Alan Gaudet describes his experience with Worldview Intelligence. He notes that it is a resilient, rich framework that offers a depth of analysis that takes you places you wouldn’t get to on your own. It really makes you want to pull out the meaning and it is a validating experience. The framework offers better methods to understand difference. Something meaningful happens between you and someone else when you make connections not otherwise possible.
Apostel Framework
Why the Personal Worldview Intelligence Exploration Matters
What is your worldview and how do you know? What information, beliefs, values, connections does your worldview filter in and filter out? How does it influence what you believe, what you value, what you care about, your relationships, your communication, your life style? Most people do not know the answers to these questions. Most people have never thought about them.
“We think with and through our worldviews but not about them.”
If you haven’t thought about these questions, it is akin to being blindfolded and not able to see what is right in front of you, or having blinders on and not able to see or access what is in the periphery. Lots of irrelevant information gets filtered out and that is very helpful as there is far too much information available to possibly take it all in. The challenge is when relevant, helpful, important, sometimes life changing information is filtered out and you don’t even know it happened, you don’t even know the array of choices that could be in front of you because only one or possibly two present themselves.
Worldview Intelligence is a personal leadership practice and the exploration is foundational to the other categories of exploration available – professional, organization, community, social systems, to name a few. Each time we deliver Worldview Intelligence programming in open enrolment programs or for a client, we ask the question, “What is our starting point?” Unless it is for a keynote or short demo, we come back over and over again to the same answer. The starting point is with the personal exploration. For exactly this reason ~ that people have given little, if any, thought to what their worldviews are and what the impact of them is.
The six dimensions of the Worldview Intelligence framework that we have developed by building from the Apostel framework, provides an elegant structure for this exploration. This often illuminates things for people that seem obvious once they are made visible but otherwise are running in the background ~ 80% of our worldviews operate in our unawareness – impacting us in unconscious ways.
Understanding your own worldviews helps you understand where and how you differ with someone else. The points of difference are often hidden or disguised, looking like something else – a disagreement about facts or a difference in opinion. You can take offence without understanding what it is that has offended you or understanding how to bring curiosity and compassion to another individual, their point of view or a situation.
In a recent Worldview Intelligence program, one of the participants was surprised at how they arrived at compassion for someone with whom they differ. They might not ever agree with that person but imagine how approaching that relationship with compassion changes the whole context for the conversation.
The personal exploration is foundational to the other explorations and it becomes obvious as people begin to imagine how to create the space for multiple worldviews, stories and perspectives to exist in the same space to fuel generative conversations of discovery or new, more comprehensives solutions to issues of mutual concern or interest. To tease out your own worldviews, what you naturally gravitate towards, to understand what is usually dismissed, opens the opportunity to hold yourself in a position of not knowing, of curiosity, of willingness to hear something you disagree with without immediately dismissing it, debating it or trying to normalize it. It changes the conversation and expands the possibilities. And it is an exploration that you can hold open for as long as you need, even for a lifetime, as your own personal leadership practice.
The Rapid Evolution and Growth of Worldview Intelligence
We have been saying, to anyone who will listen, that the work of Worldview Intelligence is rapidly evolving. If you look at what’s been emerging and developing since our first Worldview Intelligence program in Halifax in August of 2013, there is a lot of evidence to support that claim and we will share a few of those stories and examples here.
But first, as we are asked by clients and other interested individuals, what is different or unique about Worldview Intelligence and as we continue to be curious about the quality of conversations people enter into and the revelations which emerge, the most unique contribution Worldview Intelligence brings is the framework of the Six Dimensions of Worldview Intelligence which we came to through Jerry‘s research for his PhD dissertation. This framework, based on the Apostel Framework, enables people to take a step back from whatever the situation is they are involved in, ask different questions and literally get a different view – which then enables them to respond and to strategize differently – whether we are talking personally, professionally or organizationally. And it changes the quality and depth of the conversation – every time.
So, what have we been up to?
We produced a short introductory video on Worldview (thanks and gratitude to Claire Fraser for her excellent work).
There have been exciting developments in practical application in our client work. Over the last few months, Jerry and I have been able to bring Worldview Intelligence to a variety of different client engagements where we have tailored the exploration to very specific client outcomes. Some examples follow.
In the spring, I used Worldview Intelligence with a local client, a sport recreation facility in Nova Scotia, to give them a framework for communicating with each other in new ways.
In July 2015, Jerry and I used it to help the grants department at US based Foundation to collectively explore its organizational worldview, specifically in understanding the interrelationship with the worldview(s) of its various grantee populations.
Working with a professional association in Nova Scotia in September 2015, we created a tailored leadership program for association members in the province where they used Worldview Intelligence to understand their leadership role and opportunity within their profession, the environments they work in and in the larger healthcare sector they are part of. The insights they gained will enable them to approach their working relationships in new ways whether directly in their work environments or with other healthcare providers.
Then Jerry did a day long session with entrepreneurs in South Dakota offering Worldview Intelligence as a way for them to think about themselves, their work and the contexts they find themselves in.
In early October 2015, we worked with a leadership team from a US based healthcare organization. The organization has 30,000 employees in their region and they have been growing quickly, partly through mergers. In their worldview exploration we looked first personally for each person to understand their own worldview and to connect in new ways within the team. Then we used Organizational Worldview Intelligence to think about their work internally and their interaction with other teams. Finally we used the Social Systems Worldview Intelligence exploration to look at their relationships in the various communities they are located in, discovering points of commonality and points of difference or uniqueness to each community that both influences their work and informs impact and enabling a new conversation between the different community sites.
Worldview Intelligence has three categories of exploration: personal, to understand how, as an individual, we each see the world and what has influenced this. A variant of the Personal Worldview Intelligence exploration is a professional exploration – who am I in my professional role? Organizational, for collective understanding of an organization’s worldview and how that impacts how the organization operates and how employees interact internally and externally. This often illuminates gaps or other dynamics that impact organizational performance. Social Systems Worldview Intelligence exploration which is proving useful in understanding the community context that an organization works within, how to engage stakeholders in more meaningful ways and as a way to do an environmental scan and to enter into strategic planning or change management processes.
We have worked with Worldview Intelligence in a variety of cultural settings including in Nova Scotia, in the US and in Europe (with the European Commission in Brussels and with University Exchange/International students and at a university in France). We are headed to Australia in November 2015 to work with a client and to offer a three day open enrolment program there. No matter where we go, the audiences we work with engage in the exploration with receptivity and thoughtfulness, developing a plan of application suited to the environments they find themselves in.
We are developing assessment tools to track the impact of participating in a Worldview Intelligence Program in both the short and longer term. We have developed a solid keynote on Worldview Intelligence and we continue to improve the images and frameworks we are working with. We are writing a book building off of Jerry’s dissertation, adding in hands-on practical application examples we have been privileged to be part of over the last 15 months and hopefully writing in a style that will make it an easily digestible business book. We’ll let you know when it’s available.
An example of a graphic we’ve updated since we started this work.
And, as I said at the outset of this post, we are more than willing to talk to anyone who will listen. Contact us if you want to know more or you want to be an early innovator and adopter with us on this journey.
Worldview Intelligence 