29. CONNECTING TO THE
SOURCE

THE FUTURE HAS AN ANCIENT HEART.
– Carlo Levi

My dialogues with Kaz began in the summer of 2009 in my home in Stowe, Vermont, while Susan Taylor, Kaz, and I were forming plans for the continuation of a partnership he and I had begun fourteen years earlier. These dialogues drew deeply from Kaz’s years of training as a transpersonal psychologist and from his years working with Scott Peck, who had written that Kaz demonstrated “extraordinary creative genius” in forming a state of community while working with businesses in large-group settings. In this work, Kaz was able to promote unitive states of consciousness – the collapse of boundaries Bohm spoke to me about in London and that occur “at the bottom of the U,” leading to profound individual and collective insights and breakthrough solutions.

Kaz and I had coauthored a paper in 1998 with Peter Senge called “Setting the Field: Creating Conditions for Profound Institutional Change” – later known at SoL as “The Field Paper.” The Field Paper, based on all we’d learned about the subject over the past twenty years, was deeply informed by Bohm’s understanding of the way the world works. We had concluded the paper by saying, “We believe this process could represent the beginnings of a major breakthrough for large-scale transformative change, and we sincerely hope that this paper will challenge others to think and explore along similar lines.”

However, what fundamentally distinguishes the approach does not lie in its explicit activities, but in its intent and assumptions, starting with a particular view of reality. We believe that behavior throughout large organizations is influenced by subtle fields of thought and emotion, and that these fields are susceptible to change – indeed, they are continually unfolding. We believe the awareness of such emerging fields lies at the heart of all true leadership. Reality is not fixed but continually in flux. True leadership is the art of working with emerging fields to bring forth new realities.

Though radical in contrast to many contemporary prescriptions for leadership behavior, this view of leadership is not new. Seventy-five years ago, philosopher Martin Buber said, “What is to come will come only when we decide what we are able to will.” Buber went on to make a subtle distinction between two sources of will: our “unfree will that is controlled by things and instincts” and our “grand will.” Human beings cultivate this grand will over their lifetime through developing the capacity – as Buber put it – “He listens to what is emerging from himself, to the course of being in the world; not in order to be supported by it, but in order to bring it to reality as it desires.”

Far from being an abstract ideal, we believe that leaders at all levels can cultivate this listening and that doing so transforms an organization’s capacity to create its future.

Although we were unable to express it with precision then, when we wrote of Buber’s “grand will,” that phrase served as a placeholder until we began to simply refer to “the Source” and to “cultivating the capacity to access the Source.”

During our dialogues, Kaz introduced to me to heuristic discovery, a method of inquiry based on Michael Polanyi’s work, which seeks to create knowledge using reason, intuition, and, significantly, passion. With Dean Brown as his mentor, Kaz had spent years continuing Polanyi’s investigations into the tacit dimension of scientific discovery. Later, Kaz took a family-owned enterprise in Los Angeles from a Stage II organization to an emerging Stage IV company using a process of discovery strikingly similar to the U-process.

Because of these experiences, Kaz was immensely helpful to me as I was confronting the question of how organizations can develop core practices to enable their people at all levels to connect to the Source, enabling superior performance. During these conversations, I told Kaz I was generally aware of Polanyi’s work through my conversations with Ikujiro Nonanka during the Salon in 2000, but that I had never read his books. Kaz recommended three of Polanyi’s books – The Tacit Dimension, Meaning, and Personal Knowledge – and also prepared written memoranda for me on specific topics using material from these books and from his dissertation.

After absorbing this material, I realized that Polanyi’s work was central to the answers I was seeking. It describes the foundation for Nonaka’s process theory of the knowledge-based firm; it is directly aligned with and descriptive of Brian Arthur’s process of advanced decision-making and of solving “the most complex issues” facing any organization; and it corresponds to the advanced version of the U-process that I had been developing.

Of immense importance is Polanyi’s idea that the successful process of knowledge creation explicitly and necessarily rests on its normative nature. That is, as the scientists at Pari, Princeton, and HeartMath asserted, the foundation of the discovery of knowledge that changes the world as we know it indispensably rests on the values, passion, and meaning assigned to the project by the innovators. In our knowledge-based economy, where knowledge is the most important resource, superseding the traditional resources of land, capital, and labor, a deep understanding of this process is vital to any organization.

Polanyi’s intellectual journey was extraordinary in its reach. Long before his books on knowledge creation were written, Polanyi had become well known across the world as an extraordinarily innovative scientist, particularly in physical chemistry. He published his highly acclaimed first paper, on the chemistry of hydrocephalic liquid, when he was only nineteen. After establishing his leading role in the world of the natural sciences, in the late 1940s, he made a shift to focus on the social sciences and wrote a series of influential books on economic, social, and political issues from his chair at Manchester University in the UK.

The third stage of his journey (built on these first two) was to attempt to understand the world – physical as well as mental – through the perspective of knowledge creation, drawing on his personal experience and the ideas and analysis presented by scholars in a wide range of fields over hundreds of years. The three books mentioned above all bear directly on the subject of tacit knowing and were written in the eighth decade of Polanyi’s life.

Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge or tacit knowing were most fully expressed in the 1951–52 Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen, which were published as Personal Knowledge in 1958, and in the 1962 Terry lectures at Yale University, which were published as The Tacit Dimension in 1966. Polanyi regarded the “structure of tacit knowing” as his most important discovery. In Personal Knowledge, he claimed that the human mind is led to discover orders that go far beyond his rational understanding – “his triumph lies precisely in his foreknowledge of a host of yet hidden implications, which his discovery will reveal in later days to other eyes.” He referred to this hidden knowledge as “ineffable knowledge” and as “supernatural knowledge,” which he described as “tiny fragments of the universe embodied in man.” He referred to the process of such innovation as the “actualization of certain potentialities” lying dormant in the universe.

This view of the way the universe and our world unfolds is remarkably aligned with that of David Bohm’s “implicate order,” Brian Arthur’s “access to deeper knowing,” and Bob Jahn and Brenda Dunne’s “ineffable, primordial Source.” The ideas advanced in Polanyi’s lectures were not only far-reaching and important, but also astonishing in that they were published almost twenty years before Alain Aspect’s confirmation of Bell’s nonlocality theory.