CONFESSIONS OF A CORPORATE SHAMAN. Harrison Snow
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change their organizations. Those who don’t have the necessary clarity may use self-deception as a way to defend against overwhelming complexity. If they manage to avoid the temptation to blame others they are still susceptible to the classic dilemma known as the “Abilene Paradox.” Leaders and team members can have the best of intentions, yet go along with something they know is suboptimal because they fall prey to the pressures of group think. The outcome of this thinking runs the risk of being a disaster that serves no one.1
Another version of this paradox is the learned helplessness that manifests as, “We can’t do XYZ because ‘they’ won’t let us.” Externalizing your shortcomings lets you off the hook, but it also means abdicating the role of change agent for that of the helpless victim. Looking within is not easy. The blockages to change are often covered by the shadows of the subconscious. There are parts of yourself that are invisible or unknown by you and others. Lateral thinking can’t see into those shadows. It takes a multilateral tool like an organizational constellation to bring an invisible dynamic to light so it can be attended to and resolved. Freeing up the energy trapped in a psychological blind spot radically scales up a leader’s or even a group’s capacity to manage change, especially if the work environment is hyper-complex and opaque. Any enhancement of self-awareness expands one’s cognitive bandwidth so there is more capacity to process information and turn it into usable knowledge.
Soul Field
When we talk about something that is not seen but holds the space for something essential, words like soul, spirit, or field are often used. When we use those words in relationship to an individual or a group, it often has something to do with that person’s or that group’s essence. The stronger that essence, the more influence it has on the world around it.
Individuals who identify with each other create their own collective field of influence. This group soul or field, in turn, influences the conscious and unconscious behaviors of the individual members.
Much of that influence is shaped by events and people in the past as well as the present. Joining the Boy Scouts or becoming a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang could, over time, dramatically affect your character and actions in drastically different directions.
In 1894 the French sociologist Emile Durkheim introduced the concept of collective consciousness to explain aspects of group behavior. This concept also tells us something about organizational behavior. According to Durkheim, “The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own.”2 This force operates stealth-like under the radar of awareness. Bringing it to awareness enables more choice over how its influence will affect you.
Developing mission statements and their supporting values and norms is one of the standard outcomes of a corporate retreat. Their purpose is to foster positive behaviors. Yet, they seldom change how people interact with each other. The unwritten culture, how people actually behave, is determined by the collective consciousness the members cocreated over time. The different parts of our own personal self all come together in a collective yet unseen whole we call the soul. An organization is similar in that the different parts form a collective gestalt that we could call its soul field. Symptoms of dysfunction emerge when the connections within this field are disrupted.
Oscar Miro-Quesada, a Peruvian shaman and psychologist, captures the essence of the corporate shaman approach in his description of working with “. . . seen and unseen worlds with the intention to heal and restore harmony among people, social institutions and nature.”3 Restoring harmony is the work of the corporate shaman when those institutions are corporations or agencies made of groups that reside in their own self-made world. Many of the components affecting this harmony are hidden below the level of awareness. The shaman accesses those hidden components and helps restore the broken connections that hinder the flow of information between them.
Going Beyond 3D
Not being able to see something does not mean it does not exist. Dark energy and dark matter are invisible to us but they hold our universe together. The soul of a group may not have a material substance, but you can still feel it and see its effect on others. The wise leader will notice and work with that influence instead of ignoring it.
When a group starts to open up on more than the mental level, something happens that is hard to put into words. Something new and different emerges and touches the people in the room. A change takes place in you, and consequently and inevitably a change takes place in others who are part of your world. If reality is cocreated, then when your part of that cocreation is altered, the whole picture shifts. As stated in the beginning of this book, tacit knowledge is what you don’t know you know. If you can access that knowledge, insights become available that lead to new possibilities. Tacit knowledge resides in a field of intelligence below the threshold of awareness. Since all individual consciousness is connected at the subconscious level this knowledge resides in the collective unconsciousness of the group. The collective unconsciousness has also been described as interchangeable with or representative of the zero point field, the morphogenetic field, the unified field, and the big mind, or the knowing field. In this book we will call this place of knowledge and intelligence the knowing field.
It won’t serve our purpose here to attempt to explain how these fields work or even to try to prove they exist. Even Einstein attempted to explain the unified field but did not succeed.
Perhaps that is why he once said, “There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.”
Like Einstein, let’s not worry about proving anything. If unexpected, but often profound, insights arise in that higher plane then that is good enough. The foundations for accessing this knowing field include the following domains:
One metaphor to help you visualize this knowing field is to see the approximately three pounds of gray matter in your head as your computer. Bring online your heart and gut, which also contain millions of neurons, and you create a supercomputer. Establish your online connection to other supercomputers through an invisible field of knowing and you’ve entered the realm of quantum computing. Three pillars that help us utilize this amazing realm are:
So, how do we draw upon these foundations and utilize the pillars in a way that can be operationalized to produce insights and inspire change? An organizational constellation is a highly versatile tool that enables leaders to make sense of situations that challenge them with their complexity and opaqueness. In addition to leadership development and change management, this tool can be applied to many different situations leaders face. Case studies