Bringing greater consciousness into organisations

Posted 26 September 2012 by
Ralph Kilmann
Office environments

Last year, I co-led as well as participated in a two-day workshop in England on making use of the TKI to help people broaden their sense of self (across all aspects of mind/body/spirit consciousness) by fully embodying all the systems and organizations that surround their life.


The basic premise is that roughly 80% of our beliefs, attitudes, and behavior are shaped by our surrounding systems (families, communities, organizations, and nations) and maybe only 20% is the remaining space for 'free will' within those cultural systems. Some believe that the latter is even less than 20%, unless one is very conscious and has evolved beyond those organizational influences.


To make a long two-day workshop short, I had the participants complete the TKI twice, with two different sets of instructions:



For each set of instructions, people responded to the 30 A/B choices on the TKI.


Computing and graphing each person's conflict mode scores from the two TKI results led to some startling insights. Not only did people see how the nature (and health) of their systems had a huge impact on how they responded to conflict, but they also began to address the fundamental issues:



Bottom line: Which conflict modes will I use to resolve the inherent tensions between my systems and me? What are the short-term and long-term consequences of using those modes for my systems and me?


In this blog, I can't do justice to all the discussions that unfolded during the two days from addressing these types of questions. But I can tell you that I plan to spend more time exploring the interface of person and system... and how the conflict modes (via the TKI) can help people expand their consciousness and bring it into all their systems and organizations.


Ralph H. Kilmann, PhD, is CEO and Senior Consultant at Kilmann Diagnostics in Newport Coast, California. Formerly, he was the George H. Love Professor of Organization and Management at the Katz School of Business, University of Pittsburgh – which was his professional home for 30 years. He earned both his BS degree and MS degree in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University (1970) and a PhD degree in management from the University of California, Los Angeles (1972). Kilmann is co-author of the TKI assessment and has published more than twenty books and one hundred articles on conflict management, problem management, organizational design, change management, and quantum organizations.

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