the world now or how they have influenced your, or your team or organization’s, worldviews, it is a good personal, professional and leadership practice to do so. As you become more aware of the nature of the stories you are telling yourself and others, or the themes and patterns you carry, you have the choice to disrupt some stories across time or to focus on nourishing stories that are empowering. It is a powerful experience and reflection to stop to remember who has influenced you, what events have had an impact, what books, movies or life events have caused new openings and worldview expansions for you.
The Story You Tell About Another Organization, Group or Culture
Just like we make sense of our own experiences through story, we also create stories about other people, another organization, group or culture, usually based on limited experience or understanding. Our brains will fill in any gaps of knowledge or awareness with familiar, readily accessible information to create a more complete picture for you, even though this picture could be inaccurate.
What does the story you tell of some other organization, group or culture look like? In what ways does it look different when they tell it? Some of our most significant challenges and worldview clashes happen when we make assumptions about the experience and history of another group of people, which could be another team or department in your workplace, or another culture, based on little information and little or no direct contact with them.
Until you are in a conversation or relationship with someone from a different culture, have done some research or have lived in that culture, you are subject to how your own worldviews, or those of the people around you, have filled in the gaps or created the story you tell. It is easy to be judgmental or fearful concerning someone or something you don’t know.
With respect to a Strategic Workplace Culture, it means ensuring there are connecting points and conversations between teams and departments with better communication practices. This will support better trust and relationship, creating more informative inter-departmental knowledge which then creates the conditions for understanding and the alignment of worldviews across individuals, teams and departments and with the organization’s overall vision, mission, values and strategic goals.
Hidden Dynamics and Patterns in Teams, Organizations and Communities, Rooted in History
Current realities contain the histories of individuals, families, teams, organizations or cultures. These histories can hold hidden dynamics or patterns that influence the relationships and interactions among people. These patterns are often constructed and co-constructed by generation after generation, work group after work group, leader after leader, CEO after CEO.
Elements of the past get carried forward into the present and new contributions are added to, or replace parts of, previous worldviews. Legendary management consultant and writer, Peter Drucker, once said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. This is because it is operating invisibly, impacting the workplace without people being aware this is happening or how it shapes behaviors, actions and decisions. Without understanding this, or examining history to illuminate the patterns, they remain hidden dynamics and can continue to be disruptive over time. They will be barriers to building your Strategic Workplace Culture. The same applies to understanding patterns of trust and relationship within teams and organizations, how readily or not trust is or can be built, and relationships developed, to achieve a Strategic Workplace Culture that delivers more consistently and quickly on organizational strategy.
Your Influence on Exposing and Shifting Patterns
Examining your own history can help you understand why some relationships are solid and some are questionable. It may even point to ways for you to shift patterns that are not helpful.
In your teams or organizations, there are patterns of behavior that sustain themselves even as people change, departments or organizations reorganize or restructure or as growth occurs. These dynamics emerge for a few reasons. Here again, stories and how they are told are an important element. The stories told in organizations and in teams, about how the organization or team works, about specific individuals, or about what kinds of behaviors are rewarded, shape the Workplace Culture. If the stories are of failures, then whether they are told as warnings or as learnings can have a big impact.
Case Study – Illuminating the Enduring Impact of an Abusive CEO
Sometimes there are stories that are not told, even as everyone knows about them. They might be things considered immoral or unethical. They might contain some sense of failure or even shame. It is like there is an implicit agreement to not speak them out loud.
A non-profit organization asked for a 2-day Worldview Intelligence professional development program for their entire staff of about 30 people, representing all aspects of the organization from the current CEO and executive staff to marketing, finance, fund-raising and community outreach and service delivery.
Through worldview explorations, particularly through the History Dimension, both personally and collectively, they began to speak openly, for the first time, of the impact of a previous CEO who had departed the organization eight years previously. He had left behind a legacy of disrespectful and abusive behavior, internally and externally. This legacy hung in the realm of unspeakables, yet the impact of this CEO’s behavior was enduring. It showed up in some of the interpersonal dynamics of the people who currently worked there, a mixture of who had been there eight years previously and new hires, influencing trust between departments. More significantly, it was impacting the employees when they were interfacing with community. Without acknowledging the behaviors of the previous CEO, there was a discomfort that was not attributed to source – until people became courageous enough to begin to voice it.
Making this dynamic visible for the staff, created the space for discussion and acknowledgement, and the opportunity to heal as an organization, as they understood that no one person was alone in this experience, it was a shared experience. This visibly improved Workplace Culture internally and trust and relationship externally.
If, as a leader, you are trying to encourage or support certain actions, behaviors or outcomes but are not able to achieve the results, look at the messages you are trying to send and then look at the historic responses. More closely examine your role in the process. Are people chastised for failure? Rewarded for caution? Is there healing from past events or leadership actions that is needed? Are you stuck in a pattern of “we tried that before”? Have you been consistent enough in your leadership and messaging that your team sees that you say what you mean and mean what you say?
Worldview Explorations with Your Team and In Your Organization
The power of worldview explorations within your team and organization, in order to make connections and reveal Workplace Culture patterns, is not to be underestimated. Once patterns are visible, they seem obvious. Once obvious, different, more effective strategies can be used to address them. Be prepared for some skepticism for proposing a “soft”, “fluffy” or “touchy feely” approach. Identify and speak about the importance of a relational approach and remain confident that this gets you the Strategic Workplace Culture success you are seeking.
Understanding the impact and influence of history on your individual and collective worldviews, seeing and understanding the patterns that lead to social change, acknowledging wounds, finding points of connection, helps people, teams and organizations heal, if healing is what is needed.
Case Study – International Business Machines (IBM)
IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), a holding company that brought together several manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems like time clocks, computing scales, and tabulating machines. In 1924, the company was renamed to International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of Thomas J. Watson, who shaped IBM into a global technology leader over the next 42 years. Some key milestones in IBM’s history include:
* 1928 – invented the first public address system for schools.
* 1943 – invented the first completely electronic computing machine, the Vacuum Tube Multiplier.
* 1944 – partnered with Harvard to invent the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, the first fully functional computer.
* 1956 – invented the RAMAC line, the first machines to use magnetic data storage on spinning discs.
* 1957 – invented the FORTRAN programming language.
* 1981 – launched its first desktop computer, the IBM PC, which became an industry standard.
* 1996 – IBM’s Deep Blue AI defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, the first time a computer beat a world champion in a traditional match.
Over the decades, IBM diversified from its origins in tabulating machines and time clocks to become a global leader in mainframe computers, PCs, software, services, and research. However, it faced challenges in adapting to the shift from mainframes to personal computers and Unix systems in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2005, IBM sold its personal computing division to Lenovo and shifted its focus more towards business services and enterprise technology. Today, IBM remains one of the largest and most influential technology companies in the world.
Two key areas of its successful business approach have been its focus on business practice and workplace culture. Business practices included:
Clear Vision and Strategic Execution: From the very beginning, IBM’s founder Thomas J. Watson Sr. had a clear vision for what the company should look like and how it should act. He then ensured the company executed on that vision from the start, even before it became a reality.
Adaptability and Diversification: IBM has shown the ability to adapt to changing market conditions and diversify its product offerings over the decades, expanding from tabulating machines and time clocks into mainframes, PCs, software, services, and more.
Technological Innovation: IBM has been at the forefront of many technological breakthroughs, from the first electronic computing machine to the FORTRAN programming language to the IBM PC. This innovation has kept the company at the cutting edge.
Government Contracts and Diversification: During challenging times like the Great Depression and World War II, IBM was able to secure lucrative government contracts that provided a financial cushion and allowed it to implement progressive employee benefits.
Global Expansion: IBM successfully expanded its operations globally, adapting its “family” culture and welfare capitalist approach to subsidiaries in other countries like Germany.
Regarding its workplace culture, which has remained steady throughout the company’s history, key elements are:
Employee-Centric Approach: IBM’s “family” culture led to extremely generous employee benefits like pensions, health insurance, paid vacations, and even country clubs. This employee-focused approach, in exchange for loyalty, shaped IBM’s human resource management practices.
Emphasis on Ethics and Values: IBM’s strong emphasis on ethics, integrity, and values like “respect for the individual”, permeated the company’s decision-making and business practices. This ethical foundation influenced IBM’s progressive policies around equal pay, global expansion, and social responsibility.
Transparency and Communication: IBM built an extensive “information ecosystem” to keep employees, customers, and stakeholders informed about the company’s intentions, values, and objectives. This transparency and communication helped align the organization around IBM’s strategic vision and corporate culture.
Stakeholder-Focused Approach: Rather than solely prioritizing shareholders, IBM’s culture emphasized considering the needs of a variety of stakeholders including employees, customers, and the broader community. This stakeholder-focused approach shaped IBM’s business practices around employee benefits, customer education, and social responsibility.
IBM’s distinctive corporate workplace culture, defined by family, ethics, transparency, innovation, and stakeholder focus, had a profound influence on the company’s key business practices over its long history, contributing to its remarkable success.
Exercise: History Reflection Questions
Course Manual 7: Future Dimension
Your Relationship with the Future
The third of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions is Future. This may seem like an odd question, but when was the last time you considered your relationship with the future? On the one hand, it seems simple, the future will always arrive, is always arriving; whether you are ready for it or not, planning for it or not. Relationships with the future vary from person to person, team to team, organization to organization, community to community and worldview to worldview. Knowing how you view the future will inform your interactions with others. Knowing how your organization views the future will help in planning for the implementation of a Strategic Workplace Culture.
Some people anticipate the future with excitement and others with anxiousness and others with a mixture of these two emotions. Given the times we live in, the relationships and change we must navigate, it is not surprising that there may be many reactions at the same time. If you pause for a moment and sense into the questions about the future, what reaction seems most true for you? It might be something other than what is mentioned here.
As someone who is leading people and change in your organization, how are the members of your team reacting to the future, planned or unplanned – with enthusiasm, resistance or some other response? If things are changing quickly in your environment, how do you ensure that individual and collective worldviews are aligned around the Strategic Workplace Culture Vision you have created and the future you are headed for?
How change is guided and presented in your organization impacts trust and relationships and will impact your Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative. If change is viewed simply as a technical process with a series of steps to get from here to there, the people component is likely to get lost in the mix. When that happens, resistance will show up and trust and relationships will be challenged.
Invitation to Explore Where You are Going
The Future Dimension holds an invitation to explore where you are going and what you desire for the future. Your worldview provides you with ways of thinking about this desired future. This could be considered a model or prediction of what kind of future is ahead of you. Because the future is uncertain and always in flux, with more than one possible outcome, this Dimension offers many possible futures, which then offers you choices to make, whether you are aware of these choices or not, making decisions unintentionally or intentionally.
At a personal level, it helps answer questions like: Where are you going? What future is open to you in this world? What kind of future is ahead of you? Can you see a future that is radically different than now? Do you want to see a future that is radically different than now? When you think towards the future, do you value tradition? If you value tradition, do you want the future to be an extension of the past or do you want to ensure that tradition is honored in other ways as you move forward, even if the future looks different than the past? These are also questions your organization could be asking?
From the perspective of leading yourself in a Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative, you could ask the same questions in relation to the individual members of your team and the team as a whole and you could explore these questions collectively.
Source of Tension or Conflict
Future is a worldview Dimension that offers a surprising source of possible conflict or tension. This can be particularly important knowledge for you as a leader of your team and in your organization, especially as you are implementing a Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative. How do you and your team members relate to the future? Are there some members of your team who want to passively await the arrival of the future? Are there others charging ahead to find ways to shape it?
As a leader, you are likely in the forefront of championing change in your organization. Knowing there are a wide range of typical or normal responses is critical to developing and implementing a Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative in a way that will bring as many people along as possible.
Futuristic Thinkers and Methodical Planners
Some people are futuristic thinkers, barely living in the present, although they may or may not have any idea of how to plan for the futures they imagine. Others are planners, imagining and creating the pathways to the future, sometimes in leaps and bounds, sometimes more methodically. Some people are concrete thinkers and need to know all the steps, in the right order, to get there. They want the detailed road map. And there are some who just want to keep doing what they’ve always done. Others idealize memories of the past that may or may not reflect what it was like. They want the future to be a version of that past.
If you have a sense of the worldviews of your team members and their relationship with the future, you can strategize adaptable and responsive ways of implementing a Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative. It is important to make time for everyone to speak about their experience in anticipating the future Workplace Culture described, especially those more reluctant to imagine it or move towards it. Dismissing their perspectives as irrelevant or foolish or trying to drag them along will not serve either relationship or trust in the long run and will impede progress on change.
