emrgnc
proficiency palette
Proficiency is described as skillfulness in the command of fundamentals deriving from practice and familiarity. When we look back over our collections of knowledge and experience over the years, beneath the qualifications to meet others' standards or the accomplishment of others' goals, is always a central theme that defines who we are.
My theme that enables me to do this work is in the synthesis of complexity to create harmony with humanity.
By the completion of my first two degrees I had already learnt the first principles required of a Thinking Facilitator. Being an appalling rote learner, I needed a different approach to remembering the thousands of case studies examined in my Bachelor of Jurisprudence. Each case has a principle. Each principle forms a pattern. Each pattern reoccurs, creating precedents, which become the rules of law. Look for them and they are there. Applying them was then easy. But apparently it wasn't meant to be that clear. In 1987 I graduated from law school with first class honours, accidentally finding myself joint top of my graduating class.
Two years later I was working as a Senior Financial Analyst for the National Companies and Securities Commission supervising the regulation of corporate takeovers and found my aptitude as a Thought Cartographer. One of my first jobs was to analyze the monopoly shareholdings, in what was then Australia's largest corporate merger, mapping and seeing through a web of 160 subsidiaries and their interrelated interests to discover hidden truths.
In 1990 I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to live and work in Java as a foreign investment adviser working on development projects. Being at a meeting place for traditional Javanese conservatism and the enthusiasm of European and American entrepreneurship, I found I had skill in Solution Frameworking, finding ways to mesh cross-cultural complexities to form the first joint ventures in a new era of openness. Learning to speak the language and finding richness in the culture I understood enough to know that in the one society, there can be two completely different worlds.
Combining these skills with a natural series of accomplishments I became an equity partner in a large national legal services firm. Being a very young member of a very old firm, I had to build a practice from nothing. So I was happy to take on those projects that had no precedent, never having been done before, or which were too difficult to solve quickly. Comfortable working with the question and all of the parts of the problem, eventually an elegant solution would always emerge. As an Insight Developer I would see what others did not see, often resolving disputes involving multiple parties, preventing them from disappearing into years of litigation.
Now having worked with over 1000 organizations at critical stages in their journeys, I had seen the best of leadership and management teams come and go. What I noticed was that few organizations reached their potential, instead going in cycles of increase and decline. In 1999 I left my career to complete my Masters Degree in Leadership and Management, focussing on the hidden dynamics of how organizations learn and grow. Completing research into many forms of management and development theory, I began to appreciate the depth of perspective needed to see the complexity of systems to be managed by a Capability Ecologist, and my mind then put all the pieces in the puzzle together.
In 2001 I formed my own organisation, applying and testing in practice the principles of sustainable growth and multi-dimensional management. Choosing to work with outstanding organizations, I was grateful for the opportunity to be their Sustainability Navigator and see their natural emergent paths as they continued to grow, not only learning, but also changing their learning, as their systems also grew in complexity. This allowed me the luxury of volunteering time to enable interesting individuals doing exciting and worthwhile work in non-profit, non-government and emerging community organizations
My work and practice then grew, both in the depth of skill and span of responsibility moving from individuals, to organizations, to communities, to challenges affecting the whole local population. I saw patterns repeated across all strata of society and began extending my research in organizational psychology into systems of evolutionary consciousness. Completing this part of the journey I realized there was a role for me as a Consciousness Evolutionary, a role I was already performing, but until then had no name for.
I went to Canada in 2003 to learn from Dr. Don Beck, and to Melbourne in 2004 to learn from Chris Cowan, two of the few who hold the thread to the insightful work of Dr. Clare Graves. In November 2004 I joined with the first of the Integral Institute's training seminars in Colorado drawing together the depth of the work and insights of Ken Wilber. In April 2006 I attended training with Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter in Sydney.
I then had the opportunity to be one of the inaugural cohort members of the Certificate in Integral Theory course as a component of the Master of Arts Degree in Integral Theory at John F. Kennedy University (San Francisco). There are many others, but the research of these practitioners in particular informs my work.
In any work we do for others we are also doing it for ourselves. The benefit is that in doing this work I have become a Wisdom Liberationist of my own wisdom, and of the wisdom of all with whom I work. To enable others I continue to write and present papers on my research and practice, throwing a few rocks, and watching the ripples bounce back from the edges of the pond
... and so the ripples spread outwards.
Where did the competency names come from?