Collaborating In the World

I start at an obvious beginning – the meaning of the word “collaboration.” To Co-Labour” – labour together.

Labour for what? Is there a Spiral of Co-Laboration?

Beige Beginnings – Birth – the very beginning of life – women go into labour to deliver the child.

Purple Tribe – Women co-laborate to mid-wife the mother and child during the process. Midwives become a sacred circle of women in service to life.

Red Power – From Tribe to Individualistic Expression – Red is not a very co-laborative stage – as the individual wants labour  to be self-rewarding.

Blue Order – The ordering hierarchy of Blue represents collaboration in levels of cooperation where labour is organized for peace and good government. So often Blue Order feels like, looks like a masculine energy – but it creates a world of safety and security for women, children, families, society. On the dark side “collaboration” in Europe became associated with war and those who offered cooperation as the conquered/victims with the invaders/tyrants became despised as “collaborators.”

Orange Results – the outcome measuring stage of Orange brings collaboration into focus beyond effectiveness into efficient co-operations laying the work for later co-operatives. Orange has been historically an inventive stage that manifested much technology that saved labour and effort for women. Co-labour became epitomized as the specialization of labour so that the efficiency of assembly lines could be organized for the benefit of entrepreneurs and owners. The division of labour separated it from the provision of capital and exerted the power of managers and owners over labour.

Green Acceptance – the social safety net of Green Worldviews restores the value of “co-labouring” to mean joining together to achieve shared goals – co-operatives – where the “co” element of the word gains new stature beyond the denotative meaning of “with” to embrace the connotative nuance of “collective” – so that whatever/wherever/however we labour – we do it together for the co-operative benefit of all.

Yellow Systems – the Quantum Leap beyond Green restores all the meanings of co-labour so that we can meshwork them together in their self-organizing Beige, Red, Orange impulses of creativity with the structuring capacities of Purple, Blue, Green that align collective patterns for bonding, binding and blessing in collaborations that can flex and flow.

Turquoise Global Emergence – transcends and includes all the Systemic Yellow, Social Green, Strategic Orange, Systematic Blue into planetary resonance, coherence and emergence. Co-laboration at this 8th level of complexity is for the good of all life on Earth. The tribal dominance of Red, influence of Purple and power of Beige are transmuted from ego and ethno existence to regional co-laboration to planetary co-existence.

Finally the act of co-labouring becomes intertwined with inter-being, collective be-coming and planetary evolution.

This blog is part of a short series on Thoughts on (Radical) Collaboration as an Evolutionary Act: