Tapping the Wellspring

LEAVING THE CONDITIONED MIND BEHIND

Beyond Linear Sequential Cognition

“We combine and recombine in different ways what we know, looking for a combination that clarifies something. We leave out pieces that previously seemed essential if they get in the way. We take risks, albeit calculated ones. We linger on the border of our knowledge. We familiarise ourselves with it, walking back and forth along its length, searching for a gap. We try out new combinations. New concepts.”

Rovelli, Carlo. White Holes: Inside the Horizon. Alan Lane, London, 2023. P51.

Here Theoretical Physicist, Carlo Rovelli, challenges us to look beyond embedded structures to find new ways of doing things. Most of us are so steeped in linear sequential thinking that making space to just be present is antithetical. The disruption of 2025 calls for new ways of imagining. Your own mind is a wellspring of creativity, ideas, intuition and initiative. The structures that dominate our corporate, government and community organisations can seem immovable. The language that permeates organisational life both enables and constrains. Real innovation is beyond language. We just need to allow the space for it to unfold.

Reality as a Human Construct

“The very distinction between mind and appearances is purely nominal, and the more deeply we probe into the immediate contents of experience, the more clearly, we perceive that appearances are as empty of inherently existent mind as they are of inherently existent matter. Both ‘matter’ and ‘mind’ are simply conceptual constructs imputed up appearances; neither has any existence of its own, independent of these conceptual imputations.”

Wallace B. Alan. Buddhist Radical Empiricism in Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic. Columbia NY 2012. P140.

This is a very powerful quote from philosopher B. Alan Wallace. In it he captures the very essence of the dilemma of organisational life. The structures that constitute an organisation sometimes take on a level of concreteness that belies their origin and potential fluidity. This goes for most of the structures that constitute our perceived world. Including those structures inherent in our human nature, those we have learned from our environment and are embedded in the very language we use to communicate.

The Observer Impacts on the Observed:

Quantum physicists have know for some time that the act of observing changes the nature of the phenomenon being observed. This is true of all governance and organisation activities. Board oversight alters organisation behaviour. For the most part this is a positive influence. However when particular negative dynamics occur at the board level, sometimes these get played out throughout the organisation by virtue of “parallel processes”. Over the years we’ve had the good fortune to work with a number of private/public partnerships. Sometimes the private sector partners have a different agenda to the public partners. One can be driven by commercial gain while the other more focused on service delivery for constituents. This tension can get played out in organisationally.

A board needs to be focused on its own dynamics. With a little poetic license we’ve used the term “Event Horizon” to describe that crossing over point between the board and the organisation, usually via the CEO and other members of the executive team. The importance of the Chair/CEO relationship cannot be overstated from this perspective.

Thing Are Not Always What They Seem

“In his recent book “White Holes” physicist Carlo Rovelli (quoted above), takes us on a journey inside a black hole. The gigantic chasm created when a star uses up all of its energy, reaches the end of its life, and collapses in upon itself.

Rovelli introduces some amazing facts. For instance, the dimensions of the interior of a black hole are considerably larger than it appears from the outside. So, upon venturing into a black hole, beyond the event horizon, one is confronted with an enormous cavern, which becomes increasingly elongated with time. This elongation can stretch for a 100 million light years and at the very bottom of the elongation, the remnants of the collapsed star from which it formed, are found.

Matter, gasses, and light are drawn into the black hole. Nothing withing range of the event horizon escapes its enormous gravitational pull. And it’s a one-way journey. What goes in never comes out. At least not while it’s a black hole. And this is the strange thing. The remnants of the collapse star can rebound or bounce back up into the elongation of the black hole. At the extent of the bounce a singularity occurs, and the black hole transforms into a white hole. The opposite of a black hole where matter and content flows out rather than in.”

Geoff Nunn, Explorations in Consciousness, A Personal Reflection. 2025

Sometimes when an organisation changes shape, the remnants of what went before can still be found in the unconscious aspects of its corporate culture. They are, to a degree, embedded in the organisational psyche. Just like all that has gone before for you personally is part of who you are.