Loss aversion will be covered more fully in Workshop 6 on Informative Neuroscience. It essentially notes that when confronted with a change, people will tend to hold on to what they already have, or what they currently know, at more than two times the strength of adopting the new. Not only do you need a compelling vision, supported by storytelling and change practices, to move people towards the future, you need to tend to the sources of resistance as well. Otherwise, the pull of history and patterns of reality may be stronger than the future vision.
Case Study – Misreading the Future
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was founded in 1957 in Minneapolis, Minnesota by a group of engineers, many of whom came from the nearby Univac establishment. The company became famous as a supplier of very large and powerful scientific computing systems, many of which were designed by Seymour Cray and his associates.
CDC experienced rapid growth in its early years, becoming the world’s fourth-largest computer maker within just five years. The company was highly successful, reaching $160 million in annual revenue and employing 10,000 people by 1965. Much of CDC’s success was attributed to its founder, William C. Norris, who had a unique corporate philosophy that demanded not just profits, but also a commitment to social justice projects. He was an early leader in renewable energy projects, although his investments in them impacted company profitability.
As the demand for high-performance mainframes declined, CDC faced financial difficulties. This was in good part because Norris did not believe ‘personal’ computers would ever become popular or ubiquitous. In the 1980s, CDC began to exit the computer business, and what remained of the company was finally purchased by Syntegra, a data mining firm, in 1999. The company’s decline was seen as the “fall of William C. Norris” and the end of CDC’s heyday as a pioneering computer manufacturer.
Crusaders or Traditionalists
In his book, Polarity Management, Barry Johnson uses the terms crusaders and traditionalists to describe two “poles” of change. That language is useful in considering relationships to the future. People who are excited to engage the future are often crusaders for change. They may not be able to see the challenges inherent in any change process. They may not even be aware there is or could be a process that can alleviate some of the uncertainty and stress in a sustainable change process. People who value tradition, or the way things have been done, are tradition bearers. They may not see the positive aspects of change or may not be able to see themselves in it. There is value in both roles, which is why Johnson refers to managing “poles” rather than falling into false binaries. When you can recognize what the value is in each pole, you can draw upon that moving into the future.
In this image, you could put any set of poles into the blank boxes in the middle: traditionalist/crusader; collaborative decision-making/directive decision-making; Relational Leadership/Task-Oriented Leadership; inbreath/outbreath. Then list the benefits and drawbacks of each.
At any given time, there is movement in the flow of energy and focus between the polarities. When the focus on only the positive aspects of an attribute – like collaborative decision-making, for example – starts to cause problems, perhaps taking too long to make all decisions and it seems as if nothing is getting down, people get antsy and just want someone to make a decision. The focus can shift to more directive decision-making without consultation or collaboration. Again, when people start to feel excluded from decision-making or like their perspectives are not being taken into account, they can become upset and there is a movement back to collaborative decision-making. There is value in both. Being clear about the value, recognizing the polarity movement, allows you to be clear about what decision-making mode you are in and why.
An important Worldview Intelligence skill is recognizing that there are practices and processes that can be used to open possibilities or new futures as well as practices that can make the journey to this future more accessible to a wider variety of people and responses. This happens when you make space in your team, department or organization for multiple voices or perspectives to be heard equally, thus creating the opportunity for discovering a future that recognizes multiple perspectives. Throughout this Program ideas and strategies will be shared around how to invite and engage different worldview perspectives and to fully engage the people you lead.
Exercise: Reflection on Crusaders and Traditionalists
A Balance Between Change and Stability
Being aware of the different possible relationships to the future, including your own, will allow you to tend to the relationships within your team. What is the balance between change and stability that will work for you, your team and your organization? What can you offer your team that they can trust – in you as a leader and in the processes that bring stability while establishing a Strategic Workplace Culture? In what ways can you allay their fears concerning the future? How will you invite new team members into the ongoing work?
When things change fast and roles or responsibilities change quickly there is a constant readjustment of working relationships that happens – within yourself, the team and also between the team and its members and other parts of the organization they interact with. These moving targets can create a feeling of job insecurity for some, which can result in reduced loyalty as well as increased levels of stress related leave and lower productivity. With reduced loyalty comes challenged relationships and decreased trust, the opposite of what is created in healthy work environments.
Since change can and often does bring varying amounts of chaos – in structures, processes, cultures, transitions and relationships, the energy you bring to supporting your team sets the tone for how they will respond. Building in strategies and practices for your team members to stay connected to each other, and to others in the organization, as you move toward the Strategic Workplace Culture you are anticipating, planning for and implementing, will provide a foundation for sustainability over time. In the Chapter on the Practices Dimension, some ideas will be offered as well as in Workshop 4: 1 + 1 = 3, focused on high-performing and Healthy Teams.
Choices Concerning the Future
Thinking of the future provides you with alternatives that allow you to make choices about your Strategic Workplace Culture. The future contains more than one possible outcome. Your worldview gives you possible futures, which then offers you choices to make regarding how to move towards your vision for your Strategic Workplace Culture, for you, your team, department or organization overall.
As a leader you may find yourself working in spaces of emergence as you move toward establishing your Strategic Workplace Culture. This could also be thought of as working in a place of “not knowing”, which can contribute to an openness to new ideas, opportunities or ways of working. When alternatives emerge during implementation, you and the team can decide how to work with them and whether they will require you to modify your course or to work differently. This is covered more in-depth in Workshop 9: Addressing Uncertainty.
When you can hold yourself well in this space of not knowing, and hold the space for others, it will offer the opportunity to create or co-create the Strategic Workplace Culture that has been described. In this way, you could find new ways forward that neither you nor your team can imagine as you begin to implement your designed vision.
Co-Creating the Future
How does your organization view its relationship to the future? Some organizations are risk averse and some have a higher risk tolerance. What is true for you, your team or organization? What strategies do you have for mitigating risks, personally and professionally? How sure does your team or organization need to be to proactively move into the Strategic Workplace Culture? Is your organization trying to attain certainty on everything or is your organization jumping in, willing to take risks and learn from them as you continue moving forward? Which views are rewarded and which are punished? What happens when these views clash?
Case Study – One Future Planner, One with a Shorter Time Horizon
Within relationships, people can have different time horizons when considering the future. This can be a source of irritation or tension, or it can be celebrated. In this illustration, in a couple, one person (Person A) is very much a future planner, the other (Person B) is more responsive to a shorter time horizon.
When this couple plans to travel, months ahead of time Person A is already making hotel reservations, planning a few activities like museums, art galleries or day excursions, looking for interesting restaurants to ensure dinner reservations. When asking for input from Person B, Person B is often amused and perplexed as their planning horizon is more like weeks away than months away. However, they can also be nudged through these conversations to ensure their own flights are booked for travel and other travel necessities are attended to.
This could be a source of conflict, especially if Person A felt unappreciated for the effort they put into planning. But Person B appreciates the effort and makes sure to acknowledge and recognize it and has learned to be a better contributor to planning over time.
Case Study – One Nova Scotia
How the future is viewed by a group of people, a culture, a community can vary, along with the relationship they want to have with the future. Nova Scotia is a prime example of how views of the future can be a source of tension and worldview collisions.
The province has long had one main economic center: the capital city of Halifax. Halifax has been in significant growth mode over the last few years, evidenced by the number of cranes visible across the city and including relatively new innovative structures like the Halifax Library, the new convention center and the Halifax Waterfront.
Many long-time residents are experiencing moments of conflict around this as they love their city and its character, and are also advocates for growth. They worry that Halifax may lose its small city character in the midst of the growth.
There are growth issues to be addressed in Nova Scotia and especially in more rural communities where industry is low, traditional sources of employment have dramatically decreased and where youth out-migration is a significant issue. There have been and are several attempts at addressing these issues, including the work of One Nova Scotia, which published the Ivany Report in 2014, and the ongoing work of Engage Nova Scotia.
One Nova Scotia was a coalition of 15 citizens from various sectors in the province, co-led by the Premier and the Leader of the Opposition Party at the time. The Ivany Report set out a 10-year future plan, which has had various degrees of success in implementation of the recommendations.
One of the members of One Nova Scotia was Dan Christmas. Dan is First Nations Mi’kmaw from Membertou, a successful community in Cape Breton, NS. He is recently retired as a Canadian Senator and he is a successful businessman. He shared a story that reflects the dynamic tension alive in so many of the rural communities in Nova Scotia as residents consider the future.
In visiting one rural community in the province, differing worldview perspectives were brought home to him. This is a community that has become a shell of its former self because the young people have left, there are no new businesses, farms are disappearing and schools are closing. The One Nova Scotia team was testing out the idea of immigration as one means to revitalize communities. A resident of this particular community stood up and said, “Immigration will never work here. We are not that kind of people.”
Dan was stunned as it dawned on him that some people would rather the community die than welcome newcomers to be part of a possible renewal. It was also a surprise to have this comment made in front of him as his culture and background as a Mi’kmaw would have made him an “outsider” in this community, but his presence as such seemed to go unnoticed.
One shift in Dan’s own worldview was the comprehension that the barriers in Nova Scotia were not necessarily business related but attitude related. He remarked, “We looked into the well and saw the enemy; and it was us.”
The dynamic tension across the province is between wanting the future to be an extension of the past and wanting the future to be vastly different. Can it find success in a global economy? Can its institutions work globally? Can the government? If Nova Scotia wants to be more successful, it needs to be more inclusive, diverse and welcoming. Can the horizons for Nova Scotia be opened enough to embark on a future informed by its history but different than the past?
Exercise – Reflection Questions on the Future Dimension
Course Manual 8: Values Dimension
Values is Dimension Four in the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework. Values are the core commitments that we hold. These core commitments guide our personal and career choices and influence our life path, consciously and unconsciously. To Know Thyself means being able to articulate your values so your life and professional choices are more consciously aligned with them. It contributes to you being authentic and being seen by others as a person of integrity.
Many people can point to times when life was not flowing well for them as a time when they were living contrary to some or all of their values. Values prove a powerful motivator and force for living life in alignment with one’s most authentic self.
What Are Your Values
Each and every one of us has values but not all of us can easily name what our values are in thoughtful or accurate ways. For each of us, some values are more important than others. Although mostly interdependent, values do operate in a hierarchy. When challenged, some will have more importance than others. However, the interdependency can make it hard to isolate distinct values.
When asked about values, many people can readily come up with a cursory list of things they think they value, or should value, like patience, cooperation, trust, community, family, success, respect, love, honesty. The question is, are these truly the values that settle deep in your heart or soul, that guide your actions and your way of being in the world? Are they the core commitments you consistently live by or desire to live by? How well do they resonate your organization’s values?
Doing a values exploration to illuminate your own values is an important step in knowing yourself, and one is supplied in the Project Studies for Workshop 2. You may be surprised by what your values are compared to what you think they are or think they should be. You may or may not be surprised at the lack of alignment between these values and the choices you are making in life, work or relationships. While you could name a dozen things that are important to you, there are often only four to six that come into play at any given time, which is why they function in a hierarchy. Also, those four to six values can encompass, or act as an umbrella for, several other interrelated values.
Sometimes a crisis will illuminate your values. The crisis could be an existential identity crisis, the loss of a loved one, the collapse of a life style, marital discord or divorce, a promotion at work, a new job or job loss, a personal or professional development program or career coaching. Basically, any life event that sparks reflection or an examination of your life or career path or journey could reveal your values.
Values Guide Your Choices, Although They Have Wiggle Room
Your values guide your choices, consciously or not. Value is the root of evaluate. This means you use your values to evaluate your life choices. This includes choices you’ve made in the past, those in front of you right now and possible choices in the future. This also holds true for your organization.
Your values help you know what is important to you now and where to focus your attention. They are a measure of what is important to you at a deeply personal and profound level as well as what’s important to you professionally. Many people will feel good when their choices are aligned with their values and may discover, when things have gone awry, it is because they have strayed from what is important to them. Your values will guide your perspectives regarding Workplace Culture and, more specifically, what you believe is a Strategic Workplace Culture.
Values Conflicts and Wiggle Room
While you may think you hold true to your most important values all of the time, there are times, and more than you might think, when this is likely not true. What happens when your values come into conflict with each other? Say honesty is an important value for you. And say kindness is also an important value. What happens when a friend asks your opinion of their new hair style and you think it is not flattering to them? Do you choose honesty or kindness? It could depend on the circumstances. If the friend is a casual friend, you may choose to be kind. If the friend is a dear friend, you may choose honesty. However, this is also a false binary; you could choose to be honest with kindness. It may well depend on the consequences of choosing one over the other, like valuing the relationship enough to be honest or kind or both. You probably get the picture.
