evolutionary leadership: integrate and include

one the lessons that i’m grappling with from evolutionary leadership (el) is the concept of how to integrate and include the past as i/we move into the future. gibrán initially laid this is idea out like this:

imagine that a younger version of you were to walk in the door. what’s interesting is that the you of today would totally recognize younger you, but younger you probably wouldn’t recognize (in a deep sense of knowing) current you. younger you has been integrated and included in current you. the knowledge and lessons you learned from then are a part of you today.

the more i think about it, the more it’s clear to me that that’s actually very important to our understanding of growth and evolution.

at other times during the workshop, gibrán shared other examples about where this phenomenon was happening. the two that stuck with me the most are (a) human evolution (especially the three levels of the brain (of which there is now some critique)) and (b) human consciousness. someday soon i’ll write about the progression of human consciousness (as it came up at el), but not today.

as we’ve been back and working on integrating ourselves back into daily life, i’ve been thinking about this idea a lot. a few other examples that have come up are organizational development, economic understanding of society, and personal systems development.

across all of these, what i think i’m starting to see that i didn’tbefore going to el was this: forward motion and progress are achieved not by expelling the old, but by integrating and including it. this allows us to learn from it as we move through/beyond it.

this significantly shifts how i think about change processes.

:O