SUSTAIN-ABILITY AND CONNECTING UP THE SPIRIT OF YOUR ORGANISATION
As we enter the 9th and last wave of the Mayan calendar, how will the evolutionary development
challenge unfold in the corporate world and what does this mean for leadership of these times?
Bernard Chanliau and Lorna McDowell, co-directors of Xenergie, have been following the Mayan calendar through their own
business journeys, since travelling to South America in the last 20 years. In the first of a series of articles on “Sustain-Ability and
Connecting up the Spirit of your Organisation” they explore its meaning for corporate leadership.
On the 9th of March 2011, announced by the terrible Japanese tsunami, we entered the last 9th wave also known as
the ‘Universal’ wave of the Mayan calendar (tzolki count). According to ancient Mayan’s , the Cosmos was made up
by ‘Nine Underworlds’, most inherently expressed very powerfully through their biggest pyramids, which you may
have seen if you have had the chance to travel to Central America.
Each ‘Underworld’ cycle carried and developed a special frame of consciousness for the life that it creates and
therefore represents a major ‘wave’ in the unfolding
of Consciousness through Creation as per the
diagram. This last wave is designed to lead the
universe and the human beings to their highest state
of awareness development. For the purpose of this
article we will not dwell too much on this cosmic
pyramid however it is worth to note that this last
framework’s initiation is about transformation. This
ninth cycle of the universe is designed to generate
“unity consciousness” by the end of calendar year, as
oppose to “duality consciousness” which has been so
far dominant in our civilisation. Unity consciousness is
a mental model that perceives how everything is
connected and acts from that place of connection, not
separation. According to what we now know from
studying ancient scripts and humanity’s gradual
developmental growth of understanding over the years about our own history, it was the Yin/Yang-polarity favouring
the left brain half that created human civilization beginning 5,100 years ago.
Dr. Carl J. Calleman, began studying the Mayan calendar with empirical scientific techniques 10+ years ago, and what
he discovered was a schedule of the evolution of consciousness over the last 16.4 billion years. The Mayan calendar
can now be shown to be, not an instrument for tracking the procession of time as we consider it, but as a meter and
the measure of the evolution of consciousness. In other words, it is a set of principles about living in our world,
which required us to evolve in order to understand and live them. Many of these principles and ideas about “the
wave of energetic change” that is now presented to us are replicated in other philosophies and traditions around the
world and as we re-read ancient scripts, including the Bible, new understandings emerge about the meaning of what
was originally intended in this wisdom. The journey to understanding these principles is both personal and collective
and organisations have a major role to play in generating understanding as people live out their beliefs in our daily
work. In the Mayan calendar, each ‘Underworld’ cycle is characterised by a distinct frequency of Creation which is
twenty times higher than that of its predecessor. As much change is happening now every eighteen days as it
happened in (almost) a year and was happening, before 1999, almost every twenty years (previous Galactic and
Planetary waves). Time is not actually getting faster, evolution or the ‘Flow of Creation’ is, meaning a frequency
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increase. Just like sound, the higher the frequency, the higher the pitch and our left brain, linear thinking, will have
no chance of keeping up as the higher pitch the more discomfort to our ears.
Ever wondered why things seem to go faster and faster and you feel overwhelmed? The
pace of change today is accelerating each year and with it brings a degree of complexity
never imagined before as the rate of evolution is increasing by a factor of twenty every
time we shifted to a new ‘wave’ in the Mayan calendar. For example, more than half the
companies that were industry leaders in 1955 were still industry leaders in 1990, but
more than two-thirds of 1990 industry leaders no longer existed by 2004. In the latest
CEO survey from IBM “Capitalising on Complexity” seventy-three percent of UK and
Ireland CEOs expect the level of complexity to grow significantly over the next five years,
but only 50 percent believe they know how to deal with it successfully: “This means CEOs
must shake up their portfolios, business models, old ways of working and long held assumptions”. Have a look at the
video on You Tube, to understand the pace, entitled: The Evolution of Technology and the Human Race (Did You
Know).
How sustainable is this shift? Where are going?