Another time your values may not hold true is when you act in a way that is in contradiction to a value that you say you hold. We each have what we call “wiggle room” in our values. It is the space where you can find a way to justify or rationalize a particular action or behavior even if it is contrary to your stated values. “I don’t steal, that is wrong. But the waiter added the bill wrong so that’s on them.” “I always like to be on time, but this coffee date isn’t business, so it doesn’t matter if I’m late.” “I know I said I’d go to that birthday party, but there will be so many people there they won’t miss me, so I just won’t go. I’ll call my friend later (maybe).” These are minor examples reminding you to bear in mind that we judge other people on their actions and we often judge ourselves on our intentions.
Judgment and Projection Based on Assumed Values
Values is one of the places where we can carry a lot of judgment about other people. We judge others either based on what we think their values are or we judge them according to our own values, and how they aren’t living up to an expectation we may have placed on them. You can ask yourself, what do you gain by judging another person? Is it possible to bring compassion and empathy instead of judgment?
Since ‘value’ is the root of ‘evaluate’ or ‘evaluation’ and the Six Dimensions are interrelated, as you experience your reality, locally or globally, how do you evaluate this reality? How do you choose your reality or your future? Is there another lens with which to understand or evaluate your history?
The world we live in is not neutral. People love and hate; admire and despise; suffer and enjoy. We each determine what is good or evil to us; what is beautiful or not. We operate with individual and societal value systems and it can be hard to differentiate between the two. What is the source of your values? What or who in your history has influenced your values? Have you had experiences in past workplaces that challenged your values? How might these experiences affect your approach to implementing a Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative?
Values as a Philosophy of Life
In philosophy, the subject of values can be looked at from a moral, ethical or aesthetic perspective. In the context of worldviews, values are individual and societal. We are each influenced by societal or cultural beliefs about what is good or evil, what is beautiful or ugly, what is right or wrong. You can think of your values as a reflection of the importance you put on something. Every aspect of your personal and professional worldview, from reality to knowledge, is influenced by what you value and how you evaluate things.
Values are a central component of worldviews. They influence every aspect of life. They are a filter through which you choose how you will act in and interact with the world, and especially, the workplace. They set the standards for your behavior. They are moral guidelines that help you understand which behaviors are acceptable and which are not, and when and where you can push the boundaries of your behavior. If your worldview reflects the basic values you hold, then it is plausible to consider your worldview as your philosophy of life, your ideology or faith, or formula for life.
As you explore your own values in order to develop a deeper understanding of yourself, you can ask, what do I consider to be the source of moral guidelines or what society sanctions as right or acceptable? Is society the source of my moral guidelines or is there a source of moral guidelines that transcends human society, such as a divine being or force? Reflecting back on the beliefs held within your meta-reality, you can ask yourself how you think about values and especially your values in relation to the relativity of moral guidelines. Do you believe in absolute morality, that moral guidelines (values) are absolute? Or do you believe in relative morality, that moral guidelines are relative to time, culture, or situations?
Your values influence how you think about people who are different from you in some important way. Examples include skin color, gender, sexual orientation, age, ableness, religion or country of origin. Ask yourself, are you tolerant of difference or are you intolerant? Intolerance could imply that another person or the different ‘other’ must be changed or removed because of their values or worldviews. How did you arrive at your answer? Are you more tolerant of some differences than others, and on what basis do you make this decision? Is tolerance enough? What is beyond tolerance? Acceptance, inclusion, invitation? How do your answers to these questions influence your thinking about Workplace Culture?
Case Study: Accessibility as a Value
The American Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, yet people with disabilities still experience discrimination in the workplace, in public spaces and buildings, in education and in private facilities.
The ADA established policies to address discrimination against people with disabilities and provide remedies for acts of discrimination. Yet, as we know, policies do not change worldviews. As long as we hold a medical model worldview that we need to “fix” people who have disabilities, we will continue to focus on fixing the person rather than directing energy, as individuals and as societies, towards a narrative of worldview values of inclusion, openness, acceptance and seeing disability as part of the human condition. To be sure, it is important to continue with medical science to find cures for diseases and injuries that can cause disabilities. This focus is on the source of the disability, not on fixing the person.
In the Spring of 2017, a team of facilitators scheduled a community training at a facility in the Twin Cities that billed itself as being accessible. Accessibility was an important value and criteria for these trainers.
A young woman who uses a wheelchair for mobility registered for the event and was assured the venue was accessible. When she arrived, at the front of the building there were two staircases on either side of the main floor entrance that led to the second floor where the training was taking place. As she looked around, there was no visible way for her to reach the second floor, including no elevators.
A groundskeeper on the property saw her predicament. He and another passerby picked up this young woman, in her wheelchair, and carried her up the hill to the meeting room. When the trainers enquired about accessibility, they were told that there is a narrow, dirt service road leading to the back of the building where catering is delivered to the second floor. Technically, the meeting room was accessible. Functionally, it left a lot to be desired as the young woman was publicly subjected to staring, the humiliation of having to be carried up a hill, and the service road was hidden with the entrance being in the back. The young woman was very kind as she described her situation to the trainers and asked that someone please bring her specially equipped car up the service road so she didn’t have to be carried back down the hill.
When meeting people with differing mobility circumstances than you, how do you respond? Do you seek to expand your worldview through learning and understanding? Do you consider your situation mostly as normal, and people with disabilities or differences from you as not normal? How often do you check in with your worldviews regarding your values and difference?
Leadership and Values
As a leader of your team or in your organization, how well do your personal values align with your organization’s values? Does this help or hinder or have no impact on your ability to work in your organization? Has your organization taken the time to consider the relationship between personal and organizational values? Are there clashes in your team that could be attributed to differences in values? People working in environments that are not aligned with their values are more likely to experience many of the challenges of unhealthy workplace cultures.
Case Study – Making a Values Driven Difference
Bell Bank, originally founded by two families as the State Bank of Fargo (North Dakota) in 1966, has a long history of growth and success as a privately owned bank in the upper US Midwest. Over the decades, Bell Bank has expanded significantly, both geographically and in terms of services offered. In 2003, the bank acquired Northern Capital Trust, a trust company and flex spending adjudication business. Today, Bell Bank has over $13 billion in assets, 27 full-service banking locations, and over 1,900 employees across multiple states.
Throughout its history, Bell Bank has maintained a focus on its core values of “Happy Employees! Happy Customers!” and giving back to the community. The founding families have remained major shareholders and have helped guide the bank’s growth and culture over the decades.
Bell Bank states on its website that its core company values are:
Family: The company aims to create a “family atmosphere” and prioritize people over profits.
Service: Treating customers well and providing excellent service is a key focus for Bell Bank.
Giving back/Paying it forward: Making a positive impact in the community through initiatives like the Pay It Forward program is a central part of the company’s values.
The company’s people-centric culture and philosophy that “people matter more than profits” are deeply rooted in these guiding principles. Additionally, the Great Place to Work certification and various awards Bell Bank has received, such as being named one of the Best Workplaces for Women and Best Workplaces in Financial Services & Insurance, further demonstrate the company’s commitment to living up to these values.
Customers describe how pleasurable it is to interact with employees. Everyone is friendly and service is high quality. Employees go out of their way to remember the names of regular customers.
The Pay It Forward program is a core part of Bell Bank’s culture and commitment to community involvement. The program, which started in 2008, empowers each Bell Bank employee to donate $1,000 for full-time employees or $500 for part-time employees each year to individuals, families, or organizations in need. During the pandemic in 2020, the company doubled these amounts. This substantial funding gives employees the resources to make a meaningful impact. Since its inception, the program has provided over $28 million in donations and changed countless lives.
The program is employee-driven, allowing Bell Bank’s workforce to directly choose where the funds are directed based on their own passions and the needs they see in their communities. This grassroots approach has fostered a strong culture of giving and community engagement among Bell Bank employees.
Beyond the direct financial support, the Pay It Forward program has also helped strengthen Bell Bank’s relationships with its customers and the broader community. The bank is seen as a trusted partner that prioritizes people over profits, which has contributed to its growth and success over the years.
Values may be at the Source of Arguments that seem to be About Facts
Sometimes, when people get locked into arguments or positions on certain topics, they resort to facts to explain their point of view. There are at least two problems with this. First is that the person or people you are in conflict with have just as much ability to source their own information or facts that support their point of view as you do. A common joke amongst economists is: Ask any three economists to offer a perspective on the same set of facts and you are likely to get three different answers or interpretations. Second, there are few things that truly qualify as absolute facts. The existence of gravity is an example of one such fact. Remember the Ladder of Inference? We are quick to fill in missing details in any conversation, story or observance and we do so through our worldviews. This is why eyewitness accounts can be so varied. The same facts and observations can be interpreted to support very different points of view.
While stuck in an argument focused on facts, it could be that the true source of contention is values-based. If you can shift the focus of the conversation to values, it could change the nature of the discussion. An example of a question to accomplish this is: Why does this issue matter so much to you? Then you can look for shared values to understand what’s important to everyone. There you may discover points of connection that allow you to focus on alignment rather than conflict.
Exercise: Values Reflection Questions
Course Manual 9: Practices Dimension
Our lives are lived, day in and day out, through actions. Small and large actions. Habitual and intentional. Unplanned and planned. These actions are essentially the practices by which we function and through which we enliven our worldviews. Practices is the fifth of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions.
Individually we have practices and within our teams, departments and organizations, practices also exist. In these realms, practices often are described through policies and procedures, project planning documents, team processes and for decision-making. Practices are also informal in the way meetings are run, time is managed, how relationships are formed and trust is built. This Chapter largely focuses on personal practices although it does touch on other practices. Other Chapters will identify practices for leadership, team, engagement and addressing conflict.
Practices are how We Live our Lives
The practices you use to live your values directly impact the actions you take in the world. Your practices define and shape how you live your reality. They provide you with options and choices for how you act in various contexts – at work, in community, with family or friends, or in social situations. They also provide you with a means to bring or extend your worldview into the realities of the world in which you live, work and socialize.
If your practices are not congruent with your stated worldview, it will be evident to those around you. When you practice something different from what you espouse, it calls into question the validity of your stated worldview, your authenticity and your integrity.
Knowing what your hopes and dreams are and desiring to get there does not necessarily mean you know how. As humans, we generally strive to act in meaningful ways and take actions to transform the world in ways that connect to our purpose. Your worldview not only includes your history and values system, but it also offers you thoughts and reflections on how to organize your actions to influence your life and perhaps the lives of others you interact with within the grand scheme of things, as a human in the world. The practices you build, intentionally or habitually, bring life to your worldview and all that is important to you.
Daily and Intentional Practices
Practices generally fall into two categories that are not mutually exclusive: every day, how-you-live-your-life practices and intentional practices.
Every day practices are the realm of routines, habits and patterns, like having coffee or taking a shower first thing every morning. This is an important category of practices because so much of how we operate in the world is habitual, whether at home, socially or in the workplace. And even though the work of Worldview Intelligence is meant to draw attention to the habits or patterns we don’t question that get us into trouble, if we had to think everything through all the time, we would not get out of the house in the morning. We create routines that offer us efficiency. This is a good thing – most of the time.
If you value workplace relationships you may have a regular social time with colleagues within or outside of work. If you value the environment, you may have regular practices of recycling or composting or other environmentally friendly actions that allow you to demonstrate this. If you value food safety, you may have a practice of buying locally or frequenting farm-to-table eating establishments. These are regular or daily practices that are intentional.
Other intentional practices are ones you generally need to create room for or even schedule into your day or week or they won’t happen. These kinds of intentional practices may include meditation, reflective practices or exercise; practices that if you are intentional about them, they may eventually also become habitual. This could include how often and when you connect with family, friends or colleagues from other departments in your workplace.
How We Treat Other People is a Practice
How you treat people is a practice. Do you treat some people differently than others? The answer is undoubtedly yes. The question is, what is the basis upon which you treat people differently? Do you treat family members better or worse than strangers? Do you treat all your team members in the same way and do you treat them better or worse than customers, suppliers or others in the organization?
It is natural to connect with different people in different ways and that often influences communication. It might be less formal and more friendly or more formal and stilted. If the relationship is challenged, the practices we bring to it may be more habitual or unconscious. This creates an opportunity to bring awareness and intentionality to how that relationship is engaged. Subsequent Workshops will offer more strategies, including applying the knowledge gained from Informative Neuroscience, within teams and in dealing with uncertainty.
