Feature Articles / August-November 2017
Terri O’Fallon, Tom Murray, Geoff Fitch, Kim Barta, and John Kesler
Our goal in this article is to respond to the Critique‘s call for rigor by providing detailed explanations, and also, to provide further answers to questions and misconceptions that may exist about the STAGES model—therefore the article is rather long. For those who want a quick summary of how we respond to the Critique by Cook-Greuter, Wilber, and Sharma, we offer the following overview:
Feature Articles / April-June 2017
Sue L.T. McGregor
The focus of this paper was transdisciplinary collaboration and what is being said in the literature about the challenges of this aspect of transdisciplinarity work. A conceptual literature review revealed four conceptual threads: (a) managing group processes, (b) reflexivity, (c) common learning process, and (d) facilitating integration and synthesis. These challenges mirror the special qualities of transdisciplinary collaboration. Individual and collective diversities deeply affect communications and collaborations during transdisciplinary work. Those engaged in such work can benefit …
Feature Articles / April-June 2017
Gerard Bruitzman
Many of us understand that humanity is living amidst an unprecedented global meta-crisis, marked by many deep, complexly interrelated, and compounding local, national and global crises: educational, ecological, economic, health, moral, political, social, technological, et al.
We tend to respond with a mix of at least three ways to these crises. First, we tend to withdraw from the world’s complexity into more familiar, perhaps more comfortable places. Second, we tend to engage with the world’s complexity on …
Feature Articles / April-June 2017
Otto Laske
If a simple epigram could sum up what is essential to thinking dialectically it should be that it is the art of thinking the coincidence of distinctions and connections. Its essence is fluidity structured around the hard core of the concept of absence and the 1M-4D relations it implicates. – Roy Bhaskar (1993, p. 190)
To my students
Technologically driven culture change, impoverishment of undergraduate and graduate education due to a focus on obtaining employment, and the …
Feature Articles / April-June 2017
Otto Laske
The reader now realizes that in order to understand the world around it, the thinking ego uses thought forms, and that grouped together thought forms make up a living, transformational system that increasingly develops over a person’s life time (“mind”).
Since the mind is a “system”, thought forms never exist in isolation; they are therefore always ready to be deepened, linked, and coordinated.…
Feature Articles / April-June 2017
Otto Laske
Teaching dialectical thinking in a world dominated by logical thinking is a task of tall order. There is apparently no place for such thinking in a world governed by algorithms and formal- logical models.
At the same time, re-vitalizing dialectical thinking is of great value just because it provides a broadening of perspectives, not only for professionals but for …
Feature Articles / August-November 2016
Otto Laske
“The major problems in the world (today) are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” – Gregory Bateson
“Logic merely defines how the world must be if we are to successfully apply certain techniques.” – Roy Bhaskar
This article explains in the most simple terms possible how Roy Bhaskar, in his book on Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993), simultaneously deepened and expanded the notion of adult cognitive development, going far …
Feature Articles / August-November 2016
Jim Ritchie-Dunham and Maureen Metcalf
This paper provides a high-level framework for leaders to refine their approach to increasing team effectiveness by leveraging the concept of “room to roam.” Room to roam looks at five key variables we believe are foundation when looking at leadership successful performance in groups. For people working in groups, we have often seen the group perform to the level of the lowest common denominator.
This article explores the idea that groups can leverage the skills …
Feature Articles / August-November 2016
Eugene Pustoshkin
The idea of “teal organizations” described in Frederick Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations is gaining popularity today both globally and in Russia.
Hundreds of entrepreneurs and business leaders in various companies—from IT to banks—are seeking new forms of self-organizing. They’re tired of the limitations that are inherent in classical hierarchical subdivisions, their low efficiency and effectiveness and incapacity to flexibly adapt to the VUCA world (that is, our world now characterized by volatility, uncertainty, change, ambiguity, fluidity, chaos, instability, …
Feature Articles / August-November 2016
Alexander Malakhov
Translated from Russian by Eugene Pustoshkin
Those philosophers, who disagreed with the new regime but stayed in the country, suffered tragic fate. One characteristic example of that is Pavel Florenskiy (1882–1937), who was known as “the Russian Leonardo da Vinci.” His first book The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, written when he was 26, made him one of the leading thinkers of Russia. He was a man with an encyclopedic scope of knowledge; he received education …