Problem
Workplaces and relationships can reinforce fragmented, “silo” thinking and behaviors. The status quo rules, original thinking is discouraged and disease prevails. As one participant put it at a DesignShop, “The diseases that infect our company around the world are there only because we allow them to be.” Treating symptoms will not cure the illness—it must be attacked in a holistic manner.
Solution
DesignShop participants think and experience in a system of wholeness. This system includes the decision by design process and taking on the entire problem as a whole. Wholeness promotes healthy mindsets from which group genius emerges. The solution arrived at will therefore be more robust and have moved past familiarization and even past buy-in to a healthy ownership. A large enough ownership of what is created at the ASE will ensure its survival.
“All complex things taken together form an unbroken continuum between the extremes of stark clockwork gears and ornate natural wilderness. The hallmark of the industrial age has been its exaltation of mechanical design. The hallmark of the neo-biological civilization is that it returns the designs of its creators towards the organic, again.” –Kevin Kelly, Out of Control
“At the deepest level, I think that we’re witnessing the shift from one age to another. The most universal challenge we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature. I’ve been thinking about this shift for 25 years or more: We need to realize that we’re part of nature, rather than separate from nature.” –Peter Senge, Fast Company #24