Practices for Inviting and Engaging Diversity
If you say you value diversity of people, perspectives, opinions, or expressions of differing experiences, is that evident in your practices and priorities? Can it be discerned in how you interact with people who are different from you or with departments other than your own?
Practices that show you value diversity of all kinds could include listening practices, the cultivation of being present to the situation or other person and removing distractions from the interaction. Intentionally inviting worldview explorations and pausing to ensure that all views have been expressed can bring tremendous value to your Workplace Culture as well as team discussions. Paying attention, being in inquiry and being deliberate about inviting different voices, and even contrary perspectives, demonstrates that these various views are not only welcome but that they contribute to team creativity and innovation, leading to better outcomes.
It is important to note here that actions that may be valid in one context may not necessarily be so in another. For example, converting a rural landscape to prairie grass may not impact nearby neighbors, but doing so in an urban neighborhood may be met with resistance from neighbors or the local city government. Turning your front yard into the family garden could receive unkind comments from some neighbors but support from other neighbors.
Practices for Worldview Clashes
If your team has a diversity of social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, does any of this create worldview clashes or conflicts within the workplace, team or among members of the team? If it does, then it is helpful to have individual and collective practices to draw upon to work through them in helpful and healthy ways.
In building a Strategic Workplace Culture, it is not enough to simply say, “You are all adults. You don’t have to like each other; you just have to work together.” The best work gets done when the Workplace Culture supports quality relationships where people respect and enjoy each other and take pride in accomplishing goals and objectives together.
Leading Self and Knowing Thyself means you can identify what practices you want to develop personally to allow yourself to work with all the ways conflict can show up: conflict of ideas and conflict between people or personalities. The more you are able to hold that space and maintain presence, the greater the ability of others to also find their way. As a role model in your organization, and especially when co-leading a Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative, what you do will show the way. In addition to depersonalizing the situation or discussion, practices that support diversity also work in addressing conflict. They include removing distractions, listening, staying present and curious and being in inquiry. All can help to work through conflict. Knowing your own reactions to conflict situations is important here too.
One characteristic of a Strategic Workplace Culture is that team members have higher levels of social sensitivity. This means they are more attuned to environmental, interpersonal and emotional cues that indicate when things are going well and when something is off, whether with an individual or in the team. This contributes to the skill and ability to tend to the well-being of the team, individually and collectively.
We Move in the Direction of the Language We Use
As was noted in Workshop 1, Language Matters. We move in the direction of the language we use and the questions we ask. Having an intentional practice of using language that supports a Strategic Workplace Culture and using well-crafted questions, along with the practice of curiosity, will give you and your team a strategic advantage.
To be able to preface your own comments with something like, “From my worldview….” or “I imagine the worldview of our senior leadership on this issue is…” or to be able to ask questions like, “How did you come to see or experience this issue in this way?” creates exploratory rather than oppositional conversational spaces. To offer something like, “I value your perspective and it makes me think of….” keeps the exploration moving. It can be valuable to pause to create a connection by saying something like, “This is a tough issue, we each have a perspective on it. Let’s remember as we discuss this, that this is only one aspect of who we are and what we believe so we can focus on the issue and not get personal on it.”
Strategic Workplace Culture practices offer ways to spark generative dialogue where all voices and perspectives matter, learning happens and each contribution is valued in and of itself and for where it leads. Not only will these practices build trust and relationship, they will enable you, your team and your organization to benefit from the resulting creativity and innovative ideas and solutions that arise in a Strategic Workplace Culture.
Exercise: Practices to Support Diversity and Address Conflict
Case Study: From Unintentional to Intentional Leadership Practices
A 27-year-old woman was hired as the Executive Director of an Atlantic Canada Health Charity. Although a natural born leader, she had very little experience in a formal leadership role at the time she accepted the role. She took advantage of leadership and development training opportunities but it is what happens when attempting to put the learning into practice that counts.
A couple of years into the role, the office environment began to experience issues around morale and the staff began to call her leadership into question. Office gossip grew. People talked about each other all the time and it wasn’t productive or healthy. It was confounding in a way because everyone participated, even knowing that they could well be the next subject of discussion.
This was the organization’s reality and she considered leaving. As she looked to the leaders on the Board of Directors and the initiatives that the organization was embarking on, she realized that it could be an exciting time to be there. She thought about the Workplace Culture and had a sudden insight. She was allowing herself to be buffered around by the prevailing, organically forming culture and yet, as the leader, she was actually responsible for it. This reflection prompted her to take responsibility as a leader and to be intentional about leadership practices.
There were two specific things she did. The first was to make the decision to show up cheerfully every morning, to personally greet each of the 10 member staff team, rather than immediately retreating to her office. This was a focus on building or rebuilding relationship.
The second thing was to confront the unhealthy behaviors or practices being demonstrated by everyone. Not in angry confrontation, but with curiosity, confidence and clarity.
She did this individually and collectively. In a staff meeting, she challenged the staff as a whole. She said, “There is something going on here. You know what it is and I don’t.” There was silence for what seemed like a long time. She repeated the question. Finally, someone started to speak. What emerged were perceptions about her leadership that were not backed up by specific examples. One thing that was said is that she was never in the office when decisions needed to be made. She had become a mother about six months before this. Prior to being a mother, when she was out of the office, everyone knew she was working. Now, assumptions were being made and discussed that had no bearing on what was actually happening.
Individually or in small groups, whenever there were side conversations happening – gossiping about someone – she confronted it. One strategy she used, when she happened upon the conversation, was to ask what she could do to help. Since it was purely gossip, there was nothing to be done and it silenced the gossip. Another time, she called on an age-old adage and told two people in a whispered conversation that, if they couldn’t say something good about someone, don’t say anything at all.
It took courage to confront the unhealthy behaviors. It was a bit easier because she was willing to accept her own responsibility and accountability in the situation. She wasn’t asking anyone to do anything she wasn’t also willing to do. The confrontation went better because it was combined with her own changed behavior in the office, acting like a leader instead of someone with no authority, adopting leadership practices that shifted the Workplace Culture from unhealthy to healthy, from one no one enjoyed being in to one that once again was motivating and enjoyable – for her as well as for everyone else.
Exercise: Practices Dimension Reflection Questions
Course Manual 10: Knowledge Dimension
Knowledge is the final Dimension in the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework. In some ways, it is the most confounding Dimension because it asks you to reflect on what you know, how you know what you know and what is the “truth” of what you know. It also asks you to identify the sources of knowledge you rely on and trust. Sources of “knowledge” could be a misnomer because not all information is knowledge or data. Some is just noise and there is no shortage of disinformation available these days due to the proliferation of media, social media, the dark web and more sources than most of us are likely aware of.
How Do You Know What You Know?
The Dimension of knowledge asks you to consider the question of how you know what you know. Where did, and does, your knowledge come from? How do you know that what you know is accurate and correct? What sources of knowledge or information do you trust? What sources of knowledge or information are relied upon and trusted in your workplace? Reflecting on how and where you get your information, will likely inform what you know about yourself, your willingness to expand your sources of knowledge to bring more objectivity to your reflections.
Evolving Sources of Information or Knowledge
There was a time when the Encyclopedia Britannica was the most comprehensive and trusted source of knowledge available to young students and their parents. Nowadays, young people do not even know what they are. Those out-of-date books sit on the bookshelves of our parents and grandparents, hardly ever to be opened again, thanks to the vastness of information available through the internet. Even Encyclopedia Britannica has created its own online resource. However, just because information is readily available does not mean it is accurate or even actual data or knowledge. This is being compounded these days with the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence and a growing challenge in discerning what is real and what has been virtually created.
Sources of information or knowledge can communicate very different messages. You now know that your brain filters some information out and lets specific information in depending on how resonant it is with the way you already view the world. As has been referenced, there are processes that are occurring 24/7 in our unawareness. This includes the neurochemicals the brain emits, in response to real and perceived stimuli, that support us in physically feeling comfortable or uncomfortable. It also includes processes like Confirmation Bias, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Dissonance, to be discussed further in Workshop 6 on Informative Neuroscience. The messages you are receiving and letting in can be vastly different than what someone else is receiving and letting in.
If you get your information or knowledge from a particular set of sources and someone else gets theirs from a different and even opposite set of sources, you are ripe for worldview clashes. A classic example in the US is if someone only watches MSNBC news or only watches Fox Television, their experiences and conclusions regarding reality, history and the future can be very different. Research on this indicates that responses to the same questions are likely to be quite different. In these cases, it can seem to you like the other person has no idea what they are talking about. And they may think that of you.
The typical reaction is not to try to open an exploratory conversation, instead it is more likely to result in debate and argument, none of which finds its way through the other person’s filters or worldviews. This also points to why it is important to have a practice of cultivating a variety of perspectives and sources of information to consult on a regular basis, both personally and as a team or Strategic Workplace Culture practice. This does not negate the necessity of having reliable sources of professional or industry data and knowledge in carrying out the mission and strategic goals of your organization.
Inviting yourself to be curious about these experiences can change the way you relate to seeking out and receiving knowledge and the way you interact with people who receive their information from very different sources.
Know Thyself, Know Your Motivations
If you do check out other sources of information that are different from what you would usually look at, check your reactions and motivations for doing so. Is it to be curious regarding how someone else’s views are being informed or is it to prove to yourself how right you are and wrong you already think they are, or how ridiculous they are for carrying those views? Is it for a sense of superiority? If you are approaching your exploration with curiosity, there is room for expansion. If it is the former, you may only be locking yourself more firmly into your already established views. Your approach to knowledge generation will model and be adopted by others in your workplace, especially as they see how helpful it is to the results you achieve?
The Role of Assumptions and Beliefs in Knowledge
Your worldview offers you an understanding of how it is that you know what you know, how you acquire knowledge or how it is you think you know something is true or false. This is especially important because what you believe about knowing or knowledge affects what you accept as valid evidence or facts. It also affects your interpretation of the evidence and thus what you believe or accept with respect to the particulars of the world or the particulars of individuals or groups of people.
Like so much of your worldview, you make assumptions about how you know what you know, on the ‘knowing’ process itself. Remember how fast the Ladder of Inference works? In less that 13 milliseconds decisions are made. If you are like most people, you rarely question your assumptions that lead to the decision.
What beliefs do you hold regarding reliable sources of knowledge? What beliefs does your team, department or organization hold regarding reliable sources of knowledge? Sources of knowledge do not just come from media, social media or research. It is also communicated by well-known people, including politicians and celebrities. People also tend to have preferences related to leadership style or what is publicly known about people they admire. For example, people who value authority figures, opinions or traditional views on matters, will likely look to sources of knowledge that promote these things.
Our bodies also provide a source of information as many of our experiences, including traumatic ones, can be stored in body tissues. You may be skeptical of this, but there is considerable research that demonstrates this is the case. Some people rely on their senses or intuition. Others prefer logic models and rationality. How much confidence do you place in each of these possible sources of knowledge: science, research, intuition, divination, revelation or some combination or variation on this? Perhaps you think that there are no reliable sources of knowledge. What beliefs do your workplace colleagues hold regarding reliable sources of knowledge? How might your team members answer these questions?
Knowledge Influences Reality
The answers to these and many other worldview questions influence your daily actions. If you are interested in growing your leadership and communication skills, and if you are to enter into dialogues that create opportunities to build a Strategic Workplace Culture, then it is beneficial to periodically ask yourself how you came to know what you know.
You could also ask how does your team or the individual members of your team know what they know? The more a team holds the same or similar worldviews, the more confidence they will have in their knowledge, whether it is right or reliable, and the more they may be inclined to discount contradictory information, if it is available. This is not a helpful practice for creativity, innovation, inclusion or belonging. It is important to recognize that the more we are surrounded by people who think like us, the more convinced we are that our views are correct and the less likely we are to seek out disconfirming or contradictory information. What kinds of knowledge seeking practices are characteristic of your current Workplace Culture?
The Benefit of Different Sources of Knowledge in a Team
Within your team, a powerful strategy is to develop a practice of asking the questions of how the team knows what it knows, how reliable the sources of knowledge are that the team draws upon and whether there is more relevant information or data or disconfirming information available that should be considered. This is a practice that supports a Strategic Workplace Culture.
A diversity of views provides for more comprehensive analysis and opportunities for new knowledge. The ongoing process of constructing knowledge is not just combining two or more ‘knowns’ into one new or different reality, but also the possibility that something not known before might emerge during the ongoing processes of knowledge creation.
