AccelerationLab Ltd. Research Center
As a company who supports organisations and individuals to adapt and thrive in the postmodern era, AccelerationLab Ltd. provides consulting, training and coaching services. With the intention to share first hand findings with our clients, we invest in the research to explore the emerging fields and practices.
As a private research organisation, we collaborate with different institutes to promote and extend the reach of our work within a network of people with whom we share common interests.
Do agile companies outperform their traditional peers?
The emergence of the postmodern era forces organizations to rethink the way they create value. In an operating context that is more and more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, traditional management and organization practices rooted in the industrial age may have reach their limit.
A number of books, articles and business cases suggest that agile culture and practices provide the organizations with a serious advantage to keep their operational context in check. Theories like the theory X and Y of the social psychologist McGregor in the early 1950s provide us with some foundations. The positive psychology in the late 1990s shows some more insights that may reinforce the teachings of McGregor. On the problem-solving side, researchers like Dave Snowden with the Cynefin framework have contributed to review the way the individuals and the organizations deal with complexity.
We can be convinced that agile practices, supported by those theories and others are a way to improve the global performance of an organization but still, the majority of the organizations remains attached to more traditional models. Who is right? This question wants to transcend the resistance to change that may play a role.
This research is carried forward with the Business Agility Institute and the MSc SUPSI in Business Administration with Major Innovation Management (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland).
Psyché: What is the relationship between psychology and spirituality today?
To be studied, the psyche has been reduced to an object, made to coincide with the mind and placed in the brain. In this way it was possible to know its neurophysiological, cognitive and behavioral implications, its side we could say objective (Wilber 2011), but neglecting its subjective side. The psyche, in fact, which from now on we will call Psyché, is not only the object but also the subject of experience, an integral, complex phenomenon that involves all the domains of being.
This integral vision opens up the perspective of spirituality, and although it has spanned the millennia of human history from its earliest beginnings under the diverse and confused guise of magic, religion, mysticism, gnosis, hermeticism, the term spirituality as we know it today is relatively recent. It is a delicate concept to define that also represents a historical break with the past, as it belongs to modernity. The term spirituality indicates a dimension that differs both from the immanence of matter and from the transcendence of religion, revealing as Van der Veer points out (Van der Veer P. 2014) as part of what he calls the Great Transformation, namely globalization. Modern spirituality has to do with the highest values of the human being, transcends and includes materiality, provides for social commitment and participation as well as the use of the body for spiritual realization.
In this context, the survey aims to collect data about the respondents’ experiences so as to explore how the relationship between psychology and spirituality is elaborated today and to determine what are the dominant visions in today’s collective imagination of Psyché and its relationship with spirit and matter.
This research is carried forward with the Integral Transpersonal Institute from Milan – Italy
