Are our worldviews holding us back, individually and corporately, from making the world a better place?
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
I love it when I am listening to someone and, all of a sudden, a lightbulb goes off in my head. Something clicks, and I see the world differently. It happened to me recently when Ruth Wilkinson shared how she used PAS 808 to drive and frame conversations about worldviews. I realised that if we want to change the world (and I think we do), we need to delve more deeply into our individual paradigms about how it works.
Understanding the importance of worldviews
Our worldviews (and how we see ourselves in that context) affect our behaviours, and thereby the behaviours of our organisations, which, in turn, have brought the planet and its people to where we are today. Conversations about recycling, carbon footprints, and inequality are important, even existential. But the biggest existential question—“Why am I here?”—is all too often assumed, unresolved, and taken for granted.
So I wondered, how would I begin to engage people in such a conversation?
A framework for exploring worldviews and their implications
This led me to develop a kind of maturity model, based on how individuals might see themselves in relation to the world around them, and how this might translate into organisational behaviour and future implications. For this model, I drew upon concepts of progressive stages, influenced by models such as those proposed by Wilber, Kegan, Maslow, and, of course, the many people I have met throughout my life.
The idea of such a model is to give people the opportunity for self-reflection and, through discussion, to gain new insights, recalibrate their thinking, and inspire themselves and others to aspire toward growth. It provides a vocabulary and a framework by which people can gain new perspectives on their thinking and its implications, and work with others to make adjustments.
But why?
Purpose driven | worldview driven
My thinking is that for change—including ecological and humanitarian change—to be sustainable, these behaviours must be rooted in an accurate narrative within ourselves: of who we are, who we want to be, and why. By reflecting in this way about who we are and how we are, we have a better basis for thinking about how our organisations should operate and how we might want to change them. It’s about change at the level of who we are rather than simply what we do—but one will follow the other.
So, I would like to share the model with you. The abridged model can be found on the right, but if you would like a fuller set of descriptions, the complete model (about twice as long) can be downloaded via this link.
Using the model
This model is designed not as a judgment but as a tool for reflection. Where do you and your organisation sit on this spectrum? What drives your decision-making, and how might your worldview be influencing the way you approach responsibility?
I know that many in business may feel that the higher stages—Committed Altruism and Selfless Dedication—are out of reach. But there are organisations operating at these levels already. They don’t always call themselves businesses, but they are purpose-driven, profitable, and making real change. And because they exist, I wanted to ensure they were included in the model.
There may be others reading this who are right now asking, “This is all very well, but how does this increase my profits?” But that very question may be part of the problem. If we’re so focused only on the short-term, profit-driven mindset, we are missing the bigger picture: how aligning with broader social and environmental goals leads to sustainable, meaningful success.
Next steps
I hope that many of you will use the model to reflect, even for just a moment, on what implications this may have for you, your business, and what you might do differently in the future. If this is you, I would love to hear your feedback in the comments below. And, if you would like to continue the conversation, please keep in mind that I have developed a half-day workshop for leadership teams to explore these questions. There is still funding available for it to be delivered at no cost — just ask.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Relevant Link: Purpose Prototyping Workshop
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Imagine you are facing a major challenge! Perhaps an unexpected deficit, a market issue, a crisis, or a huge new opportunity? But it is important – and it demands a cross-functional team to tackle it effectively. How do you select the team members? What criteria do you use?
The issue lies in how organizations perceive these problems and challenges. They typically view them through a narrow lens, focusing on restoring or improving performance, be it revenue, margin, sales, efficiency, savings, reputation, or customer satisfaction. They see them almost entirely through the lens of the diagram on the right: We have a problem (opportunity); we need a project, a task-force, a meeting; we have to secure our future performance; who do we need to make that happen?
It’s crucial to understand that these projects and meetings don’t just shape the outcome; they also shape the individuals involved – while the people work on the problem, the problem works on the people. In this way, they contribute to both enhancing performance and nurturing potential. The diagram on the left illustrates this concept.
Key within this is maintaining the ‘four essentials of success’ at a functional level. These ‘four essentials’ are basic things that make the difference between success and failure for any group (whether remote or physical). They are reflected in the following questions:
In between these two extremes lies a whole raft of proven tools and best practices – both complete processes, and bits of process – which equip the facilitator to shape the flow of the discussion to a meaningful outcome. Some of the tools are largely auditory, such as clean language and appreciative enquiry. And, some are largely visual, such as matrices and templates.
