Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership

by Joseph Jaworski

perfect moments, when things come together in an almost unbelievable way, when events that could never be predicted, let alone controlled, remarkably seem to guide us along our path.

“synchronicity.” C. G. Jung’s classic, “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” defines synchronicity as “a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something other than the probability of chance is involved.”

In the beautiful flow of these moments, it seems as if we ...

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Over the years my curiosity has grown, particularly about how these experiences occur collectively within a group or team of people. I have come to see this as the most subtle territory of leadership, creating the conditions for “predictable miracles.”

My quest to understand synchronicity arose out of a series of events in my life that led me into a process of inner transformation. As a result of this transformation I decided to follow a dream that I had held close to my heart for a number of years. It was the most difficult decision I had ever made, but the day I made it, I crossed a threshold. From that moment on, what happened to me had the most mysterious quality about it. Things began falling into place almost effortlessly, and I began to discover remarkable people who were to provide crucial assistance to me.

Why did so many doors open for me after I crossed the threshold?

How did I lose the capacity to create the future I had envisioned? How did I regain that capacity? What principles could be discerned from these experiences?

What qualities of leadership could inspire this dynamic to occur?

this is the story of my personal journey in search of the answers to those questions, and of my inner transformation along the way.

the call to become what we were meant to become, the call to achieve our vital design.

Henri J. M. Nouwen’s book Reaching Out.

For many years I have told people that, although there are a lot of books on leadership, there is only one that serious students have to read—Servant Leadership by Robert K. Greenleaf.

For Greenleaf, being a leader has to do with the relationship between the leader and the led.

Joe Jaworski takes Greenleaf’s understanding further. He suggests that the fundamental choice that enables true leadership in all situations (including, but not limited to, hierarchical leadership) is the choice to serve life.

He suggests that, in a deep sense, my capacity as a leader comes from my choice to allow life to unfold through me.

leadership is about learning how to shape the future.

Leadership exists when people are no longer victims of circumstances but participate in creating new circumstances.

We all earn it in our life experience. I think this is one part of what Buddhists mean by “life is suffering.” We have to suffer through life, not in the sense of pain, but in terms of living through it.

David Bohm.

David gave a small seminar at MIT for a group of us interested in his work on dialogue.

Over the years my colleagues and I had come to use the term “alignment” to describe what happens when people in a group actually start to function as a whole.

I felt deeply that this phenomenon of alignment was not individualistic at all, but fundamentally collective.

“Thought creates the world and then says ‘I didn’t do it,’”

He talked about a “generative order” in which, depending on our state of consciousness, we “participate in how reality unfolds.”

When we are engaged in something that is deeply meaningful and are attuned to one another, human beings can participate in the “unfolding” of the implicate wholeness into the manifest or explicate order.

Wholeness and the Implicate Order, where Bohm lays out the basic theory,

Einstein had once said that Bohm was the one person from whom he ever understood quantum theory.

I’ve come to appreciate that one of the gifts of artists is the ability to see the world as it really is. The vision of what painters or sculptors intend to create is critical, but it is of little use if they cannot accurately observe the current state of their creation.

We can’t see people as they really are because we’re too busy reacting to our own internal experiences of what they evoke in us, so we rarely actually relate to reality.

I think people such as David Bohm have the feeling that by telling Joe their story, their story will actually be heard.

First, Joe said, we need to be open to fundamental shifts of mind. We have very deep mental models of how the world works, deeper than we can know.

it’s about a shift from seeing a world made up of things to seeing a world that’s open and primarily made up of relationships,

A deeper level of reality exists beyond anything we can articulate.

Once we understand this, we begin to see that the future is not fixed, that we live in a world of possibilities.

And yet almost all of us carry around a deep sens...

We’re resigned to believing we can’t have any influence in the world, at least not...

we’re resigned to being absolutely powerless in the larger world.

Yet, if we have a world of people who all feel powerless, we have a future that’s predetermined.

absolutely everything around us is in continual motion. There’s nothing in nature that stays put. When I look at the leaves on the tree, I am really seeing a flowing of life. Those leaves won’t be on that tree in a couple of months. At this very moment, they’re changing.

Part of that ironclad grip on ourselves which maintains the illusion of fixity involves seeing our own selves and each other as fixed.

I don’t see you; I see the stored-up images, interpretations, feelings, doubts, distrusts, likes, and dislikes that you evoke in me. When we actually begin to accept one another as legitimate human beings, it’s truly amazing.

We have to sacrifice. If everything starts to fall apart, we try harder, or we tell ourselves that we’re not good enough, or that we don’t care enough to be that committed.

So we vacillate between two states of being, one a form of self-manipulation, wherein we get things done by telling ourselves that if we don’t work harder, it won’t get done; and the other a state of guilt, wherein we say we’re not good enough.

Neither of these states of being has anything to do with the deeper ...

When we operate in the state of mind in which we realize we are part of the unfolding, ...

It’s actually impossible not to b...

Nothing ever happens by accident. Every single thing is part of what need...

We only make the mistakes that we have to make to learn what we’re he...

This is a commitment of being, not a commi...