Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

by Frederic Laloux

Not only all human beings, but all their activities, disciplines, and organizations can be looked at through this four-quadrant lens, and the results are always illuminating. According to Integral Theory, any comprehensive account of anything requires a look at all of these perspectives—the first-person (“I”), second-person (“you” and “we”), and third-person (“it” and “its”) perspectives. Most human disciplines acknowledge only one or two of these quadrants and either ignore or deny any real existence to the others. Thus, in consciousness studies, for example, the field is fairly evenly divided between those who believe consciousness is solely the product of Upper-Right or objective “it” processes (namely, the human brain and its activities); while the other half of the field believes consciousness itself (the Upper-Left or subjective “I” space) is primary, and all objects (such as the brain) arise in that consciousness field. Integral Theory maintains that both of those views are right; that is, both of those quadrants (and the other two quadrants) all arise together, simultaneously, and mutually influence each other as correlative aspects of the Whole. Trying to reduce all of the quadrants to one quadrant is “quadrant absolutism,” a wretched form of reductionism that obscures much more than it clarifies; while seeing all of the quadrants mutually arise and “tetra-evolve” sheds enormous light on perpetually puzzling problems (from the body/mind problem to the relation of ...

So curious if this is something neuroscientists studying consciousness consider for their work, and if so, how does this impct their approach and methods.