Knowledge creation happens when teams or groups are constructing new knowledge together, usually in a collaborative process. It combines the knowledge of individuals in a synergistic way. Individuals contribute their knowledge and build on and combine the contributions of others. More about this, including strategies and ideas for how to cultivate the practice, is shared in several of the future Workshops in this program. For now, suffice to say, knowledge creation thrives on the exchange of ideas, collaboration, and learning. As people interact and share their knowledge, they enrich the organization’s collective intelligence. In addition, relevant data and information enhances decision-making, serving as vital building blocks for new knowledge.
Case Study: Underestimating the Competition
In the late 1970s a family owned, high-end patio furniture manufacturer determined they need to build a new factory to improve and stream-line their manufacturing process. A factor in their decision was a belief that it would take several years before a comparable product would be produced in China. The business did not have any significant debt before building the new factory and borrowed heavily to build it. Unfortunately, within 5 years products from China entered the US market at a much lower costs, the manufacturer’s business declined significantly and has struggled to survive ever since. Did the owners not get adequate information? Did they rely too much on their own opinions? Were they overconfident? Seeking out a wide diversity of views, including those different than your own, prior to making an important decision may prevent a serious error.
Sources of Knowledge can be Valued Differently According to Function
Something else to take some care around is that different functions or departments in an organization that have different roles may well value different sources of knowledge. The engineering department may put more value on scientific studies and on the technology or processes that help them design and build things. The marketing department may put more value on communication, focus groups and relationship processes. The finance department may put more value on spreadsheets and numbers. Thus, what is real to a different department or team is constructed or co-constructed within their historical processes and contexts. Additionally, these processes may have their own forms, rules and sources of knowledge.
Exercise: Facts, Opinions, Beliefs
• Think about a time when you changed your mind about something. What was it that changed your mind? Was it a fact? Someone else’s opinion? A new insight into your own beliefs?
• Considering how long it takes to change your own mind about something, what is your expectation of having someone else change their mind about a strongly held belief or opinion? What are the ways you try to get someone to change their mind or seek out new sources of knowledge? Are there other strategies you could employ?
The Rise in Prominence of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the landscape on how individuals and organizations can access information and knowledge. It has the potential to revolutionize lifestyles and corporate practices. AI can rapidly process vast amounts of data, analyze patterns, and generate insights. From intelligent virtual assistants to advanced data analytics tools, AI technologies like ChatGPT, Gemini, Gen AI, Perplexity, Microsoft CoPilot and new platforms developing almost every day are reshaping knowledge management and decision-making.
For individuals, AI-powered platforms provide instant access to a wealth of information and expertise on virtually any topic. Interacting with AI systems, individuals pose questions, seek advice, and receive personalized recommendations tailored to their preferences and needs. This access to on-demand knowledge empowers individuals to learn and expand their skills more efficiently, fostering a culture of continuous learning and professional development.
AI-driven knowledge platforms can expose individuals to diverse perspectives, help them discover new ideas, and engage in meaningful discussions with virtual mentors and peers. As individuals interact with AI, they acquire information and have the potential to refine their cognitive abilities and problem-solving skills, if they want to be intentional about this.
For organizations, AI represents a powerful tool for knowledge management and decision support. By leveraging AI technologies, organizations can capture, organize, and analyze vast amounts of data from various sources, including internal documents, customer interactions, and market trends. AI-powered analytics platforms can uncover hidden patterns, correlations, and trends within the data, enabling organizations to make data-driven decisions and anticipate future opportunities and challenges.
AI-driven virtual assistants and chatbots can enhance knowledge sharing and collaboration within organizations. Employees can access relevant information, expertise, and resources in real-time, regardless of their location or time zone. AI-powered recommendation systems can match individuals with relevant content, projects, and colleagues based on their skills, interests, and past interactions, fostering cross-functional collaboration and innovation.
However, the widespread adoption of AI in knowledge management also presents challenges and considerations for individuals and organizations. Privacy concerns, ethical implications, and biases in AI algorithms must be carefully addressed to ensure responsible and equitable use of AI technologies. Additionally, organizations must invest in training and upskilling initiatives to help employees adapt to AI-driven workflows and leverage AI tools effectively.
Case Study: Disruptive for Sure… But How Liberating Could AI Also Be? Hosted Conversations
Artificial Intelligence or AI has been impacting our work and lives for decades now without us paying too much attention. Think Alexa, Siri, social media algorithms, map applications, or any internet search you have ever done. More recently, though, the topic has taken on a whole new life force. This is, in part, due to the widespread accessibility of programs like ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot and Gemini. Reports have been surfacing of application in a broad range of sectors from health care to architecture to the arts. Big tech CEOs have issued warnings about the disruptive nature of these new AI applications, calling for regulation – which is a first, and what caught the attention of Worldview Intelligence.
Research was done experimenting with prompts, causing amazement, then alarm, then becoming intrigued, by what can be created instantaneously. What impact will this have on our worldviews, our individual and collective knowledge and our Workplace Cultures?
Worldview Intelligence invited people from around the world to explore the question of how disruptive these new generations of AI might be on our worldviews – globally, professionally and personally? The conversations were thought-provoking for all participants. There are so many unknowns as we look to the future. But what do we know?
Concerns about privacy were identified, but it was also noted how much our phones, laptops, TVs and interactive assistants already know about us and our movements. Yes, we should be aware of the risks to how information and, thus our worldviews, can be manipulated. There is wariness about who the “human in the loop” is, who is feeding information and prompts into AI software and what their motives are. However, each and every one of us is also a “human in the loop” and we do have agency. If information can be used to narrow our worldviews, as individuals, we can be cognizant of requesting information to broaden our information sources, perspectives and worldviews.
The more interesting conversations centered how much obsolescence we have experienced, literally over centuries, and how liberating AI can be, when we embrace it.
It is definitely possible that AI will make some jobs obsolete. However, we have been experiencing obsolescence in one form or another since before the most rudimentary plows were created, to the printing press, the steam engine, cars, computers, ATMs, cell phones and more. Roles and tasks change and adapt into something new or different. The jobs most at risk have just one task that could be replicated by technology. Most other roles are more likely to be redefined, with some having a broader scope. When ATMs were introduced, it was widely thought that it would result in job loss for bank tellers. What happened was that the role of tellers expanded to dealing with more complex situations requiring assistance from a person, like cashier’s checks, record keeping accuracy, marketing of bank services, or fraud detection instead of the more routine deposits or withdrawals.
The most expansive conversation was around how liberating new technologies can be. A woman, Ms. Petersen, participating in the calls, who has been a quadriplegic for over 25 years due to an accident, described how excited she is for the possibilities that new technologies offer to her. ChatGPT prompts for her to draft letters is faster than voice recognition can do. A force to be reckoned with, she, is one of the inspirations behind a mobility project in Grand Rapids, MN. This pilot project has four self-driving vehicles in the community and it is part of a research project to assess the impact. For Ms. Petersen, it means she no longer has to wait for someone to drive her somewhere, she can access one of the self-driving cars through the app. What could this mean for others who don’t want to, can’t or can no longer drive, like seniors? What increased levels of independence will it offer people?
And, as many in our conversations noted, what proportion of our time can be freed up from tasks like house cleaning or mowing the lawn, that can be redirected to whatever essence it is that makes us uniquely human?
“Community” Knowledge
Your personal and professional communities are key sources of knowledge. Knowledge is not just what you believe, but what social groups or communities believe that resonates for you. Knowledge comes from what a community of people agrees to be true. This “community” could be the marketing or engineering departments or top management. This means knowledge, or knowing, or what professional or social groups hold to be real or true, is fundamentally a social process. It can be seen as the common or shared property and experience of a group or culture.
This points to how important it is to pay attention to how you, your team or department responds to the valued knowledge of another team or department. Do you value your own team’s perspective and knowledge more? Do you disparage another team because their focus or valued sources of information are different? Valuing a different way of thinking, recognizing it contributes to more comprehensive information and knowledge, is a useful practice. A Strategic Workplace Culture recognizes the importance of acquiring this diversity of knowledge.
When building trust and relationship within your workplace, how you interact individually and collectively with other individuals, your colleagues, teams, departments or the organization influences trust and relationship within your team. This is the question of whether your practices are aligned with your worldviews and whether those practices allow for honoring different sources of knowledge and information. There is no long-term benefit or strategic advantage to building or promoting your team and its intelligence gathering at the expense of other teams, or other locations if your organization is geographically spread out.
The Wisdom in the Room
A form of knowledge that leaders can draw on is the “wisdom in the room”. Here, the underlying assumptions are that the people who are closest to the problems or the issues have the most knowledge of them, people support what they help create and, by providing good processes and methods, the collective knowledge and wisdom can be made visible to be acted upon. The greater the diversity of perspectives in the room, made visible, the greater the depth of wisdom. This is touched upon in a number of the upcoming Workshops and particularly in Workshop 4 on 1 + 1 = 3 on healthy teams and Workshop 11 on Engaging Everyone.
Exercise: Reflection Questions
Course Manual 11: Dimensions’ Interdependence
The last six Chapters have largely discussed and described each of the Six Dimensions individually, both for personal application and in considering what it means for leading teams. As you are already aware, the Dimensions are also interdependent. While each Dimension offers a specific window through which to reflect on your worldview and that of others, this Chapter looks at the power of working with several of the Dimensions at the same time.
The Interdependence of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework
The Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework provides a structure to understand worldviews by identifying and exploring discrete elements, or Dimensions, that make up a worldview. The same six Dimensions can be used to reflect on your own worldview, that of others, a community, or a team, organization, or a Strategic Workplace Culture, simply through re-orienting the reflection or the questions used in the inquiry.
Looking at the Dimensions individually provides a way of organizing your thinking. On the one hand, the Framework is pretty straightforward and completely makes sense and, on the other hand, most likely you have not thought about organizing your thinking or reflections in this way or through this kind of structure. So, not only is it straightforward, it is also innovative and unique. It opens possibilities of new approaches to the leadership skills of self-awareness and self-discovery. Additionally, it is a key to understanding the worldviews of others, how they perceive their Workplace Culture and the actual Workplace Culture itself.
Windows of Insight
Examining the six Dimensions individually ensures the opportunity to understand each one in some depth. They each offer ways to invite and engage in healthy relationships and productive and strategic conversations, whether one-on-one or collectively. If an issue centers on one Dimension, a deep dive into that Dimension can be particularly constructive. For example, if there are unresolved issues in your team or organizational culture due to unaddressed historical influences then a deep dive into history can make hidden patterns visible. If workplace practices are not aligned with the organization’s stated worldviews, looking at what practices are helpful and which ones are counter-productive is a useful exercise.
However, it is rare that one Dimension stands alone at the heart of a workplace issue. Usually, a multiple of Dimensions are at work when differing worldviews show up. An experience (reality or history) may impact a value someone or a department holds. Or a person’s practices may have developed because of the daily reality they experience in their department. In that case, looking at practices could include a historical perspective: what was the origin of the practices? Translated into a current inquiry: do they still serve a purpose? Practices could also be explored from a values perspective: are they still aligned with the organization’s values and worldview?
Exercise: An Exploration of Departmental Worldviews
• What is our department’s reality? What does it include?
• What influences have shaped our department’s worldview? What from our history is influencing how we are seeing our reality?
• How does our department decide how to choose our future? What criteria do we use? What perspectives are we holding about the future that are influencing our reality and worldview?
• What values and/or moral standards influence our department and our work?
• In what ways do our department’s practices reflect our reality? Our values? Our perspectives on the future?
• What informs our department’s knowledge/knowledge creation?
• What, if anything, have we discovered about this department we didn’t know before?
• What do we want other departments to know about us?
• What practices do we have that support us in our work and in sustaining a Strategic Workplace Culture? What practice might we adopt?
• How will we sustain our intentions to work together differently?
Creating Alignment Across Worldviews
When thinking about how to create a new, preferred Workplace Culture or how to align worldviews in an organization, the answer resides within the Framework – it is in the practices for sure as you consider which ones are aligned with the Workplace Culture Vision and what practices are needed to bridge gaps between current reality and future reality. Answers can be in understanding the valued sources of knowledge.
The Framework provides a way to create coherence across worldviews that differ in some or all the Dimensions, by examining and comparing them to find points of connection and points of difference. In this way, the Framework is an instrument for examining and understanding the current Workplace Culture, taking action on issues of relevance, or to focus on building trust and relationship and for aligning worldviews to gain support and momentum for building a Strategic Workplace Culture.
