QOL Citizens

How Can I Work for Quality of Life?

Quality of life arises from every way I organize or am organized to do, perform, produce or relate; eg. as city resident, family member, employee, government tax payer, auto driver, energy consumer, and waste generator.

Ken Wilber's work identifies the social threads that affect the quality of my life as shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Social Threads

Key Social Threads	Detailed Social Threads
Roles	division of labor
Social Relationships	marriage, friendship, kinship, work
Civil Organizations	government, civil society, private organizations
Infrastructures	water, sewage, energy, transportation, communication; technology; agricultural systems (planting, harvesting, animal husbandry)
Industrial Systems	resource extraction, manufacture, financial, marketing
Organizational Systems	feudal, federal, hierarchical, matrix, teams
Information Systems	hardware, software, communications, databases, knowledge management, networks, relationships

I can work to improve my quality of life by becoming aware of the social structures and infrastructures in the city. My outer structures of room, home, street, work, recreation, education, health, financial, economic, government, social and environment systems are inextricably interlinked with my inner structures. Thus the quality of my outer life influences integration (and/or disintegration) in every area of my life.

The structures and infrastructures of the city are usually operated by organizations. Like individuals, organizations have a tendency to increase in complexity as they organize to respond to more complex life conditions. In my world today, all the forms of organization that have ever been created co-exist. This makes my quality of life subject to great variation as I am influenced by all these kinds of organization.

Figure 1: Organizations Develop Complexity & Co-Exist [i]

Table 2 shows some examples of organizations from my city at different stages of complexity:

Complexity Sequence:	Examples of Organizations
Families & clans Tribes & regions Feudal States Early Nations & Bureaucracies Industrial Revolution Social Services Internet Global Alliances	Family Neighbourhoods Sports Teams, Corporate Tribes Military; Police Force Civil service, churches, hospitals, government Corporations, Stock Markets Health Care Web dot.coms Multi-nationals, UN

As organizations develop they tend to become increasingly complex with increasing capacity to span time, place, people, priorities and environments. This tends to improve the quality of life for all the organization's stakeholders.

To work towards improving the quality of my life (and others) I can match or exceed the growth of organizations by developing as a leader, to become increasingly [ii]:

aware of the causes of personal, team & organizational ineffectiveness and inefficiency
self-correcting, therefore increasingly effective and efficient
self-generating, self-renewing and innovative
able to act in the moment with an awareness of a longer time horizon
impactful over a longer time span
able to act locally with an awareness of a larger spatial horizon
impactful of a larger and more spatially distributed sphere of influence
mutuality-seeking thus broadening moral span
empowering of individuals
compassionate toward all
aware of life conditions as socially constructed reality

For more ideas and references check out the Internet Resources at the Integral City Discovery Zone, Intelligent Book Shelf and Integral City Shopping Cart.

For other aspects of the QOL Citizen click on these links:

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