Abstract
This article focuses on the concept of worldviews, arguing that a change in managerial worldviews is the key lever for addressing the social and global challenges facing humanity. We draw from a new synthesis of science and spirituality, with the addition of “other ways of knowing” that go beyond rational-empirical analysis, to suggest that what we call Quantum Worldviews are capable of generating the prosocial and pro-environmental behavior consistent with humanistic management. Using the yin-yang symbol as a metaphor, we suggest that a transformation in consciousness, at the level of the paradigmatic assumptions held by managers about the nature of reality, can be understood through adult development theory. We also go beyond the metaphor to propose a quantum worldview based on a more literal interpretation of quantum science to fundamentally re-conceptualize what it means to be human, drawing on quantum research that suggests ontological wholeness and interdependence of all. Quantum Worldviews can help leaders, and the various systems of which they are a part, transition to a new science-based consciousness - long intuited by indigenous and nonwestern spiritual leaders - of an interconnected and dynamically coherent world. We identify a variety of practices that give managers a direct experience of Oneness, changing who they are at the deepest level of self-concept. Our research suggests that only when using such practices, and in sufficient numbers, will business leaders become agents of world benefit with the collective influence to bring about meaningful solutions to climate change and other wicked problems—in other words, needed system transformation.
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Notes
The double-slit experiment pinpoints the probabilistic and indeterminate nature of quantum mechanical phenomena by demonstrating that light and matter can display characteristics of both waves and particles, the wave-particle duality (Levy 2018; Schaefer 2013).
While classical physics is the science of daily life where objects are separable and subject to forces that push them toward equilibrium, quantum mechanics and associated consciousness research suggest a dynamic world of potentiality in which entangled phenomena exist far from equilibrium. In the latter, mind and matter are two sides of the same coin (hence ‘monism’).
To deny your dignity is to deny mine; or you deny mine because you deny your own.
ECLET is an acronym for the Emergent Cyclical Levels of Existence Theory researched and developed by Clare Graves in the 1950 and 1960 s. His work gave rise to Spiral Dynamics (Beck and Cowan 2005) among other human development frameworks.
From Encylopedia.com, Weltanschauung, translated as worldview: https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/philosophy/philosophy-terms-and-concepts/worldview-philosophy.
A more accurate description of the challenge in changing one’s lenses deeply rooted in the classical reductionist materialist separatist mindset.
This idea is based on the maxim that “You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
The Fathers of the Catholic Church distinguish between theology (theologia) and economy (oikonomia). “Theology” refers to the mystery of God’s inmost life within the Blessed Trinity and “economy” to all the works by which God reveals himself and communicates his life. Through the oikonomia the theologia is revealed to us; but conversely, the theologia illuminates the whole oikonomia. God’s works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works. So it is, analogously, among human persons. A person discloses himself in his actions, and the better we know a person, the better we understand his actions (CCC §236).
Studies include the International Peace Project in the Middle East.Maharishi, the Peace-making Project in Washington DC, and the Invincible America Assembly (IAA) project in Fairfield Iowa.
The formula is that only 1% of the population (if the meditators are TM level), or square root of 1% of the population (if the meditators are TM-Siddha level), is needed to generate collective coherence and counter hostile tendencies for the entire population.
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Laszlo, C., Waddock, S., Maheshwari, A. et al. Quantum Worldviews: How science and spirituality are converging to transform consciousness for meaningful solutions to wicked problems. Humanist Manag J 6, 293–311 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41463-021-00114-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41463-021-00114-0