Just reflect on 2011 so far, with the Middle East countries’ uprising, a decade-long or more of standing rulers are
overthrown in Egypt and Tunisia, escalating war in Libya to dethrone Colonel M. Gaddafi (42 years in power), and the
hunting and killing of Osama bin Laden after a near-decade long manhunt, spanning three US presidencies, within
weeks of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history which triggered a 23-foot tsunami that battered Japan's
coast, killing hundreds... Are these cataclysmic or transformative events? Could they confirm the ancient and
historic allusions of major events that will change our world, happening in and around 2012? This is a lot of global
news for the market and investors to digest. However, more importantly, we believe this is evidence of a change of
cosmic consciousness and there is more to come for which leaders need a new set of understandings and tools in
order to be able to make sense of what is happening and lead their people meaningfully through these times For the
first time in history, scientists, theologists and psychologists are converging on their understandings of “the truth”
and how to work with it.
The levels of consciousness in the Mayan Calendar have a striking resemblance with evolutionary psychology - the
evolutionary progression from seed to
mature fruit as our old ways of leading
and thinking are not capable of
encompassing the level of
interdependence and complexity we
face or as Einstein said “We can't solve
problems by using the same kind of
thinking we used when we created
them.”
Social scientists of the last fifty years,
such as the one’s mentioned in the
table opposite, concur that the
development of consciousness of these
times calls for a giant leap from what
they call pre-conventional and
st
nd
conventional (1 tier), to post-conventional (2 tier) and early post-postconventional (3rd tier) ways of meaning
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making. In these models, levels of consciousness represent an ability to
respond effectively to an increased level of change and complexity.
Leaders today need to learn
how to navigate a ship
through 100m waves —
oceans that will never
again be serene — and still
be able to guide their crew
safely from port to port
Most people are in what Kegan called the second order of awareness. This
equates to Beck’s red, blue and somewhat into the orange level of the spiral
and Cook Greuter’s “first tier” of awareness. This may sound confusing as
each author uses a slightly different labelling for what is a very similar set of
definitions. All agree that after the “first tier” as labelled in the above
diagram, that there is a giant leap in approach. The numbers describe a
developmental journey that all humanity shares, but where individuals at any one time, will exhibit different stages
of this development in their observable values and behaviour and which form a key pivot of their learning and
transformation during their lifetime. As Torbert says “Each developmental transformation is like being born again,
and again, and again...”
They imply that some ways of making meaning are not just different than but more complex than other ways. Yet it
is vital to remember that while some people travel the path more quickly than others, development is a process, not
a race. The danger is of course that we can assume the post-conventional levels are somehow higher or better the
previous levels as this belief results in ego-based judgement, which is a conventional value.
However, if we manufacture our order making/meaning every day through our own social conditioning, what
meaning-making capacities are necessary to enable managers to succeed at implementing change? Why is this
important?
One needs to look at the trailblazing impact of these twisting forces of change. Statistical reports on trends to
understand that work related stress, absenteeism, workload, anxiety disorders, obesity, non-productive working
hours, or The World Economic Forum’s Risk Response Network (RRN) where thinkers gather to ponder the problems
of the planet at Davos ....are on the rise.
For example, the latest CIPD employee outlook report published on the 5th of May indicates overall job satisfaction is
at its lowest since the surveys begin in April 2009. The proportion of employees saying they are under excessive
pressure at work has edged up to 42%, compared with 40% for the previous quarter. The proportion of employees
agreeing they achieve the right balance between their work and home lives has fallen slightly to 56%....etc
Not every statistics in this latest CIPD UK survey is all doom and gloom however what is the meaning of all of this in
relation to what we understand about developmental levels?
Why do you have to leave 5 voice-mails or send x emails to get in touch with someone today?
Only 20 percent of us– 1 out of every five – feels fully engaged at work, according to one global study of 90,000
employees across 18 countries. Forty percent of us are actively disengaged. Over 100 studies have now
demonstrated the correlation between employee engagement and business performance.
The meaning making of these models become more interesting once we correlate this with the propositions of many
authors regarding organisational and personal performance. In a recent webinar series entitled, Waking-Up the
Workplace Bill Joiner of Changewise and author of a developmental model and psychometric similar to those
described above, mentioned that only about 10% of the people (at the so-called ‘Catalyst level’ and above) are agile
enough to deal with the evolutionary challenge of complexity and change we’re collectively facing. Managers who
operate at the Catalyst level of agility have a different mindset about what it means to be a leader.
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To be clear, that doesn’t mean the other
90% are incapable of leading their
businesses. However, to truly be able to
deal adequately with the complexity we
face, he states we need a developmental
or agility level (i.e. inner operating
system) that goes beyond the
conventional level of our times because,
in complex, rapidly changing
organisational environments,
conventional leadership over-controls
and under-utilises subordinates.
