ABSTRACT
In 2010 Sir John Whitmore delivered a presentation on ‘Sustainability and the Role of the Global Coaching Community’ at the Association for Coaching’s International Conference. Sir John offered a number of insightful reflections that found resonance with many members of the audience. He reflected that our quantitative outer knowledge has raced ahead of our qualitative inner wisdom. This gap, he said, is unsustainable and substantial transformations are required to restore balance. He believes our system of deferring to hierarchy is in decay and in need of replacement, fuelled by a growing imperative for self-responsibility. The ‘Old World’ he characterised as striving for growth, conforming to imposed rules backed by a sense of fear and a focus on quantity. The ‘New World’ he envisaged should be characterised by sustainability instead of growth, inner values rather than imposed rules, a platform of trust and a focus on quality. One assertion that took me by surprise was an assertion that competition between people is not an inevitable part of human life required in order to comply with Darwinian survival of the fittest ideas. Cooperation between people may in fact be our only viable survival strategy. In thinking about his presentation subsequently, I began to see the wisdom of such a statement. I had assumed that competitive Darwinian natural selection was necessary for human advancement. Implicit in adopting such an assumption, I later realised, was the fact that I had overlooked what it is to be fully human. Being a product of our super ‘rationalised’ world mindset that Max Weber warned us about, my mindset too had become more adept at abstracting reality, manipulating it and utilising objects in one way or another. Sitting each day behind a computer, dealing with facts, figures and verbal information threatening to swamp me with detail, it is easy to dissociate from residing occasionally in that deep tranquil formless space from which we can appreciate what it is to be human.
