WORKING
THE WAY
LIFE WORKS
This chapter is excerpted from a forthcoming book, A Time to Break Silence.
It is dedicated to people in all walks of life who are willing to question the purpose of work in view of the ecological emergency we face, willing to challenge the assumptions that define what we do, and willing to find a better way.
About The Book
Humans have made a big mistake.
Human and social development – the way we work, the way we organise ourselves and our entire way of life – is based on a philosophical error. Our ways of seeing, thinking and acting are at odds with basic physics.
This error is not news. We’ve known about it for a long time. But we’ve failed to correct our mistake. We have yet to integrate the insights of 20th century physics into our 21st century lives, because it challenges so much of what we believe and what we do.
We’re witnessing the consequences.
A Time to Break Silence explores the relationship between the astonishing ecological losses and social disturbance we’re witnessing, the nature of organisations and organisational life, and human nature itself.
It argues that the only way to address our dilemmas and avoid collapse is to be honest about the depth of our crisis, to understand its source, and to engage in whole-system change by aligning ourselves with nature’s intelligence and learning to work the way life works.
A Time to Break Silence explores the relationship between the astonishing ecological losses we are witnessing, the nature of organisations and organisational life, and human nature itself.
About the author
Paula Downey is senior partner at CultureWork. She has designed and facilitated participative processes for organisations of all kinds, at every level of scale – from small groups of fifteen or fifty to more than a thousand people across several continents.
She has a Masters in Responsibility and Business Practice (University of Bath 2003) and she writes and speaks on the challenges and opportunities of whole system change.
She created The Climate Action Sprint to help people build a bridge between their 9-5 work and our climate and biodiversity crisis.
Need a process that will help people talk, think and work better together?