In their 2005 HBR article, 7
Transformations of Leadership, Torbert
and Rooke describe that the levels of
corporate and individual performance vary according to action logic. Notably, they found that the three types of
leaders associated with below-average corporate performance (Opportunists, Diplomats, and Experts) accounted for
55% of the sample. They were significantly less effective at implementing organisational strategies than the 30% of
the sample who measured as Achievers. Moreover, only the final 15% of managers in the sample (Individualists,
Strategists, and Alchemists) showed the consistent capacity to innovate and to successfully transform their
organisations. Leaders today need to learn how to navigate a ship through 100m waves — oceans that will never
again be serene — and still be able to guide their crew safely from port to port. They must remain highly effective in
an environment of extraordinary, ongoing stress.
We alluded to the difference between one stage and the next as a quantum leap in understanding and perspective.
To give a concrete illustration of how different these stages are, let’s look at what ‘feedback’ means at different
levels. Here is an example from Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter shared in a recent webinar:
While feedback to the lower stages (i.e. conventional) is seen as a personal attack – a way of aggressively criticising
one’s very person – to a higher stage (i.e. post conventional) it is more often seen as a gift. It is an opportunity to see
through one’s own limitations and let go of the old patterns that no longer serve. The two meanings may both refer
to something called ‘feedback’, but the similarities don’t go much further than that.
In our consultancy work, we see this everyday where we engage with conventional “expert-achiever” cultures, which
in some way or another deny self-expression, creativity and are conditioned to a command and control patriarchal
style of leadership, rooted in “fear-of-failure” in order to satisfy the appetite of the shareholders.
This has got them where they are today and this conventional “expert-achiever” single-loop learning organisational
culture was necessary to embed the flavours of the month such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Total
Quality Management (TQM), Enterprise Resource Planning (MRP/ERP), Business Process Reengineering (BPR), ISO9001, Six Sigma...etc
With each respective implementation reassuring the organisation that if they followed the program the bottom-line
would take care of itself. Like most perceived panaceas, each of these programs received a lot of hype, produced a
few success stories but in general, contributed little towards helping companies identify and achieve their full
potential.
Walter Brueggemann (2010), theologian and author of “Journey to the Common Good”, speaks of the dangers of
policy born out of nightmares. He refers to the Biblical reference in Exodus as an ancient memory ingrained in social
behaviour, where the Pharaoh’s nightmare of “organisational failure”, prompted him to create a policy to feed the
poor that robs them of the essentials for them to rebuild their community. Policy born in nightmares seeds or
tightens an anxiety-based culture, causing a gradual death grip on the unfolding of events. Policy born in this way, he
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argues, prevents the possibility of truly acting in the interests of the common good
because people don’t have the time or energy for it. There is much to learn from this.
Obviously as mentioned at the beginning of this article, higher levels aren’t necessarily
suitable, today, for some purposes where strict command and control protocols are
important, such as the military. However, the idea of developmental evolution poses
important questions for the way that we think about such organisations and indeed any
which are concerned with “the public good”. Today, many experience, amongst their
staff, profound dilemmas and questions about their “style” of leadership and how to
“engage” people to understand and interpret “the common good”. Such dilemmas
should not go ignored; they are invitations to enquire further.
The representation of the organisation in the military example is like a machine where
we need to fix a part as if it’s broken, patching a little there and about, with good soldiers obeying the orders. Like a
machine it’s rigid and compartmentalised, where the dominant cognitive model is “to move away from” failure” as
oppose to “move towards hope”, where it avoids disequilibrium because it needs to avoid change and embrace
status-quo. Moving away from failure creates a culture of anxiety and fear, entering the ‘survival zone’ as Tony
Schwartz from the Energy projects describes, where we move reactively – in fight or flight -- when we perceive a
sense of threat or danger.
In such systems, people tend to move towards “absolutes of truth”, where one side is right and the other is wrong.
This in turn, feeds a culture of fear, of scarcity, where events unfold carrying this energy of diminishing returns.
Unfortunately, politicians don’t help us in this regard, engendering competition and debate, rather than deepening
dialogue so that we can develop a greater understanding of all the parts, in order to see the whole and how we are
all complicit within it. The recent events in the Middle East are an example in case, where battles of faith bring
together many truths amidst the survival of one small planet, albeit we think an important one, in the entire
universe.
