Alia Aurami

 A nexus for integral, next-stage organizations is born

Since Frederic Laloux published his Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next-Stage of Human Consciousness, with foreword by Ken Wilber, the impact of Integral on businesses and other organizations will never be the same. The author seems to have hit a nerve in the Zeitgeist; the number of readers of the book and of websites referencing it is rapidly growing, as are the number of organizations and organizational leaders taking clues from the well-researched book.

From the desire to boost the collective intelligence and impact of this emerging social ecosystem,[1] a new initiative is born: Enlivening Edge: News from Next-Stage Organizations, an online newsletter and a website. They are reporting news and views about the journey of those organizations, and about the various initiatives supporting the organizations, e.g., this wiki, the Reinventing Organizations online conversation platform or the ResponsiveOrg movement.

 Both a newsletter and a magazine

 Enlivening Edge is called a “bimonthly newsletter,” but don’t be fooled by the modest “newsletter” label. The website which stores the content of the emailed newsletter has a rich set of departments making it look more like an online magazine. These departments include features, media, columns, tools and practices, field reports, research, and book reviews.

In the first issue you can find a rare interview with Laloux, especially of interest to innovative leaders, where he is speaking of the personal journey that led him to Reinventing Organizations. The issue has articles reporting on the experience of organizations pursuing various approaches to self-management, and Teal Buzz (juicy snippets from blogs, tweetstreams, online forums, etc.)

It also sports a good selection of annotated videos, columns by George Pór and Matthew Mezey, and field reports on such public gatherings as the ‘Why aren’t organizations shifting’ open-space event in London, and the ‘Building Soulful Organizations’ workshop in Montreal. In addition, under the title “Could Teal Be the New Green?” the Research department of Enlivening Edge presents a summary of three young scholars’ thesis on “Teal Organisations and Strategic Sustainable Development: A promising approach to transition businesses towards sustainability.”

Of particular interest to Integrally-interested leaders, would be Lynne Sedgmore’s article “Chief Executives should heed Laloux’s call.” Quotes and observations by other business and organizational leaders in this next-stage ecosystem are found throughout the issue and website.

The very existence of EE points to the gap between the present conditions in most soulless workplaces that waste our creative potential, which causes massive disengagement, and what we can become in organizations that are re-invented for realizing creative potential. EE’s motives include supporting those engaged in closing that gap.

Who are the creators of Enlivening Edge, and how can you get involved?

 The first issue of the newsletter, and the website supporting it, were a brainchild of George Pór  − then developed by the combined efforts Matthew Kalman Mezey and George, supported by a seed fund from Future Considerations.

Since then, a growing team of inspired volunteers − including myself − joined Pór and Mezey, now working on the second issue. We are not only promoting self-organization through our publications, but also using Teal principles and Holacracy in how we organize our work together. We are discovering the Evolutionary Purpose of our joint undertaking; Roles are being defined; Accountabilities are offered; practices are being started.

 We don’t feel Enlivening Edge belongs to us, but to the emerging global movement of organizations going Teal. So EE is what its readers/contributors make of it. Originally, it is only a structured set of curated news and views from the frontline of evolutionary transformations in organizations. With a little help from all who care about that work, it can also become a vibrant hub of co-learning, co-inspiration and co-creation − a commons of emergent practices and ideas worth improving and propagating. We hope that Enlivening Edge will grow the movement, and with every subsequent issue the newsletter and its website will become more and more “owned” by us all.

We always have more content ideas to write about than capacity to follow up on them, so volunteers to be writers, contributing editors, social reporters, copy editors are always welcome.  And of course, if your organization or initiative is doing some newsworthy Teal work, or if you have any other suggestions for us, do contact EE at george(at)enliveningedge.org.  If you want more ideas, here is a page suggesting ten ways you can get involved right now.

My calling to participate

Why am I involved? I adore the inventive fluidity of this kind of startup situation with highly conscious people, exercising new options for organizing ourselves around world-enhancing purposes, transforming a vision into actual operational systems. This project means that for me and all of us involved − a shared space where our passions and talents can blossom and be honored. We can, as one marker of Teal organizations that Laloux points out, “show up as fully ourselves.”

I specifically get to express my passionate commitment to humanity’s development into shared higher-consciousness, and to explore further the paths leading to it. One of them is boosting collective intelligence in the ecosystem of organizations going Teal, by making that ecosystem more visible to itself. Such opportunities are (so far) rare and precious indeed!

About the Author

Rev. Alia Aurami, Ph.D., is committed to humanity’s potential for living, working, and relating in shared higher consciousness. Thus, as a spiritual ministry, she is helping organizational leaders operationalize a Teal worldview and beyond. She is also a researcher, practitioner, and facilitator of “higher we-spaces.” Her ongoing passion is to co-creatively enhance all the natural intelligences of individuals, groups, and especially of world-changing organizations and businesses, enabling them to achieve their Purposes with fewer hassles and resources, and more joy and impact. Since 2006, she’s extensively written explorations of Second and Third Tier stages in the Integral/Spiral Dynamics framework, especially with application to groups and organizations. Alia also supports Integral City’s work in the world, by serving on its Core Team.

Footnote

[1] “To realize that possibility, the commons (and other social holons) interested in boosting their CI need to develop collective sensing and meaning-making organs and processes. For example: Mahatma Gandhi, discovered and appreciated that one cannot build a social movement without a newspaper that acts as a mirror and a catalyst to its collective consciousness. His visionary genius today, would inspire the creation of socio-semantic web platforms for the commons to grow collaborative problem-solving and co-creation capabilities.” George Pór, Towards a Federated Framework for Self-evolving Educational Experience Design on Massive Scale (SEED-M) http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-822/GP.pdf p. 3