Consciousness and capabilities of consciousness are NOT gained or ‘learned’ by training (i. e. practicing with new behaviors that are taught—it has too many non-behavioral aspects) or by lecture (e.g inspirational messages or details speeches that makes one want to be more conscious in engaging in one’s life and living). The capabilities and resulting consciousness are best and most rapidly and deeply gained in a developmental process where they are applied to real life as they are introduced—being applied to arenas of meaningful work that must be considered anyway. The intention is to focus work and the way work is done to be more meaningful, more “value-adding stream” Results focused, and to see that only if we work more consciously as persons can the meaning and the results happen (as measured by those who decide if we stay in business and prosper).
Purpose of Capability of Ordering:
To see the order of the world in which we do business, completely and accurately, and project and interpret possible outcomes based on chosen courses of action
1. Intentional use of systemic frameworks appropriate to a situation:
To be conscious, we have to be observant of the particular frameworks we are thinking and operating within. Peter Senge and his MIT cohorts have spoken and written eloquently about mental models and how they limit the mind. Systemic Frameworks are a means to shifting our mental models and opening up the world we can conceive and create. It is much like changes the glasses and telescope lens we use to see the world. Models give the pattern or example for imitation, even our own repeated imitation of past patterns. The architect in preparing to hand over blueprints, may develop a model for a contractor. We actually architect our own mental patterns or models by following the same patterns of thought and action repeatedly., We become predicable because we are driven by mental models. They tell us how reality it and that becomes how it is.
Frameworks instead offer the opportunity for an architect or designer to change what they routinely think about and how they routinely think about it. Frameworks give a way to evoke new perspectives and thereby form new questions. They are like a skeleton on which lots of different options might be hung. Where the model invokes imitation, a framework evokes reflection on how one is thinking about something so the imbedded mental models become opaque, where they have been invisible and unquestioned. System frameworks offer a system’s thinking technology that provides generic questions applicable to all living systems rather than models that provide specific predigested answers.
Consciousness occurs through the development of capability to utilize, and later to develop, frameworks that enable us to shift our paradigms and perspective of reality and how to join effectively with changing realities. We are always thinking through frameworks that have rigidified as models of reality, rarely with intentional choice, and primary without being complete and whole. Unfortunately these rigid models come to serve as filters to what we are able to think about and conceive of. A shift to use of systemic frameworks that are generic across all thinking processes (most thinking models are content bound—e.g. marketing tools, or manufacturing steps) enable us to reconsider what we think about and how we think about work and working as well as the workers themselves. A familiar example of how people have tried to do this is through the idea of moving from win-lose, to win-win and, with a systems view, we might add win-win-win so that the stakeholders to two people working out a solution also win. A three-term consideration here is more complete than the two terms alone. The entire technology of systemic frameworks shows how this idea is the very, very tip of an iceberg is this regard and that words, which is the most often used attempt to shift thinking, must be augmented with systemic graphic representation in order to have the whole brain be able to shift to guide thinking to be more complete and whole.