The History Dimension provides an easy way to invite people into an exploration of their personal worldview. It often quickly becomes clear that history is interdependent with reality. We begin to see how significant influences in our history have brought us to the reality we experience daily, weekly, monthly or annually. The practices we use to live our daily lives are clearly a component of reality even as it is its own Dimension. What we value, our core commitments, also influences our reality and arise from our history.
The sources of knowledge we trust can significantly influence or reinforce our belief systems (reality) or our core values or commitments, especially as we continually seek to validate our own experiences and sense of identity. One Dimension may provide a window into understanding or awareness and, once in, the interdependence becomes clear. Starting with an exploration of each Dimension and then diving into the interrelationships of the various Dimensions allows for a more thorough consideration of our worldviews.
Case Study: Using Three of the Dimensions to Create Alignment within a Governance Structure
A provincial professional association was changing its approach to how it regulated the profession, moving from a top-down heavy-handed discipline-oriented approach to a more collaborative and learning oriented approach. Rather than immediately resorting to discipline, the association researched early warning indicators of when one of its members might run into problems and designed interventions to provide education, mentoring and support prior to an escalation of the issue.
The leaders in the organization knew that adopting a new approach to regulation meant that everyone in the organization, including the Board of Governors, needed to be onboard.
In addition to the comprehensive body of knowledge and research the organization had drawn upon to create the new model of regulation, they understood the need to align perspectives or worldviews so the Board could govern effectively in a new model of regulation. The Association decided that an important step in the process would be to bring Board and senior staff together to share perspective and opinions on the process to be sure implementation moved smoothly forward with clear support.
As the session began, Board members were asked what their worldview of governance was and how that might have changed since before they were elected to the Board. This demonstrated to them that the knowledge, including assumptions and beliefs they may have carried about the effectiveness or relevance of the board, that they had drawn from before serving on the board was limited compared to the knowledge gained once they began their governance term. This demonstrated the changing nature of beliefs, expansion of worldviews, and, since their views had already changed, it was possible to continue this journey.
Then the Board was invited into reflections on the future, reality and practices Dimensions to illuminate ideas about what to do next in support of the new regulatory environment. They were asked and invited into conversation, one question at a time, the following:
* What will the future of the regulation of our profession look like and how will we support and encourage this future?
* What will our governance reality look like, what limiting beliefs do we need to let go of, to embrace this new reality?
* What practices do we have, or do we need to adopt, to move toward this future?
They identified several immediate actions that they could take as a Board, including the need to change the nature of their meeting agendas to be more future oriented.
Current Reality Implications for Considerations of the Future
As you consider the interdependencies of the Dimensions, it can help you understand more about another person’s or a group’s situation and what they might be experiencing. For someone who has more than adequate means to fund their day-to-day living (reality), they have more capacity to plan for near and far futures. They may have the ability to contribute to savings or a retirement fund as they also plan family vacations for the next winter or summer.
For someone who is just able to meet their daily needs, their stress levels are likely to be higher, planning any kind of outing might be a luxury or saving money for a child’s future education might be out of reach. It impacts the way they think about life and about imagining into the future.
For someone who is living in poverty, it can be struggle to get through each day and future planning might be whether they have the ability to put food on the table tomorrow. People with less means often have to make choices that those with more means have no comprehension of.
A study of young, at-risk youth living in dangerous conditions found that many don’t see living past 20. They don’t see a long-term future for themselves. This view leads to day-to-day actions that contribute to the likelihood of them not living past 20. Their view becomes self-fulfilling.
Being able to reflect on the various circumstances and worldview experiences of the people who work on your team or in your organization may offer insights into what a Strategic Workplace Culture means or could offer everyone from the lowest paid employee to the highest paid executive. The higher up in an organization a person is, the less likely they are to truly consider what the experience of someone on the front lines or in the secretarial pool is like. A true Strategic Workplace Culture can offer a similar quality of workplace experience for everyone.
An example of this is to create the opportunity for employees to be fully engaged, to seek out input and feedback from them on a regular basis, to invite contributions and to offer some degree of input into decisions that directly impact their own work. This might include things like offering more flexible work schedules, a hybrid structure or adding more sick days so people do not feel the stress of going to work when they are not well.
What Is Normal? – Mental Models of Neurodiversity
More and more these days, conversations about neurodiversity are normalizing the spectrum of experiences people have in life and at work. Neurodiversity is used to explain the unique ways our brains work. While everyone’s brain overall develops similarly, no two brains function just alike. Being neurodivergent means having a brain that works differently from the average or “neurotypical” person. People with neurodiversity were, and often still are, left on their own to figure out how to fit in and compensate for challenges in their own way. With the recognition that neurodiversity is part of a spectrum of experiences, more and more employers are adjusting practices to be more inclusive, creating systems of support rather than isolating individuals to their own coping mechanisms.
This is, again, where exploring the interdependencies of the Six Dimensions
Framework can contribute to a better understanding of how to be supportive and inclusive of people dealing with the challenges of neurodiversity. What is the reality of someone who is neurodiverse? What does this mean for them at home and work? What are some of the past challenges or experiences that have shaped their worldview? What can be learned by exploring those challenges, especially of how well or not they were addressed or supported by others? What practices can be adopted or adapted to ensure their future with the organization is a more rewarding experience for them? What sources of knowledge can be consulted to become educated in providing better acknowledgement, support and practices?
Worldview Explorations are Vibrant and Dynamic
The intersections between the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions can occur in many ways. The loss of a child can impact someone’s daily experience as the memory of the child is ever present and certain events can be a painful reminder. A daily struggle to pay bills can leave a person pessimistic about the future. A desire to continue working in an economic sector that has employed generations of a family or community (mining, agriculture, fishing or forestry, as examples) can cause a person to see few other options for future employment and perhaps contribute to resistance to career changes.
A person may believe in fairness or equitable treatment for all co-workers regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation and yet the reality is that a glass ceiling exists that works against this goal because organizational practices do not support equitable treatment. There could be a belief that success should be measured by the results of the entire team, but the work environment is highly competitive where advancement is based solely on individual achievement and team or group success is not rewarded by the formal or informal practices of the organization.
As our workplaces, neighborhoods, schools and social lives expand, we encounter more and more diversity in life experiences and outlooks. These life experiences are usually multi-dimensional. Being able to work with the six Dimensions interdependently and to explore their interrelationships helps us discover the full richness of the people we work with, our neighbors and communities. It can take us to new and unexpected explorations, and it can help us build a Strategic Workplace Culture as we discover new vibrancy in the people around us.
Exercise: Dimensions Interdependence Reflection Questions
Course Manual 12: Framework Practicality
The beauty of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework is its simplicity and functionality within its coherent structure that informs our thinking. The Framework is versatile and practical. The same Six Dimensions can be used to explore the worldview of a team, department, organization, community or Workplace Culture, simply with a different orientation for the research questions. And it can be used to compare historical, current and future worldviews. The Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework is not only academically rigorous, it is also highly adaptable and intuitive. This Chapter explores both this versatility and practicality, demonstrates how it is connected to Know Thyself and offers exercises to stimulate your thinking about applications.
Adaptability and Intuitiveness of the Worldview Intelligence Framework
During the early years of development of Worldview Intelligence, there were two basic ways programs were created and offered. One was through open registration programs that attracted a wide variety of people, coming from diverse places, organizations and situations. The collective intelligence and co-learning in these groups was rich. The other was in designing client specific programs to address questions or issues the client had identified.
People who have experienced Worldview Intelligence also speak about how intuitive the Framework is – more than most approaches to understanding worldviews they have come across or used in their work. It can be applied without always consciously thinking about all Six Dimensions and can be pulled out in full to examine issues that are stuck, to find new ways to strategize relationship and communication, to make progress on issues that matter. People, departments, organizations, sub-systems do not all have to think alike. In fact, it’s better if they don’t. The worldview exploration helps build bridges between different perspectives by making explicit what is often implicit and inviting in the creative thinking that comes with a diversity of perspectives.
The pandemic brought the necessity to be more creative about application development and delivery through a variety of virtual options. The power of the Framework was consistent, no matter the means of presentation and discussion. This Chapter is an invitation to be creative in imagining the specifics of embedding the Framework and specific practices into your Strategic Workplace Culture.
Scope of Application
As has been explored throughout this Workshop, the first application of the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework is in exploring your own personal and professional worldviews. This is the most obvious connection to Know Thyself. Part of knowing yourself is to also understand what this means in terms of being a member of or leading teams, or being a leader in your organization. In the culture exploration identified in Scope of Application, this generally refers to the local, social and workplace cultures you are part of and other cultures you might want to connect with.
Culture Exploration and Know Thyself
For many people who are part of a dominant culture, identifying aspects or characteristics of the culture is extremely difficult. As has been shared, worldviews operate almost invisibly and this is true for cultural worldviews as well. It can be easier to look at another culture or another society and identify elements of the culture, generally shared by many other people. However, what is identified is often built from stereotypes and is usually a small slice of the richness of any culture. Every culture in the world is a vast weave of the entire spectrum of what makes up a community, society or a country including all professions, the arts and entertainment, infrastructure, architecture and so much more. No one country or culture is entirely the story that immediately comes to mind.
People who are not part of the dominant culture often have a greater awareness of cultural influences – their own and the culture they work and socialize in. Since worldviews are, in part, locally constructed, the geography, architecture, food choices and cooking preparation, music, literature, language and more that arises from place, are all indicators of local and cultural worldviews. Anyone who must navigate between worldviews often has more worldview awareness and agility than those who don’t. For some people, being worldview aware is not a luxury, it can be a life-or-death necessity.
The ways to use the Framework to inform thinking, discovery and strategy is limited only by your imagination. In the evolution of Worldview Intelligence, first there was only an invitation into trying to articulate an individual’s worldview. It was a BIG question. Then, the Six Dimensions Framework was created and for a few years, it was primarily used to inform the design of all types of training programs and consulting strategies. Even without the subsequent models created to illustrate planning, healthy teams, addressing challenging conversations and more – all developed in service to positive and productive outcomes – the Framework invited thinking about current worldviews, how they emerged, what was desired and where the gaps were that needed to be bridged.
There will be all kinds of opportunities to apply this Framework during the Program, to embed it as part of the business process of a Strategic Workplace Culture. The intent of this Chapter is to begin to spark what those explorations and practical applications might be.
Exercise: Cultural Influences on Your Worldview
• What are some elements of reality in your cultural background(s) and how might they be influencing your reality?
• What historical influences have shaped your cultural background(s) and how might they link to some of your own historical influences, especially through family or community?
• How does/do your culture(s) look to the future? Is there a connection to how you look to the future?
• What are some of the values or core commitments that are important aspects of your cultural worldviews?
• Are there practices or rituals that define your cultural background(s) that are also important to you now?
• What knowledge emerges as you have an awareness of the influence of your culture(s) on your worldview?
Social Systems Exploration
The final exploration identified in the graphic of Scope of Exploration is Social Systems. Typically, social systems explorations are in reference to teams, departments, organizations or communities. It is intended to identify systems of influence, relationship and connection. A system is essentially an assembly of elements linked together to produce a whole in which attributes of the elements contribute to the behavior of the whole. An organization can be illustrated or contained within an organization chart. Relationships can be formal and informal and enduring patterns of behaviors and relationship within social systems may be explicit and implicit. A social system cannot be contained in an organization chart but it can be mapped as a network.
Individuals also have social systems, but rarely do we map them. Our social systems also influence and inform our worldviews. In this Chapter, the invitation is to map your own social system to see what you learn about yourself, your relationships and your influence within your system. As human beings we have a tendency to want to simplify things to understand them. Sometimes that is necessary to keep our sanity and, sometimes, in the simplification, we lose important context. Looking to your own social system might offer you new context to who you are as a leader.
Multiple realities exist within the social system, all at the same time, and can be closely tied to the realities, histories and values of individuals and social groups, explicitly or implicitly, and held from one generation to the next unless challenged or changed.
Mapping a Social System or System of Influence
A systems map is a thinking and communication tool. Creating a map reveals the structure of a system of interest, such as your own social system. It is a useful tool for reflecting, gaining new understanding and planning. It can be used to identify where it could be helpful to explore the Six Dimensions of each element of the system. It creates a visual from which new descriptions can emerge and insights can arise.
Exercise: Questions to Reflect on Your Social System
• Who or what is at the center of your social system – you or someone else? Family unit? Some other unit of influence?
• Who are all the important people who are part of your system, personally, professionally or socially?
