CONVERSATIONS THAT MATTER – THE INTEGRAL AFRICAN DIAOLOGUES
Experience with African tribal ways of being within an enterprise
WITH RENÉ DE BEER AND ALAIN VOLZ
Both René and Alain work with tribal people in African countries. They teach enterprises how to speak with people of different cultures and different ways of being in order to effectively run their businesses. The employees, on the other hand feel seen and respected when addressed in the right way, and they are happy to do their work in the best possible way. Learn in the conversation how they are creating trust and connection and enable to reach the goals.
HEIDI WRiTES
We Europeans have exported our mindset, our ideas and ways of being, everywhere in the world and we think that ours is the right way of doing. With lots of good will we sent all sorts of – what we believed to be – support to the developing countries and we were wondering why “those people” didn’t follow up with it in the exact ways we had imagined. I think here for instance about all sorts of machinery which was not built for Saharian sand and soon ended up unusable; or factories which couldn’t be properly handled by the local people.
We were quick in believing them “primitive”, not intelligent enough and unwilling to learn what we wanted to teach them. We never arrived at the idea that, maybe, something could be wrong with our approach. We didn’t question our methods and ways of communicating with them. Fortunately, in the last few decades, we have learned a lot – at least some of us – by the work of Clare Graves and Don Beck, who discovered that human beings are at different levels of development and that people on each level have their own way of seeing the world, their own way of communicating, their specific needs for living their lives and for learning new things.
It became very clear that our own way of being and doing is not at all paramount for the rest of the world, and if we really wanted to support others, we needed to find the right way and the appropriate language to reach them and to be understood. Building factories and imposing work on people i.e. in Africa is not the same as when we do it in Germany. Transferring the same practices to another country and continent 1:1. The expectation that it would work efficiently is doomed to fail.
Fortunately, there are people involved in these countries who have the understanding of what is needed to engage the local people. To learn that is not an easy task, but the result is evident.
In our conversation, two of these pioneers share their experience of working with people in Africa. Alain supports women to build small enterprises in Ghana – he first had to build trust and was accepted by the tribe he is working with. Rene has much experience with workers in gold mines. She is South African and grown into the particular needs of the continent, while Alain started his project 8 years ago, coming over from Europe. An interesting exchange of what they found challenging, exciting and meaningful.
Videopost for December 11th, 2019
About René de Beer
Please go to THIS POST to learn more about René
About Alain Volz
Realization of Leap into Life Foundation is the outcome of an emerging process. Alain has studied business administration and organizational psychology in the Netherlands. For 15 years he has been working as a consultant on human talent & change management. Working for the largest independent consultancy company in the Netherlands he met Dr. Don E. Beck.
Together with Dr. Beck and others Alain is co-founder of the Center for Human Emergence in the Netherlands (CHE-NL). As co-director of CHE Synnervate, the consultancy company owned by CHE-NL, he travelled with Anne-Marie Voorhoeve to Zambia. Together they coordinated research on the rural community in Macha applying Spiral Dynamics integral.
In 2011 Alain was invited by representants of the Dagomba tribe in Ghana Northern Region. They requested for support in preserving the traditional values in modern times. Shea butter making is significant in the tradition. It is work done by women and earning them some income. But even with earnings from Shea butter making most women and their families live below poverty rate.
Leap into Life Foundation has a purpose to change this; to add value to the international chain of Shea butter production and trade. The foundation calls this a Value Based Economy – an economic system that adds value to the chain in social, economic and ecological perspective; Planet, People, Prosperity. Basically, the inequalities and irregularities we are facing with Shea butter are issues many at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ encounter.
Spiral Dynamics integral is applied to create clarity in the complexity of the value chain from a ‘whole-system’ approach. The communities are suffering from global warming, land degradation, social inequality, and economic exploitation. Creating a ‘Fair Chain’ in Shea touches all these topics and makes them concrete.
Spiral Dynamics is used to create workable solutions with respect for the traditional values (meet them where THEY are), to support healthy development of the local communities in Africa (transcend AND include), and to bridge the different worldviews (from Beige to Yellow/Turquoise) that are present in the Shea butter chain from producer in Africa till end consumer in the West. This process is called “Mesh weaving”. Alain is a Spiral Wizard and Leap into Life is a Meshwork Foundation. https://www.leapintolife.nl
RESOURCES
Caritas at the Integral African Conference
About the Integral African Conference
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