Collaborating As the World

(Feminine Empowering Masculine)

The relationship of labour and co-laboration to power can reveal the differences between power over, power with and power as.

In Power Over, labour is driven from above. Co-laboration is dictated by the overseer, the boss, the tyrant. The worker or labourer is useful only for the brute force of its repetitive efforts to produce some outcome that benefits the powerful one(s). This relationship is a dominator hierarchy. Little if any mutual trust and respect exists.

In Power With, labour becomes co-laborative – where the relationship transforms from hierarchy to circular or flattened relationship. The workers and managers agree on what and how labour is to be performed – so cooperation and co-laboration are qualities of the relationship. Mutual trust and respect are values that are shared and practised.

In Power As, labour, management and design are embraced as a system that is inter-dependent. In complex systems where multiple organizations are practising with Power As then the systems within the larger system become intra-dependent. Co-laboration recalibrates domination into meritous authority, management into regenerative power and agreement into intelligent influence. Co-laboration itself becomes an act of coalescing authority, power and influence. (Adizes).

In each of the experiences of Co-laboration we can see the impact of gender influence on the relationships. In Power Over (un)Collaboration women are usually with less power in the dominator hierarchy. (Traditional husband over wife and children).

In Power With Co-laboration is neutered so men and women are co-labouring – for a humancentric purpose. We can see this in Map 4 of the Integral City maps – where the values and form of the human organization progresses from Birth Family (Beige), to Clan Hearth (Purple), to Tribe Dominator Command (Red) to Bureaucratic Merit Hierarchy (Blue), to Organizational Strategy (Orange).

In terms of Spiral Dynamics’ XYZ Templates this describes much of the organizational forms present in the major working contributions in the X Template.

In the mature Organizational Strategy (Orange) the Y Template emerges as Social Systems (Green) comes on line – to support the workers by providing resources, direction, feedback and contexting information. As Green is a non-hierarchical system the Y Template can be seen as embracing, supporting and caring for X Template labourers as valued/valuable people.

Then as Green matures beyond social safety nets and takes the Quantum Leap into a systems view of the world, the Systemic worldview and capacities come online, enabling the Z Template to emerge – not as a domineering top of the pyramid, but as the integrating archetype that coalesces authority, power and influence (CAPI, per Adizes).

This is also where the GPS recalibrates the XYZ Template into the Individual, Collective Intelligences (X Template), served by the Strategic Intelligences of Inquiry, Meshworking, Navigating (Y Template) and guided/aligned by the Contexting Intelligences (Eco, Emergent, Integral, Living) (Z Template).

But beyond the Z Template, the Integral City GPS reveals the Evolutionary Intelligence as the primordial impulse that enables co-labouring so that it is “Power As.”

In Power As,  Co-laboration has been subsumed by the Evolutionary Impulse so that the Feminine Archetype enables both women and men to co-labour – to meshwork – with their full potential in service to Gaia.

This then becomes a deep form of co-labouring where Power As re-unites human labour with all of Gaia’s beings and Gaia herself. This unleashes enormous primordial power for all as an Evolutionary Act that truly enables living the Gaia Code of Care.

This Radical Collaboration creates grooves in the energetic fields, opens doors between realms, amplifies intelligences and magnifies capacities for the new Humana Qui Curat – the Human Who Cares – for Planet, Places, People, Persons.

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