However, often the issue is beyond the scope of intuitive self-correction by individuals or the group. In this case you may need to explicitly interrupt what is happening.
We feel a bit under the microscope of dispassionate (even unfriendly) eyes. And we cannot drop the ball. Perhaps doing so has real consequences for our career, or our job security, or our reputation and influence.
To avoid this, we need to take a good look at how our organisations, and the people within them, respond to change. And then we need to create a practice zone environment in which it is easier and less threatening for people to engage with change:
And whereas a healthy team can inspire and amplify everyone’s efforts, an unhealthy team can do entirely the opposite. And in doing so, it can create disabling levels of anxiety and depression. We were all built for relationship, and when we are denied the opportunity to ‘belong’ in this way it can have harmful effects on us. It can strip us of enthusiasm, self-belief, confidence, mental wellbeing, even hope.
Oftentimes they are the result of unresolved 
And the shift in our thinking makes it much more likely that we will tend toward the closed dialogue responses on the red side of the diagram above.
There is overwhelming anecdotal evidence that people see meetings as an obstacle rather than an enabler. All too often, and for too many people, meetings seem (and perhaps have become) a distraction to simply getting on with their work.
In Engineering, ‘stress’ is usually caused by something wanting to be in two places at once. ‘Strain’, incidentally, is what results from this – it gets stretched, it suffers ‘fatigue’, it breaks – all very anthropomorphic.
It is therefore a bit of a cruel irony that being under stress is often the biggest barrier to being creative.
But if we can break out of ‘being driven’ for just a short while. Perhaps by planning in some time to be creative within our meetings. To stop for a moment and think about alternative ideas. For example by having a regular point in each day, or even week, to exercise our creative faculties. How might our working lives be different?
It won’t happen all at once. Like all of our abilities, creativity takes practice. But if we make the choice, the practice will come, and our creative muscles will develop.
The problem is that our heads were not built to handle all of this stuff in this way. And the more we rely on our heads to do so, the more likely we are to forget important connections, and make mistakes, and find we have to rethink things – which creates further stress. Or worse still, we ignore those mistakes, and create problems for people ‘down the chain’. This creates further stress for them, and is the main cause of silo behaviours.
In the past, things were reasonably stable, and strategies could be cascaded down from the top of the organisation. Jobs remained fairly static, and people could pretty much get on with them year on year in the same way. The key connections the organisation required were largely integrated into routines and habit.
Much of the routine in people’s roles will be automated with bots and AI. Which is good, because that will give them more time to spend on thinking through the bits that aren’t routine. The increasing level of internal requests, and product/service changes. The technology that is evolving with each update. The special projects where they need someone with your experience. The requests for new ideas. The new agile ways of working. The scrums and self-managed work groups.
Because now change is happening so fast, they cannot cope with making all of the decisions from the top. There are too many. And it takes too long to cascade them down. People need to see the opportunities for themselves. They need to make their own decisions. They need to respond, and adapt, and fit in to fast changing configurations.
So, since the early 1960s, Engineers have been devising design tools to handle all of that complexity for them. To structure complexity, and enable them to then focus on specific subsets within that. In this way, the overall system of connections can be complex. But the application of human thinking and creativity can be simplified. The design tool enables the engineer to work at different levels of abstraction. The structure of the tool breaks down complexity, but maintains the relationships. It keeps all of the connections as context and simplifies (decouples) the problems within it.
Organisations have long tended to be performance-obsessed. The financial markets have set a paradigm where profits grow in every cycle. And they expect changes in leadership when they don’t. This is exacerbated by media reporting, which publicly humiliates leaders who fall short in some way.
In a learning culture, failure is expected. If everything you do is successful, you are clearly not pushing the envelope hard enough. Thriving organisations need creativity and ambition. And these inevitably generate failures.
