Living systems & leadership
From conditioned role
to embodied role
Consciousness as a lever for flourishing in organisations
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Living systems & leadership
Consciousness as a lever for flourishing in organisations
Entering into relation
There is something almost inevitable about this movement. The instant a human being enters into relation with another, a role takes shape. Rarely consciously. More often as an automatic response, built from earliest childhood, shaped by needs for survival, belonging and recognition that have constituted our way of being in the world.
This role is never neutral. It carries an intention, even an unspoken one: to support, to convince, to create, to educate, to protect, to follow. It is the silent language of our values and needs set in motion within the space of relation.
Very few people are permanently aware of the needs that constitute them, of what they put in place to satisfy those needs, and of how much their value systems shape them. These things condition us, and we have been self-conditioning since the very beginning.
This conditioning is not a weakness. It is an inherited adaptive intelligence. The problem is not that it exists, but that it operates most often in the shadows, outside our field of awareness.
The challenge is simple to state, yet demanding to inhabit: to develop awareness of the role one is playing, at the very moment of playing it, so as to choose rather than react.
The systemic trap
Without role awareness, something well-documented can take hold. The interaction slides toward one of the three positions of the dramatic triangle. Not through malicious intent, but through conditioned reflex, in response to an unperceived tension, an unexpressed need, an unspoken expectation.
The response to this trap is not a counter-effort, nor a act of will. It is a practice: that of the witness. The capacity to hold some distance from what is happening, at the moment it is happening, and to observe without being immediately swept along.
The witness muscle
It is almost like a muscle, this potential for expanding consciousness. It can be trained. It develops progressively, through deliberate practices of self-awareness in relation. The stronger it becomes, the earlier the slides toward the triangle are detected, before their unwanted effects have time to take hold in the system.
Collective potential
Archetypes are not boxes in which to confine people. They are forms that human potential takes in interaction. Role-resources, one might say, that have endured across time and cultures because they respond to something real in the life of human systems.
This is where the link with the Vritti model becomes operational. The nine dimensions of the model do not express nine pathologies or nine fixed types. In their totality, they express the full range of human potential in interaction.
Two examples among nine:
Enters any interaction immediately asking: what are the rules here? What is desirable? They orient toward improving the state of things, with a natural drive toward alignment with what is right and just.
Enters into relation through the question of connection: do they appreciate me? Can I do something to help? Their dynamic centres on giving and receiving, on closeness, on mutual recognition. Their difficulty is often in perceiving their own needs.
The richness of a living system depends on the presence and cooperation of all nine dimensions. Not by seeking to master everything oneself, but by knowing how to recognise what each person carries, and by honouring roles at the moment they are played well.
Traditional cultures, particularly those rooted in Vedic wisdom, had intuitively integrated this completeness. The Navratri festival celebrates twice yearly the nine faces of the great goddess, reminding us that life needs the full range of these expressions to unfold.
Within the Flourishing Organisation framework, the first question of living evaluation is direct: Is it alive?
Is the system animated, engaged, in motion? Are the six polarities being nourished? Are roles inhabited or merely occupied?
This question takes on its full meaning in the light of what precedes it. An occupied role is one assumed by reflex, through compliance with a job description or a conditioned pattern. An inhabited role is one taken on with awareness, with choice, with the wholeness of who the person is.
Explore the full framework →What life requires
An inhabited role is not a fixed role. It unfolds within the living tension between two poles that, nourished simultaneously, produce an emergent quality. It is this dual nourishment that generates the ascending movement.
One will notice that the fifth polarity, Acting and Witnessing, is precisely the one that enables all the others to function. It is what conditions role awareness itself. To act fully while simultaneously being the witness of that action: this is where a role ceases to be occupied and becomes inhabited.
What makes everything possible
There is a limit to what the psycho-social dimension alone can achieve. As long as one remains confined to this register, conditioning reasserts itself. Defence mechanisms remain present, ready to surface the moment pressure rises.
There exists another potential. The capacity to connect with something greater than oneself. This connectedness is not an idea or an abstract belief. It is experiential. It cannot be explained from the outside: it is lived from within.
The Vedic tradition describes it through three manifestations of the spiritual nature within the human being:
A joy without external cause. Surging, overflowing. The first sign of connectedness, and the most reliable guide for those who seek to deepen it.
Joy, once stabilised, becomes clarity of perception. A penetrating attention, capable of seeing what is at work and acting within it with precision.
Non-dual awareness. I am the drop and the ocean. From this state, a role can be fully embodied, without attachment or defence.
Joy bubbles from within. It overflows like bubbles rising from a cup. And when it fills all the space, there is no room for the other emotions that call us back to order. It is simply: joy is not there.
This path, from joy toward consciousness and then toward being, is not a linear progression. It is an alchemy. And it belongs first to the realm of experience. What is certain is that when one has lived it, there is no doubt that one has.
The culmination
From this state of connectedness, something shifts in the way a role is taken on. It is no longer the defensive role of the ego seeking to satisfy its needs or protect its values. It is the creative role of a being acting from a space of fundamental trust.
This role is fluid. It adapts continuously to what the system calls for. It is not fixed in a posture, nor limited to one dimension of human potential. It can move through all nine, according to what carries the most meaning in the present moment.
The concept of Sahaj
Jnaneshwara, in the twelfth century, continuing the work of great Indian philosophers such as Shankaracharya, articulated this concept clearly: Sahaj, natural spontaneity. The being who inhabits this state acts without being the actor. Is in action without being in action. Is the agent, and yet is carried by something greater. Conscious, measured, fluid, adaptive, in constant movement.
This is where collective intelligence can reach its highest form. When each person, in their inhabited role, strengthens the other in theirs. When the power of one increases the power of the other, and reciprocally. When interaction becomes what the Flourishing Organisation framework calls a flourishing interdependence.
There is nothing left to defend. Nothing left to try to satisfy. Because in this state, life flows fully, without restriction, across the whole palette of its colours.
Is it alive?
Is the system animated, engaged, in motion? Are the six polarities being nourished? Are roles inhabited or merely occupied?
In summary
What this reflection maps is a journey. Not a linear progression toward an ideal state, but a permanent, spiralling movement between four dimensions that call to and reinforce one another.
Recognising, at the moment it takes shape, the role one is playing. Is this a choice? Or a conditioned reflex?
Recognising the dimensions each person in the system carries. Honouring them at the right moment. Facilitating their cooperation rather than their competition.
Creating spaces where the system observes itself, evaluates itself honestly, and recalibrates before dysfunctions crystallise.
Allowing something greater than the sum of egos to be present. Cultivating the conditions for this openness, individually and collectively.
It is then, and only then, that one can say the roles are inhabited. That the system is alive. That the interdependence is flourishing.