Tag Archives: worldviews

What is it to be Worldview Aware?

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Individuals, organizations and communities all have worldviews. They operate at least 80% unconsciously and impact how individuals, organizations and communities see and interact with the world, events, situations and other people or organizations. Worldviews influence relationships, communication, tension or conflict, decision-making and workplace cultures.

Worldview frame

To be Worldview Aware is to feel, experience or notice that worldview(s) exist, individually, organizationally, in community and across stakeholder groups. It is knowing and understanding more about what is happening in the world, locally, regionally and globally, by being or becoming aware of worldviews – first your own and then, with curiosity and compassion, someone else’s.

An individual,  organization and/or community that is worldview aware offers greater leadership potential and creativity that arises from the interaction of multiple worldviews, leading more often to innovative ideas or solutions and more diverse, welcoming, inclusive (work) places, more creative problem solving, planning and strategy development.

With some of our most entrenched issues and challenges in today’s world and the growing visibility of some of these issues growing (racism, discrimination, sexism, police violence as a few examples), Worldview Intelligence™ and becoming Worldview Aware may help us discover together pathways that do not currently exist. Letting go of what we know to discover what wants and needs to happen.

You can follow the conversation at our Linked In group and or our Facebook group.

Worldview Intelligence

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As our work with worldview continues, Jerry Nagel and I, and other friends and colleagues we are evolving this work with, have been reflecting on what it means to be worldview aware, wondering if awareness is enough. We imagine it is a step, albeit an important one. Awareness in and of itself can be expansive, turning judgment or assumption into generosity and curiosity. And then what? What does it take to create the transformative spaces we have been witnessing with this work? It takes practices, skills and a wee bit of courage too. In was in the spirit of this wondering that the term Worldview Intelligence arose along with the curiosity of what it means; generating the working definitions that follow.

Worldview frame

Worldview Intelligence

  • The ability to learn or understand worldview(s), to be worldview aware
  • Development of skills that offer ways to address differing worldview situations, invite multiple worldviews
  • Creating opportunity and circumstances to use skills, knowledge and awareness to move from differences to progress, for yourself, your organization or community

Worldview Awareness

  • Feeling, experiencing or noticing that worldview(s) exist, individually, organizationally, in community and across stakeholder groups
  • Knowing and understanding more about what is happening in the world around you by being or becoming worldview aware

Having just wrapped up a two day workshop in Minnesota on Worldview Intelligence, a significant thread of conversation was application. How do we take what we are learning and experiencing and bring it to life in personal practice and in the way we approach our work, in the practices of our organizations? Transforming differences into progress.

worldview awareness day panoramicWe have built and are prototyping a number of frameworks that help us and workshop participants see intervention and application points. The exercises invite skill building – on the spot and afterwards in the work. The response has been thoughtful and transformative as people are seeing when and how to apply what they are learning and understanding that the quality of the messenger is as important as the message – maybe even more so when the messenger embodies the qualities and practices of worldview intelligence.

We have been working with worldview for a few years now, in the Art of Hosting trainings we have been delivering and other venues. What we learned there showed us the need for deeper dives into worldview and the identification and development of skills and intelligence that can impact even our most challenging situations. We will share what we are learning as we go and as we have time to digest the depth of experience created that invites people to show up in the fullness of their humanity – for some, the first time they have ever felt so fully invited.

Worldview Awareness as a Transformative Process

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Worldview frameWorldview awareness is the most transformative experience Jerry Nagel, I and the colleagues we work with in Nova Scotia, Minnesota and elsewhere have witnessed so far for inviting diverse perspectives into a conversation or a process – around race, power and privilege (diversity/equity), political differences, silos in organizations or for community engagement.  We have witnessed people finding their way into conversations previously inaccessible because no one had language that engages the conversations in this degree of thoughtfulness, reflection and curiosity, instead of with defensiveness, dismissiveness, rationalizations or judgments.