These things give us arguments to keep anxiety at bay, and to lift us away from depression. In this way, they give us a resilience to cope with more stressful situations than might be possible without them.
less attention to those things that cannot be explained in those terms. As a result, we have abandoned the concept of ‘spirituality’ to more superstitious perspectives. And we have lost sight of its true potential to balance materialistic and rational dominance. Sadly it is no longer a term that can easily be used without prejudice or misunderstanding.
All of a sudden things like hope, love, loyalty, character, centredness, integrity, trust are back on the business agenda. And we are just about reaching the point where we can re-appropriate the term ‘spirituality’ to mean something which reflects the impact and potential of all of those things. Which is just as well, because if we were to attempt to tackle what is coming without them, we would all have serious mental health issues. Spirit is key to stress resilience at work.
In the West, workplace stress and problems with mental health at work now accounts for over half of all lost time.
Not only is the general trend getting worse, but the causes of stress and poor mental health at work are also increasing. Faster change, greater competition, more complexity, longer exposure, increased uncertainty.
Because the fact is, that these stresses and the risk of mental illness is also affecting us. In many ways the impact of change is having its greatest influence on the leadership. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we too are increasingly busy. More and more, we are handling complex and ambiguous situations. Many of us are feeling it a struggle to keep up, and are unable to find time to ourselves.
So what are the causes of stress for your organisation?
Unsurprisingly, these events are connected with fundamental human needs for security, affection and control. Three things that are echoed in Maslow’s hierachy of needs.
It also ties in with what we need to be successful as we cope with the demands and opportunities of our work. The things we need to rebuild our mental health:
What happens in this ‘internal space’ holds the key to how people handle stress. It also determines the extent to which that has repercussions for the mental health of their colleagues and the overall system.
In fact, it is rare to encounter an organisation which is wholly red or wholly green in this. That said, given the relative business and people benefit of the green descriptions over the red ones, there is always merit in actively seeking to become more green.
Do people know the extent to which meetings within their organisation have a positive or negative influence on the factors in this stress map? Most executives would not have any data on the proportion of meetings which fell into each category. Or whether there was any meaningful patterns within that. This, in itself, is part of the problem.
All extrapolations of how work will change over the coming decade highlight the extent to which routine will be automated, and people’s roles will be inherently about change. As a result, levels of collaboration will continue to increase. And continuous learning will become the key business skill for those who will thrive in this emerging future of work.
Our interviewing approach allows people to feel understood and respected in their current views. But it builds from there in tapping into their imagination to identify what sort of future would inspire them and their commitment.
In this way, the interview process begins to open up people’s thinking at a very personal level, and to get them to think about possibilities and potential beyond their everyday mindset. And it makes them curious, for how their answers compare with those of their colleagues. And also about what might emerge from the visioning workshop itself.
Moving from individual positions to embrace and support a collective vision of a common purpose, is a journey. It is a journey in which commitment needs to be built and preserved and reconciled as the collective will emerges and flourishes. And key to achieving that it that the process is both transparent and scrupulously fair.
Ideally, if we design the workshop perfectly, the process of the workshop will flow naturally and intuitively. It will seem to provide the natural next step at precisely the right moment. And people will not even realise they are following a process. Most of the time, a well designed workshop will feel that way. But there will still be little bumps in the road. And some interventions just need to be tuned and timed to what is happening in the moment. That is where facilitation comes in.
Pursuing an adventurous shared vision is a learning experience. 12 months in, the people who started off on the adventure, are not the same people you now meet. They have grown in ability, confidence and understanding. The perspectives they had 12 months earlier have evolved. New insights, and collaborative experiences have stretched the way that they think and the potential they see around them. And they are coming to discover that what they thought was 70% right was actually only 50% right, but that is okay because they have only had time to cover 30% of the ground.
But when we see a world around us which is struggling. And we see evil go unchecked and unpunished. The things we value are being lost. And it all seems to be heading in the wrong direction. What then happens to our hope?
And for those of us that lead or influence organisations, we have to ask ourselves, what are we doing to increase hope? Where are our people placing their hope? And what is the role of our organisation in inspiring and channeling that hope? How do we and our organisation become creators of hope?
What is needed is what we call adventurous vision. A creative expansion of the perspective of the organisation and the people within it. A shared picture of a future that matters, and which creates meaning for all involved in it. Something that makes a real difference for the people within the organisation, and the people they interact with outside of it. A pursuit that offers them a sense of pride in the difference they will make – what they truly, confidently, HOPE to achieve.