• What information do you want to gain from illuminating your social system? How can you use the Six Dimensions to gain further understanding?
• What questions could you be exploring related to your social system?
Case Study: Worldview Intelligence Causes You to Think Differently
A long-time diversity trainer participated in a Worldview Intelligence program and she said it changed her. “You don’t just walk away from it and go ‘done with that, what’s next?’ It seeps into your skin and blossoms as you learn how to verbalize it.”
Of her experience in the program she said, “You are in that first question when exploring your history and the next thing you know your perspective is changing. It causes you to think differently, which causes you to act differently.” It doesn’t necessarily happen overnight. You learn the skills and then you practice.
She now asks different questions that help her see and understand where people are at and helps them think about their worldview without needing to ask directly about it. Questions like where are you now? How does that define how you see and experience your workplace? Diversity and inclusion?
When asked why she decided to attend a Worldview Intelligence Program, she said she was intrigued by the idea, even as she was hesitant. “Nobody asks you what your worldview is. It was an opportunity to see what that means. At the same time, you could be afraid of knowing your own worldview.” She said the worldview exploration allows for your own internal view. Knowing your own worldview allows you to center yourself. And when you know where you come from, the core of who you are, that prepares you for whatever else you will encounter, including worldviews very different from your own.
When asked about the lasting impact for her, she took a deep breath and became reflective for a moment. “It is not easy to say – there are no standard words. It’s something you feel. I have a greater belief in myself, more confidence in what I know and I don’t need external validation anymore.” She went on to say, “Anybody who knew me before and sees me now, sees the impact, sees the difference.”
This difference in her makes a difference in her work. She said the biggest difference is in simple things, but things that were not in her conscious awareness before. “I plan work in different ways now.”
Understanding worldviews, where they come from and how they influence communication and relationship means she tunes in differently to what is going on with the people around her. As a result of the program, she offered, “You develop stronger communication and facilitation skills. I have a greater sense of awareness of people, of communities I work for and in – and I’ve been working in community for a long time. I check in around where people are at in their own experience rather than assuming I know. I make suggestions differently now than in the past – in ways that have a greater likelihood of getting through the other person’s filters.”
In the long run, she says that the practices of Worldview Intelligence improve client interactions, inter-office interactions and outcomes in the workplace. In her view, “Business needs to invest in opportunities for staff to understand where they are at. This will make them more open to understanding where others are at and to seeing new ways forward, even on issues that are challenging.”
Illuminate Blind Spots and Identify Key Strategies for Policy Implementation
The Six Dimensions of the Worldview Intelligence Framework provide a sound structure for illuminating blind spots, patterns and trends with respect to implementation of new policies and strategies in your organization. It can reveal barriers that can then provide you and your team with information key to developing approaches to the successful implementation of a Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative.
You might believe that once the Strategic Workplace Culture is in place, your job is done, that everyone in the organization is committed to the new Culture. But looking at the situation through the reality Dimension and what people are experiencing in their day-to-day patterns, you might discover this is not entirely true. You could also look to the customer or client situation for clues. If it is the case that the new reality still does not meet up with the planned future reality or Vision, then you can discern whether something in the Vision needs to evolve or strategies need to be developed to address the blind spot(s).
You could look at measurement systems to see if they are measuring relevant information, ask better or different questions, develop the conversational skill sets needed to address blind spots and the things people don’t want to do. This requires the creation of “safe enough” spaces for frank and honest conversations related to differing personal realities within the organization that invite curiosity and learning versus judgment. This is a Strategic Workplace Culture characteristic and practice.
Under history, you could explore if the new Strategic Workplace Culture was been developed based on a particular worldview. You could look at how policy implementation has been dealt with in the past, especially policies that might have challenged worldviews in the organization. How have the questions the new Strategic Workplace Culture is designed to address been addressed in the past? Is there an assumption that while issues from the past may remain, they can just be let go or dismissed – like they are no longer relevant? Looking at history enables you to identify patterns that might be lingering from historical events, decisions or situations. It helps you to recognize if healing may be a necessary part of the Strategic Workplace Culture and to then take appropriate actions.
A look through the Dimension of future may prompt questions like: How will a new Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative challenge the worldviews or identity in or across the organization? Do our employees know where the organization is headed? Do they see the new Strategic Workplace Culture as contributing to a stronger and better future for the organization? Through this exploration, worldview and identity challenges can be identified so they can be addressed. Leaders can also ensure the story of the future – the Strategic Workplace Culture – the organization is moving towards is consistent and clear to those who work in the organization.
Values conflicts might be interfering with establishing the new Strategic Workplace Culture or causing overt or covert resistance. Are personal and organizational values in enough alignment to go forward? Are similar or consistent personal beliefs or values held across the organization regarding the new Strategic Workplace Culture? Are they responding to changes in social attitudes and mores? To address a potential lack of coherence, values can be made explicit and discussed regularly. This would include articulating what they look like in practice, the development of accountability mechanisms to bring values to life and the creation of safe enough spaces for frank, open, honest conversations related to possible conflicts between personal and organizational values or whatever else holds energy for people.
Will the current practices of the organization support the new Strategic Workplace Culture? What rewards systems are in place and what are they rewarding? Are the Strategic Workplace Culture practices influenced or shaped by the dominant social system? Will they be readily adaptable to any social/cultural system? It might be helpful to check or test the Strategic Workplace Culture practices (policies and procedures) against a global range of social/cultural systems that could be researched on the subject matter the Strategic Workplace Culture is intended to address, to determine the efficacy of it. Answers to these and similar questions about practices can help identify any new practices that need to be encouraged (or old practices that need to be let go of) to support the new Strategic Workplace Culture. It will also be important to identify the skills required to develop powerful questions to encourage and support these conversations.
Finally, when it comes to knowledge, what is being measured and does this provide answers that are useful and helpful? Is qualitative evidence or measurement substantive enough? Talking to employees can be a way to measure success, if done well and consistently.
Identify the key things that will demonstrate the impact of the Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative and implement both quantitative and qualitative measurements. Create safe enough spaces for frank, open conversations between executives, HR staff and the whole organization, that invite curiosity and learning versus judgment. Then have the conversations needed to continue to advance implementation of the Strategic Workplace Culture.
The Invitation to Leadership and Application
This Chapter shared a number of ways that Worldview Intelligence and the Six Dimensions Framework are practical and adaptable. This has been illustrated with examples and exercises and which you will see more of in the Project Studies for this next month.
The invitation is for you to begin to imagine possible uses in exploring worldviews, applying it to activities like planning, team development and, of course, in your leadership role in creating a Strategic Workplace Culture. You can’t break it and you can’t do it wrong. The more versatile you are with it, the more naturally it will be for you to think in terms of worldviews and any or all of the Six Dimensions.
Project Studies
Review of Workshop 1 Project Studies
The Project Studies from Workshop 1: Workplace Culture, focused on three main themes.
The first was on deepening knowledge and understanding of worldviews and Worldview Intelligence in service of understanding more about the current Workplace Culture. This included journaling on what was personally impactful and how this basic understanding of worldviews was creating a window into the worldviews of workplace colleagues, teams, departments or the organization overall and making a list of issues, challenges, or historical patterns that might contribute to challenges in implementing a Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative.
The second theme was to establish base-line measures to be used to track progress of the Workplace Culture Initiative as steps are taken to implement the new related business processes. This includes distributing the Employee Pulse Survey and collecting the responses to provide indicators of where improvement might be needed as well as identifying other baseline measures to track, like sick leave, absenteeism or turnover and recruitment costs.
The third theme was to create and sign a Commitment Pledge and identify and request others whose support is essential to the success of this initiative to also sign it. And, to draft the Vision for your Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative and seek input on the draft.
With respect to the CIDA-W Planning Model, this largely falls into Clarify and Illuminate.
Overview of Workshop 2 Project Studies Themes
The main focus of Workshop 2: Know Thyself, is in using the Worldview Intelligence Six Dimensions Framework to learn more about your own worldview, how that relates to your sense of identity, understanding each of the Six Dimensions in more depth, while also exploring the interdependence of the Dimensions and the practicality of the Framework. While focusing on your own leadership and growth, there is also an impetus to reflect on the teams or departments you work with as well as the organizational overall, relating these reflections to your Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative.
With respect to CIDA-W, this is about Worldview Intelligence Leadership and it is also in Illuminating your worldview and growing your self-awareness while becoming more knowledgeable about others’ worldviews, including colleagues, teams and the organization overall.
Project Studies for Workshop 2 is slightly different than all of the other Project Studies in this Program. It is divided into two parts. The first part is to continue the specific focus on Know Thyself by deepening your self-knowledge through reflection and the exercises provided below. The second part is to continue the work on the Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative that was started in the last month and is critical to the successful implementation of the business process for this Initiative. This will continue the work of Clarifying and Illuminating and begin the process of Designing the Initiative, by identifying specific new processes to be initiated.
Tasks in Part 2 include reviewing the draft Vision and comparing it to current reality to identify gaps; reviewing the Employee Pulse Survey results and using the data to inform Initiative choices; reviewing historical patterns that might impact the success of your Initiative; and the identification of options you can choose from or be inspired by to determine the specific projects you will undertake as part of designing your Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative.
Workshop 2 Project Studies – Part 1: Know Thyself
Part 1 of Workshop 2 Project Studies is designed as individual reflections. You may want to do one of these Tasks a week, rather than sit down to do them all at once. You can decide whether you also want to share and discuss the results of your reflections within the team.
In addition to any available online tools you may use to explore your strengths and areas for growth, Part 1 in Project Studies provides additional exercises to further reflect on you as a person and your leadership style, particularly as it relates to Workplace Culture.
Self-Reflection Journaling Exercises
The purpose of these journaling exercise is to encourage you to engage in self-reflection and introspection to deepen your knowledge and awareness of yourself and how your perspectives influence the choices you will make regarding establishing a Strategic Workplace Culture.
Task 1: Future
This task makes a connection from history to future, to help you discover your approach to the future. Complete the following exercise:
Step 1: Reflect on Your Past
Take some time to think about your past experiences and how they have shaped your perspectives on the future. Consider the following questions:
* What major events or turning points have occurred in your life?
* How have you responded to challenges and uncertainties in the past?
* In what ways might your experiences in previous and current workplace environments influence your view of the future?
* What have you learned from your past experiences?
Step 2: Envision Your Ideal Future
Imagine what your ideal future looks like. Consider the following aspects:
* Your personal and professional goals
* Your lifestyle and daily routines
* Your relationships and social connections
* Your sense of purpose and fulfillment
* Your preferred workplace culture
Step 3: Identify Your Approach
Based on your reflections on the past and your vision for the future, reflect on your approach to the future. Consider the following questions:
* Are you generally optimistic, pessimistic, realistic or pragmatic about the future?
* Do you tend to plan and prepare extensively, or do you prefer to take things as they come with minimal planning? What are the results of your approach, for yourself and for those you work with?
* Do you focus more on the short-term or the longer-term when thinking about the future?
* Do you see the future as something to be controlled and shaped, something to be influenced, or as something that is largely out of your control?
* How might your general approach to the future influence the choices you will make regarding establishing a Strategic Workplace Culture?
Step 4: Evaluate Your Approach
Reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of your approach to the future. Consider the following questions:
* How has your approach served you well in the past?
* What challenges or limitations has your approach presented?
* How might you need to adjust or adapt your approach to better navigate the future?
* How do others respond to your approach to the future?
* How does this approach influence your leadership style?
* How does this approach influence your decision-making?
Step 5: Develop a Balanced Approach
Based on your reflections, identify and develop a balanced approach to the future that incorporates both your past experiences and your vision for the future. You may already embody this balanced approach and, if so, this is a matter of illuminating it and becoming more consciously aware of what may be an implicit process for you. Consider the following strategies:
* How might you maintain a sense of optimism and possibility, while also being realistic about potential challenges?
* What does engaging in both short-term and longer-term planning, balancing immediate needs with longer-term goals, look like for you?
* In what ways do you cultivate a sense of agency and control over your future, while also being open or remaining responsive to unexpected events and opportunities?
* How will you remind yourself to regularly review and adjust your approach as your circumstances and priorities change over time?
* Reflect on, and adapt as needed, how your approach impacts your workplace decisions and relationships.
Share any reflections or insights that have emerged for you as you complete this exercise.
Task 2 – Values
My Personal/Professional Values
The purpose of this exercise is for you to identify personal and professional values that are important to you. The exercise generally takes about 30 minutes to complete. You will need a blank page to start and post-it notes.
