Introducing the Third Dimension and Integrated Clarity®

"Greed is out. Empathy is in." — Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

As humanity evolves, we are constantly being invited to expand our view of ourselves and the world. This creates enormous changes in our workplaces and the way we relate to one another at work. But sometimes it isn't easy for us to comprehend that next dimension in our evolution.

This book introduces a way to bring empathy into the workplace — to create a new dimension of increased harmony, productivity, and success to both individuals and organizations. As I spoke of this new paradigm in the fall 2004 keynote address for the University of Arizona's College of Fine Arts' opening convocation, I told the following story of Flatland and Spaceland. My talk marked the beginning of a thirteen-month strategic planning and dialogue project I was hired to conduct with the college management and staff. They were about to be introduced to a new dimension — the one you will experience and other managers, employees, and business owners are coming to know, if you put into action what you read in this book.

The Square demonstrates many qualities we all possess when confronted with change and something new we don't understand. At first he goes into denial. Then he's confounded. He's curious. Then he gets angry. At one point he becomes fearful. He doesn't want to or thinks he's incapable of seeing things from a new perspective, a new depth. Finally, through actual experience, he accepts and is thrilled with the new dimension.

This book calls for a "new race of rebels" who are willing to explore a way of being that's wider, deeper, and fuller, not to mention more effective, than our current worlds of being and business normally express.

The ideas presented here are what many call innovative and revolutionary — both metaphorically because they represent a new way of doing business, and literally because they can lead to the kind of innovation that creates dramatic positive change.

Workplace Thinking and Doing — A Two-Dimensional Approach in a Three-Dimensional World

I worked in a Flatland of my own the first eight of my twenty-nine years as a communication and organization development consultant. I was a two-dimensional consultant working in the two-dimensional worlds found in the business, nonprofit, and government agencies that were my clients. In these worlds, the two dimensions consisted of thinking and doing. I found problems and fixed them, only to see the same problems arise again after the fix. Consultants in Flatland are in perpetual demand because they fix the symptoms but not the root causes.

To some degree, we all work in Flatland. In the two-dimensional world of thinking and doing, the organizational dialogue goes something like this: "If we think hard enough about our problems or goals, we will be able to develop a plan to do all the 'right' things to be successful." The traditional work culture places tremendous value on the intellect, on data; on taking action and staying busy to implement "the plan." This culture measures our worth and success in terms of how much thinking and doing we can get done in a day. In fact, workers and managers who can get more than a day's work done are richly rewarded. The value of people in the two-dimensional workplace comes down to getting the job done, irrespective of a person's quality of character or the demonstration of values. Some organizations are even one dimensional: "Don't think. Just do what I say." In these types of organizations, performance and profit are valued more highly than people — all types of stakeholders, from employees to the community at large — sometimes even at the expense of the consumer.

This imbalance may be overt but more likely it's subtle, leaving us with a quiet discomfort, difficult to articulate but clearly present. Slogans, well-intentioned morale-boosting activities, and corporate communications that pronounce the opposite can mask our experience. When we do experience that oh-so-rare brush with being regarded in our full humanness — not just our capacity to think and do — we are acutely aware of how much we've been longing for it. When we come across people in an organization who really get who we are as unique people, it reminds us of what is positively possible and mostly absent.

We need only turn to the news headlines of the past few years or our own personal history to find further evidence of less-than-human experiences in the workplace. The global economic crisis we're recovering from has been a crisis of values and morality, not one of the dollar, euro, or yen. In the preface of the World Economic Forum 2010, Klaus Schwab and John J. DeGioia wrote, "The current economic crisis should warn us to fundamentally rethink the development of the moral framework and the regulatory mechanisms that underpin our economy, politics and global interconnectedness." The previous year, in December 2009, the Forum had conducted a unique new opinion poll through Facebook. Respondents — the majority of whom were under thirty years old — were asked how they see the role of values in the economy today. Of the more than one hundred thirty thousand respondents from France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States, strikingly, more than two-thirds believe the current economic crisis is also a crisis of ethics and values.

Only in a two-dimensional world can so many people be financially and emotionally bankrupted while a select few experience unheard of profit at their expense. This is not a system problem alone. Something is fundamentally out of balance in the way we participate within that system, as well. Sadly, we have become...