The two most important things in creating adventurous visions are conversation, and asking the questions ‘Why?’ and ‘What if …?’.
History? Really?
Intuition is becoming more and more important as the world get more complex. And the time to respond gets ever shorter. It is increasingly difficult for rational decision making to take account of all the variables. Furthermore, those variables often change before the decision is complete.
Purpose centricity reflects business’s response to the search for meaning. This trend can be seen in the growth of businesses which see profit as a means to serve, rather than service as a means to profit. And in the shift toward recruits who seek meaningful roles over highly-remunerated ones. The result of this increased focus on ‘why?’ will lead to new value chains. Consequently creating business opportunities which inspire people within the organisation. Inspiring a sense of pride, loyalty and belonging in those who work for it. The fruit of this growth in meaning will be mental wellbeing. As a result of increased creativity, greater autonomy and efficiency, and closer customer relationships.
Value co-creation reflects the fruit of closer, more empowered customer relationships. The best of which will continue to evolve from the purely contractual and transactional to a shared partnership for customer success. Advances in technology and digitalisation will enable better, more creative, customer engagement. And supplier staff will increasingly become allies in jointly understanding new opportunities for adding value, and in developing solutions that utilise the resources of both parties to best effect. This creates new possibilities for everybody involved.
Digital Empowerment is a key part of innovation and change. In essence it is about optimising the fast-evolving relationship between human and machine intelligences. Developing each for what they do best. Adapting them to better utilise and empower each other’s potential. For the machine, it is about using AI and code to deliver consistency and routine, and to provide new tools and capabilities to people. For the people, it is about being freed from machine-like drudgery to be creative, build relationships, inspire, dream, care, love, bless. And to stretch and configure the machines in pursuit of this.
Over the last decade, cultural trends, customer expectations, transformation through Cloud technologies and business imperatives have combined to compel more and more businesses to prioritise customer success.
So, what are the key KPI’s that Software providers are having to focus on:
To impact those critical KPI’s, software vendors need a customer success management capability. One that is impacting the success of their customers in using their products. So what does that capability look like?
Investing in having the role of a Customer Success Manager (CSM). Software products are evolving rapidly with new capabilities. The Cloud platform enables delivery of these new features at a much faster rate. Customers need ongoing help to adapt and realize value from these products. Customer value realization is the fundamental reason that keeps customers coming back. The CSM role accelerates the delivery of that value to their customers. The CSM is that deep functional expert with consulting type skills that facilities the customer to success.
by 
But this situation is far from unusual; we might even have been that CEO rushing through the Airport whilst taking important calls. As we try to cope with the increasing levels of change and complexity that attends our roles, we find that so much more is forced into our calendars, and we are getting less and less time to properly understand and think things through.
What sort of person will be needed to replace you to cope with 2025? And will their qualities be the ones that will be most effective in lifting the organisation to the next level? Or will they simply be the qualities that enable them to barely survive relentless onslaught of calls for their attention?
First, we need to call it as it is. We need to be honest about what is happening and its potential implications for us, our people, our organisations, and our values. We need to move beyond the ‘macho’ front that exists, and open up about the downsides of all this. Yes, that requires courage, but we needed courage to get where we are. We have courage. And it is now time to turn it to a different track. To step into the adventure of: What happens if we stand up, and say “This has to stop!”
Much of this change will need to be autonomous, self-directed. In part this is to avoid further overloading established leadership roles. But in bigger part, it will be because we will need to make these changes quickly and with direct understanding of the specific situation. Change leadership becomes everybody’s responsibility.
But how will they make decisions? Will they also get the thinking time necessary?
Providing of course that the higher-level decisions are an exemplar of this approach.
Over time we have developed and collated a wide range of practical resources to support this. We have made these resources freely available to all those seeking to better engage the hearts and minds of their people. And we have developed practical pathways for people to learn how to use them. Starting with easy intuitive tools and techniques, and building to more sophisticated ones. Basically, we have a tool for every situation, and every level of ability. We will provide links to explain these shortly, but first, there is a key point to make.
I suspect you have heard the idea that the future is VUCA – a military acronym coined after 9/11 for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.