Conversations previously stuck open up because the language of worldview and worldview awareness offers alternative ways for people to ask about how welcoming, open or inclusive they may be, or their organizational culture might be. In one situation, with one of my colleagues in this work, a dialogue that was needing to happen for many years in her organization opened up because someone was now able to ask, “Do we have an issue with worldview here?” The response, which was a surprise to the person making the inquiry, was, “Yes.” My colleague had been ready to have the conversation for a long time without a entry way into it that would be expansive rather than debative. She understood the power of strategically waiting for the right timing to emerge.

The transformative impact we have been witnessing for years now, in our Art of Hosting trainings and other speaking opportunities, through the introduction of a worldview framework and then inquiry through a world cafe or reflective listening has inspired the development of the Worldview Awareness curriculum for personal, organizational and community engagement, identifying and exploring worldview awareness patterns, practices and strategies. The impact continues to be powerful as shared, for instance, in the reflections on our experience in Nova Scotia during the one day introduction to the Transformative Power of Worldview Awareness attended by seasoned diversity practitioners and change agents.

Individual worldview awareness invites each person into reflection about their own worldview, what has influenced the construction of their worldview, how it impacts their communication and relationships as well as how they see the world. This internal reflection, guided by curiosity, then generates curiosity about other people and the evolution of their worldview. In and of itself, this can create “safe enough” space for people to share more of who they are. In one AoH training in Grand Rapids,MN at the end of a World Cafe on Worldview, a young Native American man stood up and shared he felt able to speak more and more openly about his Worldview thanks to the collective exploration we were in and the Worldview teach or framework that invited the inquiry.

The idea that organizations also have worldviews is often a moment of insight and inspiration for participants in this exploration. To be thoughtful and intentional about organizational worldview practices and patterns invites the opportunity to think about policy development and employee recruitment and retention in different and more comprehensive ways. It provides a means to explore alignment of stated organization Worldview with its practices and offers strategies on how to invite and host a multiplicity of worldviews inside the organization which ultimately makes the organization more successful on most indicators.

Community engagement, when done well, invites a multiplicity of viewpoints and perspectives – or worldviews – into the conversation or public meeting. Most community engagement is still done in traditional town hall style – with a panel of experts making presentations and answering questions from the few community members who happen to make it to the scarce microphones placed on the floor of the meeting room. Engagement with constituents needs to be heartfelt and meaningful, not just the opportunity to check off a box that says we consulted.

tug of war rope pixels

Worldview Awareness curriculum, combined with strong engagement or dialogic processes, provides ideas and strategies on how to invite the multiplicity of voices into a process that strengthens the power of engagement and of outcomes, while creating more welcoming and inclusive environments. Worldview Awareness invites the full complexity of a situation and of issues, ensures that people with different viewpoints and sometimes contradictory interests exchange worldviews and often charts unknown territory. This leads to practical outcomes that might not have been achieved otherwise and that can more easily be implemented because all stakeholders involved experience a higher degree of commitment and ownership. The result is better decisions and more sustainable actions (solutions).

One of our dreams is to offer these workshops (tailored of course) to all the places grappling with how to create more inclusive, generative workplaces or communities by accessing new lenses for deciphering the increasing complexity impacting work environments and communities. Worldview awareness offers organizations committed to a diverse workforce the opportunity to engage those they serve, internally and externally, in more generative, compassionate ways in service of the outcomes we all want to achieve.

worldview awareness day panoramic

Understanding Worldview and How It Impacts Us As Hosts – guest blogger Jerry Nagel

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authored by Jerry Nagel (originally published at Growing Hosting Artistry on January 6, 2014)

Each of us has a worldview and a personal story about how we perceive reality. Our worldview combines the cultural and personal beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, values, and ideas we hold to form maps or models of reality. Our worldviews come from our collective experiences in society – from our parents and friends, the books we read and movies we watch, the music we listen to, our schools and churches. We then interpret these experiences into an individual worldview.  (Jenkins, 2006; Schlitz et al, 2011)

World view eye

In practice, we use our worldviews, without necessarily being conscious of it, to construct complex conceptual frameworks in order to organize our beliefs about who we are and about the world we live in. (Schlitz et al, 2011) These maps or models help us explain how we view the world and why we act as we do in it.