1) Starting with a blank page, identify 5 people who you admire or respect. They can be people you know or simply know of. They can be real or fictional, living or dead.
2) Beside each person’s name, list the characteristics and/or actions that you admire or respect.
3) As you reflect on the characteristics you identified, imagine what values might underlie these characteristics. It doesn’t matter if you are right or not, it is the imagining that is important here. List as many values as come to mind. There is no limit.
4) Once you have done this for all the people you identified, review the list of values that has emerged. Are there any values that are important to you that are missing from this list? Write down as many as come to mind. Again, there is no limit.
5) Once your list is complete, write each value on a separate post-it note. Lay the post-it notes out in front of you. Once again, add any additional values that you feel are important to you that might be missing.
6) Cluster the post-it notes into like categories. Move the post-its around among each of the clusters until you feel like the clusters are complete. You will likely have between 4 and 6 clusters. For each cluster, identify a word, representing a value, that seems to capture the entire cluster. It might be a word already in the cluster or it might be a new one that emerges as you review the cluster.
7) Make a list of the values ranked in order of importance to you. Begin by taking the values that name a cluster and compare them, beginning with two. Identify which of the two has more energy or more of a pull for you. This is a sense of how it feels, not of how you intellectually think it should be. Don’t think about it – go with your first gut feeling.
The one with more pull goes on the top. Take the next value and compare it with the bottom value. If it has less pull it goes to the bottom. If it has more pull it gets compared with the top value. More pull it goes to the top, less pull it stays where it is. Continue this process until you’ve ranked all of the values, from the one that has the most emotional impact or pull for you at the top to the one that has the least emotional impact or pull for you at the bottom. Trust your instincts.
8) Create a chart with 3 columns. The headings are: Core Values, Complementary Values, Values Statement or Description. Place the values in this chart in order in the first column. List the rest of the cluster under Complementary Values. They help you understand what you mean by the one word you have chosen. It is okay if some of the original values you wrote down don’t fit anywhere. Feel free to discard. As you reflect on the Core Value and the Complementary Values, write a brief statement or description of how the Core Value shows up in your life, how it guides your decision-making and whether it is personal, professional or both. This statement might incorporate some of the words from the cluster of values, but it doesn’t need to or need to incorporate them all. The more succinct you can make the description the more powerful it is likely to be.
Share your values chart and any reflections that have emerged for you to the portal. Reflections might include anything that surprised you, any new insights this offers or any reflections on how your values have guided your decision-making and choices in the past.
Just to note, team and organizational values and exercises will be shared in future Workshops.
Task 3 – Practices
Awareness Leads to Change
The key purpose of this exercise is to simply notice your practices or habits without judgment. Awareness is the first step to making any desired changes. By reflecting on and possibly tracking your habits, you’ll gain insight into your unconscious or unintentional behaviors and thought patterns.
With this awareness, you can start to consciously choose how you want to respond in those moments, rather than defaulting to an automatic habit. Over time, you can replace unhelpful habits with more positive practices.
Step 1: Reflect on Practices or Habits
* What practices or habits do you have that help you stay present, focused, energized or motivated?
* What practices or habits do you have that demotivate you, cause procrastination or are not a good use of your time?
* What practices would you like to adjust, adopt or release to be more motivated, focused, energized and to ensure you use your time wisely? Just to note, wisely does not have to mean more productively, although it could. A wise use of time could be exercise, meditation, time in nature, time reading (including fiction) or time with family and friends.
Step 2: Reflect and Adjust
After 30 days, reflect on how you have incorporated intentional practices. Are they helping you make progress towards your goals? Do you need to adjust or add any new practices? Continuously refine your approach to keep it aligned with your values and priorities.
Share what practices you have decided to be intentional about and how they are making a difference in your day-to-day reality.
Share reflections on your Practices and any adjustments you have made to the portal.
Task 4: Mapping your Social System or System of Influence
As noted in the Course Manuals, we each have social systems, systems of support or of influence. Mapping these systems can provide insights into relationships, motivations, leadership, what’s important to you personally and more. Understanding your social system can help you build trust and relationship and to be more strategic in communication within it. The purpose of this task is to map your social system and reflect on what it reveals to you. It is recommended to read through the exercise to understand the whole of it before beginning with Step 1.
Step 1: Decide if you want to focus on your personal or professional social system or both.
Identify and list the various components – people and units, units being teams, groups, or departments – of your social system(s) that you interact with regularly or that have a strong influence on you, your life or career.
Step 2: Write each person or unit on a separate post-it note.
Step 3: Lay out the post-it notes in a “map” that seems to represent the relationship(s) between the various aspects of your social system? Are they close or further away, more or less impactful, or any other criteria that feels relevant to you?
What or who is in the system you have identified? Are there things or people external to the system? For what reasons are they inside or outside your system?
Step 4: Identify relationships – primary, secondary? Who are you paying attention to? Who is or isn’t paying attention to you? Is there another part of the system you wish was or wasn’t paying attention to you?
Who do you need to impact or influence? Who impacts or influences you? Who wishes they were influenced or impacted by you?
Step 5: Create a legend for your system map, if that is helpful. This could include color, size or directionality of lines and arrows used for identifying significance of relationships. It could include squares, triangles or circles that signify various elements of your map.
Step 6: Transfer your post-it notes onto a large sheet of paper, creating your “map”. Draw relationship lines between the components of the system. Draw boundaries – what’s inside, what’s outside?
Step 7: Once you have your map, reflect on what it reveals to you and any new insights you might have. Use the Six Dimensions Framework as part of this reflection as you look for connecting points, points of difference and points of influence.
Other Reflection Questions
* What have I learned in this entire Workshop about my worldview?
* What surprises me about what I am learning?
* What did I learn that connects with my experiences?
* What does this tell me about my workplace experience?
* What might I put into practice from what I have learned or experienced?
* What initial thoughts do I have about how I might put the above idea(s) into practice?
* Are there learnings from looking at my social systems map that could influence how I approach the design a Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative?
Share an image of your map and your reflections through the portal.
Workshop 2 Project Studies – Part 2: Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative Tasks
Part 2 of Workshop 2 Project Studies, focused on your Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative, is intended to be part of team discussions and decision-making.
Task 5 – Review the Employee Pulse Survey Results
Review and discuss the results of the Employee Pulse Survey. Identify specific questions, issues or opportunities to be addressed, and discuss why you believe addressing these questions, issues or opportunities will contribute to improving Workplace Culture.
Task 6 – The Six Dimensions Framework and Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative Vision Review
Review the draft Vision for your Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative developed during Workshop 1 and the last Project Studies. After reflecting on the Employee Pulse Survey results, apply what you have learned about the Six Dimensions to the Vision and revise or adjust the Vision as makes sense.
Does the Vision take into consideration the daily realities of employees throughout the organization? What changes might you make to ensure that the Vision attends to the differing realities of employees in their roles throughout the organization?
In thinking about the history of your organization and the list of patterns identified in the last Project Studies, does the Vision address any concerns that might be lingering from past events? Does it build on positive past events to create a stronger Workplace Culture?
Does the Vision offer a description of the future Strategic Workplace Culture that is clear and compelling for everyone? Can employees see themselves in that future? Does the Vision for the future include a pathway that is understandable and will lead to achievable outcomes?
Are the values for a Strategic Workplace Culture in the Vision in alignment with current organization values? If there are any proposed changes or additions to company values, are they reflective of company culture? Do the values resonate with stakeholders, particularly with employees and with customers or clients?
Will the Strategic Workplace Culture Initiative require any changes in current company practices? Are there practices that need to be stopped, either those that are part of informal interactions or any that have been incorporated into policies and procedures? Are there new practices to implement? Are these changes clear within the Vision?
In developing the Vision choices were made. Is it clear why the specific choices were made? Will employees understand the information or knowledge behind the choices? Were the choices made based on facts, opinions or some combination of these and other considerations?
Create a chart to do a gap analysis between the future Vision and current reality by looking at each of the Six Dimensions. This analysis may need to be done for each department or for each level of leadership within the organization.
Task 7: Goals and Strategies to Bridge Gaps
Identify the gaps between current reality and the future Vision for each Dimension and create a list of them. For each of these gaps, discuss goals and strategies that will be needed to address the gaps. Make a preliminary or draft list of these goals and strategies to be reviewed in future meetings. Identify who else should be consulted or engaged in the discussion and identification of goals and strategies to bridge gaps.
Task 8: Identify a preliminary list of workplace process(es) or project(s) you might undertake to support your Strategic Workplace Culture Vision.
You can select some ideas from the lists provided below or use those lists to spark your own ideas. The lists include identifying target audiences, form of project and process improvement ideas. You will want to land on ideas that will align with the needs you have identified.
Ideas
Target Audiences for the Project or Initiative
Identify target audiences for each component or project for implementing the Vision you decide to undertake. It could be that under one project, you have multiple target audiences and you may have multiple approaches to reach them.
Target audiences could include:
* Leadership/Senior Executives
* Managers/Supervisors
* Specific Departments
* Team Leaders
* Teams
* Enterprise-Wide/Everyone
Project Form Ideas
Your work could take different forms and may include several forms. Ideas include:
* Education / Learning and Development Programs
* Program implementation – ie, design and implementation of mental health or health and wellness programs
* Engagement and communication processes designed to ensure people have valid input into specific initiatives or the overall direction of the organization.
Process Improvement Ideas
There are many different possible elements to creating and sustaining a Strategic Workplace Culture. From the assessment results, you will have identified areas of focus for your project(s) or process(es). You will want to be thinking from a holistic perspective to determine what thing or combination of things will have the greatest impact.
Ideas include:
* Communication
* Employee Engagement
* Flexible work arrangements
* Opportunities for learning, development, growth
* Health and safety
* DEI / psychological safety
* Improve ability to deal with conflict
* Create green initiatives
* Improve meetings
* Improve team performance – more cohesive and aligned teams
* Create organization wide mental health strategy
* Develop tailored mental health supports
* Institute mandatory health leadership training
* Develop tailored mental health supports
* Prioritize return to work processes
* Provide coverage for therapy
* Host mindfulness Mondays or Wellness Wednesdays’
* Put mental health on the agenda to reduce workplace stigma
* Ergonomic assessments
* Workplace accessibility assessments
Process Implementation
It is important that you have a systematized approach to project management to ensure effective implementation of the initiatives you decide to take on. You may already have an established approach to Project Management that you can use for this purpose. In the event this is not the case, here is a structure you can adapt and adopt for this purpose.
As you move through this program, each Workshop will add information, knowledge and skills to your ability to be successful in the implementation of your Vision. You will want to create a project plan, which maps out project requirements. Project planning typically includes setting project goals, designating project resources, identifying responsibilities and accountabilities, and determining the project schedule.
Your project plan may include a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to help with project execution. While the project plan focuses on every aspect of your project, the WBS is focused on deliverables—breaking them down into sub-deliverables and project tasks. This helps visualize the whole project in simple steps. Because it’s a visual format, your WBS is best viewed as a Gantt chart (or timeline), Kanban board, or calendar—especially if you’re using project management software.
Possible Next Steps
Name the initiative(s).
Identify the following:
1) The need this initiative will be addressing, including your target audiences.
2) The purpose (usually arises from the articulation of need).
3) The outcomes to be met, including defining goals and objectives.
4) The measures you will use to determine if the outcomes are being met.
5) Clarify stakeholders and their roles, including accountabilities.
6) Determine resource requirements for implementation.
7) Align on milestones, deliverables and project dependencies.
8) Outline timelines and schedules.
9) Share the communication plan, incorporating the various stakeholders.
Program Benefits
Human Resources
- High Trust
- Strong Retention
- Effective Recruitment
- Inclusion & Belonging
- Candid Conversations
- Constructive Conflict
- Bridging Differences
- Reduced Absenteeism
- Workplace Wellbeing
- Learning & Growth
Management
- Company Resilience
- Aligned Strategy
- Relational Culture
- Inspired Workforce
- Motivated Employees
- Healthy Teams
- Better Decision-Making
- Productive Meetings
- Increased Responsiveness
- Customer Satisfaction
Management
- Leadership Excellence
- Competitive Advantage
- Worldview Awareness
- Worldview Intelligence
- Neuroscience Knowledge
- Behavioral Knowledge
- Client Satisfaction
- Human Flourishing
- Innovative Thinking
- Strong Collaboration
Client Telephone Conference (CTC)
If you have any questions or if you would like to arrange a Client Telephone Conference (CTC) to discuss this particular Unique Consulting Service Proposition (UCSP) in more detail, please CLICK HERE.