18. ENCOUNTERING THE
AUTHENTIC WHOLE
WITHIN EACH PART IS ENFOLDED THE WHOLE, SO THAT EACH ELEMENT BECOMES A MICROCOSM OF THE MACROCOSM. IN THIS SENSE, THE INDIVIDUAL STANDS AS AN IMAGE OF A WIDER REALITY, WITH ALL ITS COMPLEX ORDERS.
– David Peat
When I had arrived at Pari, I had not been slated to be among the presenters; but before Lee presented, David and Tahir asked me to be first up on the last day. I was happy to do so because I wanted everyone there who had been so close to Bohm to know how indebted I was for all he had done for me.
I began my remarks by telling the group about my meeting with Bohm and what had happened with the Leadership Forum, with the scenario team I had led at Royal Dutch Shell in London, and with the Alliance Project and Innovation Lab, where we uncovered the U-process. I ended the brief “history” by mentioning the Global Leadership Initiative and the demonstration projects and drew a picture of the U-process as I now understood it, emphasizing the “little doorway” at the bottom of the U and the need for Stage IV facilitators – what I called “the advanced U-process.”
The central point, I told them, is that I knew that none of this would have unfolded this way without Bohm’s generosity of spirit. Here was a complete stranger calling Bohm’s home on the Sunday his new book was announced. Everyone in the room knew how shy and retiring Bohm was. Yet, after just a short few words over the phone, Bohm changed his entire schedule and spent four hours with me the next day. It was an extraordinary act of love, I said – I knew no other word for it. And that single act of love and generosity changed the entire direction of my life, and of countless others. It also reflected the fact that Bohm was living what he was teaching – that there is a divine order to the universe, and that it’s up to us to step into that “cubic centimeter of chance” when it is presented to us.
After I concluded my remarks, there was a stillness in the room. I felt the spirit of Bohm there, and I was filled with gratitude to David and Tahir for making it possible for me to be there and to heal the personal pain of not having flown back to London to be with Bohm after he had reached out to me in that letter.
Andrew was the first to comment. He was interested in the model of the U that I had drawn and how it could be used in organizational settings. After drawing a U model of the Innovation Lab, I told him the story of Gary Wilson’s Los Angeles refinery and of Dave Chapman’s lease-trading company. We talked about how one goes about selecting an organizational team to participate in an Innovation Lab. The guiding principle, I said, was that you choose a true representation of the whole system you intend to shift – a “strategic microcosm” of the whole.
Henri commented that this process aligned completely with the focus of all his work on the philosophy of Goethe’s science. David agreed. As he put it in his book, Synchronicity, “Within each part is enfolded the whole, so that each element becomes a microcosm of the macrocosm. In this sense, the individual stands as an image of a wider reality, with all its complex orders.”
When he reminded me of this at Pari, I said, “Exactly – the whole of the system is expressed or reflected in each person. Therefore, if we select a team that is truly representative of the organization, we have the whole organization in the room. The selection process begins with Deep Structured Dialogues, with the Generon interview team using their intuitive minds, deeply listening, reflecting, and inquiring, while nurturing attitudes of genuine openness and curiosity, and tapping people’s genuine individual and collective aspirations. By diving into the concrete experience of the members of the organization, a picture of the whole begins to emerge. The interview team then reflects deeply together and comes up with its view of the whole system and who the best representatives will be.”
“At a point during this generative interview process,” Henri said, “a dynamic interior movement takes place and an accurate picture of the system becomes apparent.”
Brian Arthur had described precisely the same process, which he used to understand a complex system and determine the best approach for an intervention. In our first encounter with Brian in Palo Alto, he had told us of his experience in Dusseldorf, Germany, as a summer intern with McKinsey & Company while he was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley during the 1960s. He described how his team was taught to understand the current reality of a complex system they were confronting:
They just sat and sat. They didn’t do anything. They just sat and observed and interviewed and observed and thought and went back and observed. It cost plenty to do this, but they were quite patient. This would go on for months until they had what I would now call a complex picture of what was going on – the opposite of what it would be to come in with some cognitive picture and say, “You need to be organized this or that way.” They actually let a picture emerge. This wasn’t lost on me. I would now call this an inductive rationality rather than a deductive rationality. Rather than laying a framework on top, they simply let the framework emerge.
Henri and I had a conversation at lunch in which I told him how much I respected his work on the philosophy of science and the perception of wholeness. He said that at one moment a year or so ago, he had experienced a sudden awareness “out of my heart” that “I am doing this work because of David Bohm – it all comes from Bohm.”