Our experiences within the contexts we live in, be they religious, geographic, or cultural, all contribute to how we interpret reality.  Often this vision of reality is not fully articulated in our conscious awareness. In fact it could be so deeply internalized that we don’t question where it comes from. As practitioners and hosts of the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter this is an invitation into personal inquiry.  Understanding our own worldview grows our capacity to host others better.  Especially because our worldviews influence every aspect of our lives – what we think about, how we act, what assumptions we make about others, what motivates us, what we consider to be the good, the moral and the true. It gives coherence to our lives. It is the channel through which we interpret reality as we see it.

Worldviews are an individual phenomenon and a group phenomenon. (Jenkins, 2006) Everything we hold to be true is found in community. A community is not just a geographic or placed-based clustering of people living together as a village, town, city or nation. A community can also be a discipline in science, a faith community, a community of practitioners of a type of music, art or sport or a community of practitioners of the Art of Hosting; and these communities are part of a world of “multiple simultaneously existing local realities” (Hosking, 2011). These local constructs or realities are primarily constructed through language based processes such as the written word, art, music, dance, speaking, symbols, sign, etc. (Hosking, 2011). Thus, it is through ‘language’ that we represent our worldviews and it might be through language that we will begin to understand another’s worldview.

Worldviews are not necessarily or always fixed. Individual and community/cultural worldviews often shift or change. These changes can be quite small and hardly noticed at first, but eventually have a transformative impact.

Worldviews can also change quite significantly as evidenced by many changes in the past century resulting from scientific advances (flight, Internet, space travel, atomic energy, etc.). Some shifts can be so transformative (or converting) that people change religions or physical characteristics. So, while worldviews are locally constructed, they can shift based upon changes in local or global constructs as well as individual or collective experiences. On a personal level, these types of changes often manifest in some form of spiritual experience that impacts a person’s view of self in the world (Schlitz, Vieten, & Amorok, 2007).  In effect, we have the ability to change our worldviews with awareness, consciousness and intentionality.

If our worldviews are mainly locally constructed, then we could ask, “What consequences do these local, cultural worldviews have for our ability to work together?” – an inquiry relevant to Growing Hosting Artistry. One answer is that they can create barriers to understanding and finding common ground for working together. Which raises questions of “What to do about it?” and “How can we avoid collisions of worldviews and instead come together in ways that build understanding and respect and allow each of us to hold on to that which is most important?”

The invitation, individually and in our hosting work, is to be in inquiry, to be curious; to be nonjudgmental; to approach hosting from a stance of not knowing; to practice generosity; to value good conversations and recognize that good conversations can lead to wise action; to remember that the practice is the work and to remember that many world views can exist in the same place when we step out of either-or thinking into the welcoming of many different perspectives in the same space and time, celebrating difference rather than insisting on sameness. Growing our hosting artistry on the individual and collective levels creates more invitational space for ourselves and for others to show up in the fullness of who we each and all are.

Jenkins, O.B. (2006) Worldview Perspectives, http://orvillejenkins.com

Schlitz, M., Vieten, C., & Amorok, T. (2007) Living Deeply: The Art & Science of Transformation in Everyday Life. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.

Schlitz, M., Vieten, C., Miller, E., Homer, K., Peterson, K., & Erickson-Freeman, K. (2011) The Worldview Literacy Project: Exploring New capacities for the 21st Century Student. Institute of Noetic Sciences, Petaluma, California.

Hosking, D. M. (2011) Telling Tales of Relations: Appreciating Relational Constructionism, Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht, Netherlands.