It is only now through quantum science or and social researchers like Margaret Wheatley, Peter Senge, Ken Wilber
Bruce Reed and Otto Scharmer that we are beginning to understand that organisations are like a living system where
chaos is the critical process by which natural systems renew and revitalize themselves from where visions emerge
due to the interaction of good thinking and good hearts of the people, where we can attain a post-conventional
systems view more suitable for innovation, therefore change.
Helping organisations move towards success, while moving away from problems is the name of the game, not one
against the other, not either/or. As we do this, we discover new meanings of success as we realise just how
connected and inter-reliant we all are. Suddenly, ignoring calls and other avoidances, surface as a leakage of energy
that could be rectified by a simple, respectful, human, conversation. Suddenly, less is more because less is about
mindfulness and the connectedness of us all being part of one living system, not fiefdoms of castles in competition
with each other and fearing annihilation.
This chaordic path is very much part of our work today at Xenergie, the path that walks between chaos and order.
This is what Heifetz et al (2009) refers to as the “productive zone of disequilibrium” – the sustaining of the
discomfort long enough for understandings to emerge.
The steps in our programmes (i.e. world cafe, conversational leadership, team coaching...etc) are intended to create
generative structures, structures that allow our clients to create, without stifling creativity and the emergence of
new ideas and new ways of doing things in order to access post-conventional higher level of consciousnesses. Even
in one-to-one level executive coaching engagements, we help generate discoveries that can unlock progress for the
entire organisation, by “manufacturing” uncertainty that shifts the ‘action logic’ of those we accompany.
We, too, are still learning from our consultancy journey and will continue to do so until we die, to meet our clients or
potential clients where they are today because our work is rooted in post-conventional thinking where we envision
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interdependent, collaborative organisational cultures where conversational leadership and working within a
‘performance zone’ is the norm. Sometimes talking the vision of post-conventional value sets in the language of an
organisation that is more comfortable at a conventional level of meaning making, is not easy. Just like interpreting
and translating foreign languages, mistakes of comprehension are made and the art is to bridge the language and
mental barriers because these hinder the relating and relationships that enable fundamental changes of
understanding to occur that lead to organisational change. .
Information, through conversations, is the source of all the energy that leads to reorganisation and adaptability. If
you block the flow of conversation, then you block the ability and potential for the organisation to adapt to its
environment and to act and react.
Margaret Wheatley (2006) says that when leaders strive for equilibrium by imposing control, they constrict people’s
freedom and inhibit local growth, thereby only succeeding in creating more of the anxiety conditions that threaten
the organisation’s survival. She draws the metaphor of Yellowstone National Park, where human-imposed stability
measures thwarted the natural process of small fires which regularly clean out brush and dead trees, the result was a
“fragile equilibrium completely vulnerable to the cataclysm of fire that destroyed large areas of the park”.
Conclusion: What’s the meaning of all this?
1. Unity Consciousness – acting from a place of connection
Most of the research and models of evolutionary psychology focusing on human consciousness, ego-development, or
‘developmental action logic’, depending on the label from the author, is not
new. What is new is the times in which we now find ourselves, a time
“You are not a human being
prophesised and alluded to in many ancient traditions and by eminent
in search of a spiritual
philosophers of the centuries and collectively referred to as an Age of
experience. You are a
Convergence where a new level of interpreting our world will occur. For our
spiritual being immersed in
studies, we have chosen to follow the Mayan calendar for the past three years,
a human experience.”
and have been impressed by its accuracy. On our journey we embrace and
Teilhard de Chardin
explore other lines of study and enquiry including Christianity, Buddhism,
Taoism and earth-based philosophies such as Shamanism, in order to see the
whole coming together. All converge on an idea of “unity consciousness” which is about seeing that we are all
connected – one planet in one universe and, in the words of John Donne, no man is an island, “every man is a piece
of the Continent, a part of the main”. They also converge on a very similar set of principles for working and leading
at this time, which form the basis of Xenergie’s forthcoming articles, webinar and organisational interventions.
For the sceptical readers amongst you, may we recommend some reading in order for you to confirm or disconfirm
your current beliefs as this paper is not intended to prove the veracity of the Mayan cosmology. If you are interested
in the Mayan Calendar, may we recommend to you the scholars such as Ian Xel Lungold or Carl Johan Calleman
whose groundwork demonstrate major threshold points specified by the calendar and ‘named’ on the Coba stone.
These correspond to major shifts identified by modern scientific research.
