Big Business and the Great Chain of Being

I figured if I was going to talk about the Great Chain of Being, I'd better draw up some cool diagrams like that chaotic guy is always telling me to. You may have noticed, however, that my diagrammatical skills are tainted by the dubious quality of paradox. In figure 1a, I portray the great chain as soul enveloping mind enveloping life enveloping matter. His C-ness might have put it like this: (soul(mind(life(matter)))). No wait, now that I've taken a better look at how he pulls that trick I see it's completely different. Nevermind though. The point of figure 1a is that matter is transcended and included by life, which is tee-and-ied (yes, T for transcended and I for included) by mind, which is tee-and-ied by soul. And then ultimately, soul is tee-and-ied by Spirit, which is at the same time the paper/bits on which the entire great chain is printed/displayed, being the ultimate ground of reality and all.

Now let's have a look at 1b. This is where the paradox comes in, ‘cause now matter is represented by the largest circle, while soul is represented by the smallest circle, contrary to figure 1a. Please note, however, that paradox really means ‘apparent contradiction'. Hah! It's not really contradictory, because in figure 1a I represent the transcend-and-include aspect of the great chain, while figure 1b represents depth and span. Basically the argument runs like this: since life transcends and includes matter (like molecules tee-and-ie atoms), it has more depth. It is more complex and has a higher level of differentiation and integration. However, since it takes matter to ‘produce' life, there can only ever be less of life than of matter, so as depth increases, span decreases. In the example of the atoms and the molecule, there can only ever be fewer molecules than atoms, as the former tee-and-ie the latter. This is why, in figure 1b, span decreases as depth increases.

With that out of the way, we can proceed to my main argument, which is actually about the evolution of human ways of being in the world, applied loosely to the way they have expressed this in organizing themselves economically. Along the way, it'll become much clearer what I mean by that (I hope).

Over time, ‘we' have evolved from the universe into the solar system into the lithosphere into the hydrosphere into the atmosphere into the biosphere (including the anthroposphere and ‘civilization'), now slowly giving way to Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere. Yes, I am a crude storyteller, but only because this is not the main point of it. For the first time, evolution is now becoming conscious of itself (by means of human reflexivity and awareness, allowing for some level of choice and free will). By exercising our free will, by growing what Stephen Covey calls ‘the space between stimulus and response', we can evolve consciously, in fact embodying evolution. We're pushing the evolutionary envelope, pulling the future into the present moment, which itself includes all of the past - and at the same time we're conscious of this!

This is indeed a very exciting thing, and we're only just getting started. Having become conscious of all this, we can now reflect back on our short spurt of human history and notice some patterns. In doing this, I noticed that what we're conscious of is itself evolving. Our perception, our worldview has evolved, and the ways in which we have expressed them in collective organization have, too. And this is where the great chain re-enters the story. Consider this: the dynamic relational exchange that sustains us has evolved from physical exchange to emotional-relational exchange to mental exchange, and we're increasingly seeing isolated forays into trans-rational exchange. On the individual level, this has happened many times before, but historically, humanity's center of gravity is only now starting to go beyond the level of mental exchange.

One of the most obvious ways in which this development finds expression on a collective basis, is in our economies, in the ways we organize our processes of exchange. As Otto Scharmer, Brian Arthur, Peter Senge and others note in their article Illuminating the Blind Spot: Leadership in the Context of Emerging Worlds, the business environment is shifting from more tangible to more intangible realities. I'd say this is analogous to the development from more gross to more subtle realities, as mapped out in the great chain. Business has long been located in the physical world of product-making. In the noosphere, however, we find that business is increasingly about services, about ideas and sense-making (rather than product-making), about communication and language in a globalized world where everything is connected to everything else, just like Teilhard de Chardin had envisioned (although obviously his vision was not limited to the economic dimension of reality).

That seems to be the world in which we live right now. But even business (or in fact, especially business) is pushing the evolutionary envelope, and I think we're beginning to see the first signs of large-scale, trans-rational exchange on the level of soul. Business is evolving from product-making to sense-making to sensing. Flow, presence and mindfulness are the new competitive advantages. We're going ‘upstream' experientially, from looking at things ‘out there', to noting our relationships to things, to considering our ideas, our thoughts and language (services, the experience economy, the linguistic turn), to becoming aware of the present moment (the ‘inward turn'), the perceptual order that pre-exists the conceptual order (William James). Our eye of contemplation is opening up. Eleanor Rosch speaks of primary knowing. Otto Scharmer is doing incredible work on the U curve. Csikszentmihalyi has been telling us all about flow for quite a while now. And then there's the work of guys like Wilber, the increasing attention for spirituality in the workplace... Isn't it obvious?!

So, Can Big Business Save the World? Hell yeah! Big business is moving ‘upstream' into involutionary potentials, it's evolving consciously, and in fact I suspect it will be the single most important factor (though not the only one) in collectively walking the path of breakthrough, rather than breakdown, and taking yet another big step in the relative realm of Lila, the play of life. And I am deeply, passionately and detachedly dedicated to playing my part. To be continued...