Our understanding is that organizations and the culture that is lived in them significantly define the opportunities that an employee is given to contribute with all his or her possibilities and abilities. Therefore, for us, Committed Leadership is always also a cultural and organizational development task. However, these cultural and organizational conditions are created formally and to a large extent not formally by the managers.

Committed Leadership uses the insights from Spiral Dynamics (Don Beck, Claire Graves), the methodological framework of Ken Wilber’s integral approach and concretizes them for organizations from the perspective of a very highly developed consciousness of the 2nd level of Spiral Dynamics.

Don Beck and Claire Graves have established in extensive scientific research that people (and systems) are continuously evolving in a typical sequence of successive stages of development. These stages of development (typically described with colors in Spiral Dynamics) can be roughly divided into Level 1 and Level 2. The vast majority of human beings and man-made organisations and systems (e.g. nations) are at level 1, where they are at different stages of development. If the individual developmental stages of the first level are already large steps, the developmental step from level 1 to level 2 is particularly large in comparison.

The important difference between level 1 and level 2 is that in level 2 the challenges of the (own inner as well as outer) world are perceived from a completely new perspective through the achieved development of consciousness (universal comprehensive consciousness, sometimes also called transrational consciousness). The perspective of an all-embracing, all-inclusive consciousness in which the individual ego loses much of its importance. And from this new perspective, completely different, previously unknown solutions to these challenges will then become possible.

To ensure that managers, and subsequently the corporate culture, plan, decide and act in the best possible way from this awareness, a company can support them on many levels:

• Careful selection of their managers to bring a lot of understanding / awareness of these key roles into the organisation Careful selection of their managers to bring a lot of understanding / awareness of these key roles into the organisation
• Further development of managers not only in terms of “management skills”, but also in the direction of expanding awareness
• Creation of meeting formats in which managers can at least temporarily adopt the level 2 perspective
• Implementation/application of ‘best practices’, which promote the personal development of both managers and other employees
• Implementation/application of ‘best practices’ that enable employees to contribute to the company with all their skills
• Selective but also continuous training of managers in all the above-mentioned aspects
• Implementation of pilots within the company, who become role models in the company
• Offer individual (integral) coaching for consciousness and personality development

Ideally, the starting point should be a management workshop of at least 3 days, in which a distance is first created to the current professional and private challenges. Through the environment (e.g. near-natural, largely digital non-accessibility), suitable trainers and individual as well as group exercises, managers gradually open up to the changed perspective of consciousness and learn to engage with trans-rational consciousness (“no mind”, “no thinking”). This usually involves a complete reassessment of the personal situation as well as the professional task and, together with the other managers, they are classified and brought together in a plan. This can be done with proven co-working tools. It doesn’t matter whether this common plan involves a new strategy, a new understanding of culture, reacting to a current challenge or simply working together in a team.

Before or after this management workshop, the status of the culture is surveyed in a maturity model. This is then the best starting point for developing the culture and leadership roadmap for the company.