Personally, we have certainly felt and had some glimpses of the ‘ninth wave’ through meditation, dreams and in
witnessing everyday occurrences. This wave is leading to a much deeper connection in interpersonal communication
since February 2011, where one looses track of self and time.
2. More difficulty to process information in our familiar ways
As we move forward in time as per the Mayan cosmology, it will be more difficult to process information and make
decisions in our familiar linear-sequential, left brain way. We are sensing this amongst our clients, where everyone is
trying to keep-up with information overload - even with smart phones, life just gets faster and faster and the
primary value exchange between employees and employers is time for money, both of which are in extreme scarcity,
strengthening the afore-mentioned death-grip of diminishing returns all round. The predicted accelerated rate of
change will simply be too fast. Unless we elect to experience the stress of constant overload, we will have to engage
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our intuition and change our mental models in how we think about things in order to unlock new resources to which
we’ve previously been blind on not known how to access.
3. Access to new sense-making and relating resources within ourselves
The ninth wave stimulates “heart-awareness” by accelerating change, such that our capacity for rational deliberation
is overwhelmed and a more intuitive response mode activated. Just like in the book “Mutant Message Down Under”
a fictionalized account of a "walkabout" where the author Morgan explored the Outback with a group of Aborigines
and gains from the use of authentic detail. In Cook-Greuter’s paper “Ego Development Nine Levels of Increasing
Embrace” she talks about how the capacity to draw from and appreciate insights from non-rational sources of
information increases throughout post-conventional development: “As the process of self-awareness deepens and
reasoning becomes further differentiated for Construct-aware individuals, access to intuition, bodily states, feelings,
dreams, archetypal and other transpersonal material increases”. At this time, she continues, the focus on language
and difference diminishes, as other tools and resources of connection strengthen.
Calleman believes that behind these cosmic forces, whose times of activation are described by the Mayan calendar,
is an intelligent plan for the history of humanity that comes from a higher source and has a benevolent intention. The
highest point of energy will be attained on the 28th October 2011.
At Xenergie we believe this evolution will trigger a new way of working that is already waking-up the workplace.
Human beings, and therefore organisations, often need a painful event to change their assumptions for it is indeed
hard to teach old dogs new tricks, after thousands, if not millions, of years so inter-generational teaching that has led
us to where we are today. This evolution, assisted by technology, will increase the amount of enquiry which in turn
will promote change, which in turn will promote double loop learning as an organisational coping mechanism, which
in turn will hopefully promote a more sustainable living system.
References
Beck, D. E. and Cowan, C.C., (1996) Spiral Dynamics, Mastering Values, Leadership and Change. . Chapter 2, Nature of Meme Systems and
Chapter 5, Dynamics of Leadership. Boston; Blackwell Publishing.
Brueggemann, W. (2010). Journey to the Common Good: Chapter 1, Faith, Anxiety and the Practice of Neighbourliness. Kentucky; John Knox
Press.
Calleman, CJ. The frequency increase of the Ninth Wave of the Mayan calendar has thrown the world into the chaos from which the new world
will be born http://www.calleman.com/content/articles/Frequency_increase_Ninth_Wave.htm
Cook-Greuter, S. (1985). Ego Development: Nine Levels of Increasing Embrace. Adapted and expanded from S. Cook-Greuter. A detailed
description of the successive states of ego-development.
Did you Know? The Evolution of Technology and the Human Race. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcSzqm5Whwc
Donne, J (1624). Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Meditation VII in Devotion XVII. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Meditation_VII
Heifetz, Linsky and Grashow (2009), R., Grashow, A., and Linsky, M. (2009), The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Tools and Tactics for Changing
your Organisation and the World. Chapter 2, The Theory Behind the Practice, pages 23, 26 Boston; Cambridge Leadership Associates.
IBM, Capitalising on Complexity: Insights from the CEO study, 2010
Schwartz, Tony: The Power of Full Engagement, Free Press; 1 edition (February 4, 2003)
Scharmer, C. O. (2009), Theory U – Leading from the Future as it Emerges. Chapter 11, Presencing. San Francisco; Berret-Koehler.
Wilber, K. (2006), Integral Spirituality, A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World. Boston, Shambala Publications.
Wheatley, M. Leadership and the New Sciences: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World (2006), Chapter 5: Change, Stability and Renewal: the
Paradoxes of Self-Organizing Systems. San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.
Xel Lungold, Ian: http://www.mayanmajix.com/ian.html
7 Transformations of Leadership, HBR April 2005, David Rooke and William R.Torbert
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