In an earlier paper, I provided an overview of value networks in organization theory. In this paper, I create a virtual interview with Gregory Bateson (1904 – 1980), to learn what he would say about value networks. I did this because the opportunity for doing this presented itself in multiple, interrelated ways.

Bateson was a multidisciplinary thinker in fields ranging from anthropology, psychology, and family therapy, to biology, communication theory, and cybernetics. I became acquainted with his work in a telephone interview with Fred Steier during the enrollment for Fielding Graduate University. Fred has been intensively engaged with Bateson's work during his career. As a result he co-edited a special double issue of the journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing for Bateson’s centennial. While I was reading Bateson myself, I became impressed by the range, the depth, and the beauty of his thought. So when Fred agreed to work with me on this paper, I obtained the opportunity to learn about value networks through Bateson’s lens, supported by an expert in his work.

After first examining the groove in jazz improvisation as a concept of human development and consciousness in three working papers and a professional case study, I now turn to value networks. My first challenge is to provide an overview of the subject and to place it in a larger context. I do this by examining the emergence of the term value network and by contrasting and comparing the different takes on value networks. Then, I put the term in the context of synonyms and like terms, before taking a step back by putting the emergence of the idea in a larger societal and cultural shift. Then, I examine the state of the art in value networks. Finally, I outline and propose different takes on an in depth exploration of value networks.

This report describes how 200 people from Mise en Place, a Dutch temp agency, moved into a groove and then analyzes the factors leading to this groove as experienced by the participants and in a comparison with Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow and Sawyer’s theory of group-flow.

Van Middendorp, S. (2009). Human development and consciousness: A theory of groove. Unpublished manuscript. Fielding Graduate University.

What I found missing in the literature of organizational improvisation, was a theory that helped me integrate the metaphorical thinking in the source domain of jazz improvisation with real interventions in the target domain of business. Before designing organizational systems based on the metaphor of jazz improvisation, I feel a need for a conceptual framework that helped me understand the subject from the leading edge of theory. Up to now, the academic community engaged in organizational improvisation had mostly focused on describing the jazz metaphor based on observations and on analyzing the metaphor as such. To my best knowledge, no theoretical framework for applying the metaphor in business practice has been conceived yet. I wondered if I would be able to create an integral theory of groove that I could use as a framework for organization design. I also felt that creating this theory would help me integrate the loose thinking I produced so far in a comprehensive way.

The theoretical framework builds on the work produced so far, and adds two additional theoretical perspectives to complete the picture. These additional perspectives are Husserl’s notion of internal time consciousness (Husserl, 1964), depicted here as a network of retentions and protentions (Losscher, 2005), and Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance (Sheldrake, 1981, 1988).

Van Middendorp, S. (2009). Human development and consciousness: An integral analysis of groove. Unpublished manuscript. Fielding Graduate University.

The problems we address in our world are increasingly complex and dynamic in nature.  Current organizational systems for addressing complex problems often fail to provide sustainable solutions to our problems. The emerging academic discipline of organizational improvisation looks at the ways jazz musicians solve the complex problems associated with improvisation as a source domain to infer meaning for other organizational domains outside jazz. In jazz, the groove is the collective peak experience of a jazz group while improvising music together. When seen as a conceptual metaphor, there are conditions under which people in other contexts than jazz can also move into a groove. In this paper, I will argue that when in a groove, there is a healthy connection between the evolution of the people and the evolution of the systems involved. When there is a healthy evolution of people and systems, people are better able to address complex and dynamic problems.

Van Middendorp, S. (2009). Human development and consciousness: Thinking about groove. Unpublished manuscript. Fielding Graduate University.

This paper is about groove, which is an altered state of consciousness that emerges for jazz musicians who are improvising together in a peak performance. A quote from Frank Barrett’s (1998) paper “Creativity and improvisation in jazz and organization: Implications for organizational learning” which inspired me to research groove, serves to illustrate the concept:

When the [jazz] players successfully achieve a mutual orientation to the beat, they develop what they call a “pocket,” or some refer to as "achieving a groove". Establishing a groove is the goal of every jazz performance. […] Once a group shares this common rhythm, it begins to assume a momentum, as if having a life of its own separate from the individual members. (pp. 613; 614)

In Knowledge Area 702 (KA 702), short for Fielding’s Knowledge Area of Human Development and Consciousness, I chose to explore the concept of groove, a state of consciousness shared by jazz musicians in the heat of their improvisation performance. I wanted to understand what this groove is and how it could be used as a metaphor for human development and consciousness in other contexts than jazz improvisation. If it could be applied as a metaphor, I assumed that it could make a complex psychological construct accessible to a larger audience in an attractive way. In business for example, people are struggling with the continuous adaptations needed to an ever complex and dynamic environment. I hoped that the language of jazz could help us design organizational interventions that would help us accelerate our development in a healthy manner.

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