Joseph Jaworski - Synchronicity. The Inner Path of Leadership

“A deeply personal and moving narrative that opens up new vistas on compassion, commitment, and connectedness – and hence on leadership.”

“An insightful, profound, and readable contribution to understanding the personal side of leadership.”

“An unusually thoughtful exploration of the ‘inner’ aspects of leadership, particularly in the business arena, surfaces in Joseph Jaworski’s Synchronicity . Eschewing easy answers and ten-point plans to success, presenting the insights he has garnered from forward-looking thinkers including David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake, Jaworski offers a searching and wise brief that deserves to be read in board-rooms everywhere.”

“ Synchronicity is an intensely personal and compelling book. As I reeled from Jaguars to mountain-tops to oil companies and a rare window on history, I was grateful that Joe Jaworski let us travel with him on ‘the inner path of leadership.’”

“From seemingly simple early chords, this book develops into a prophetic symphony by its conclusion.”

“ Synchronicity is a book that anyone serious about leadership will have to read.”

“ Synchronicity illustrates that leadership is about the release of human possibilities, about enabling others to break free of limits – created organizationally or self-imposed. Although this book describes the author’s personal journey, it contains profound messages about organizational learning and effectiveness.”

“Written from the heart as well as the head, Synchronicity is the story of one man’s journey toward the place we all must go in the century ahead. Jaworski’s life demonstrates that the immense cultural and institutional change that a livable future demands can begin anytime, anywhere, in anyone, even those who have benefited greatly from the old order of things.”

“Jaworski’s personal search for insight and inspiration is told so compellingly that the reader hardly notices how deep is the philosophy of leadership it conveys – and how broadly relevant to leaders in every domain.”

“I’ve spent my life writing about a new way to think and to be. Joe Jaworski has spent his living it. His deeply personal vision of Servant Leadership, nurtured by a courageous openness to love, to pain, and to his own and others’ experience, is told with a profound simplicity. Synchronicity touched deeply both my head and my heart.”

“No other book is like this one. Its gripping life stories punctuate a how-to on managing toward ‘predictable miracles’ by exploring your ‘cubic centimeters of chance.’ What a wake-up call!”

“Joseph Jaworski pinpoints the astonishing encounters that manifested in his life when he followed his inner compass. Wise guides rose spontaneously; fate cleared blockages; love was caught in an airport passing; even an ermine communed eye to eye. Jaworski’s life story teaches us how to recognize and respond to our own moments of inner knowing and how these personal shifts can reverberate in the world.”

Since the publication of the first edition of Synchronicity , I’ve been searching for the principles that lie at the heart of the phenomenon I described there – the capacity we have to sense and actualize emerging futures and to shape the future instead of simply responding to the forces at large. What is the source of our capacity to access the wisdom for action we need in the moment? How can we learn to enable that capacity, individually and collectively?

The answers to these questions were slowly revealed to me over a fifteen-year period. Because I feel adequate now to be explicit about what I’ve learned, I’ve added important material to this second edition, including four principles that lie at the heart of participating in the unfolding of the universe.

In the process of this search, I gave serious consideration to the Western scientific-materialistic worldview – our underlying belief system, which has prevailed in the West for over two hundred years. I believe that this belief system is no longer adequate for the issues our society is facing; that a historic shift is now occurring; and that a more comprehensive worldview is emerging. Institutions can play a leading role in enabling this emerging worldview.

At the time of writing the first edition, the most admired institutions were led by what Robert Greenleaf described as “servant leaders.” Scott Peck has referred to these as “Stage III” leaders. But I believe that a more advanced generation of institutions must be led by what I call “Stage IV” leaders. Stage IV leaders embody the characteristics and values of servant leaders but have matured to a more comprehensive and subtle level of development. They exhibit a capacity for extraordinary functioning and performance. At the heart of this kind of performance is a capacity for accessing tacit knowing that can be used for breakthrough thinking, strategy formation, and innovation, including envisioning and creating the kind of institution or society we desire.

Stage IV leaders believe that there is an underlying intelligence within the universe that is capable of guiding us and preparing us for the futures we must create. They combine their cognitive understanding of the world around them with a strong personal sense of possibility – the possibility of actualizing hidden potentials lying dormant in the universe, a view that carries with it the power to change the world as we know it.

Institutions led by this quality of leadership, from line leaders to the very top, will, in my view, flourish in the decades to come. Because of their success, these institutions will become living examples of what is possible in the face of accelerating complexity and high turbulence. Operating from this new worldview, these living examples can play a major role in shifting the prevailing belief system.

I hope that this second edition will serve your own path toward higher stages of growth and development – and that it will also serve the leadership of your institution and of society as a whole.

We’ve all had those perfect moments, when things come together in an almost unbelievable way, when events that could never be predicted, let alone controlled, remarkably seem to guide us along our path. The closest I’ve come to finding a word for what happens in these moments is “synchronicity.” C. G. Jung’s classic, “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” defines synchronicity as “a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” In the beautiful flow of these moments, it seems as if we are being helped by hidden hands. I have often had such seemingly accidental experiences, both in business and in my personal life, and have always been highly intrigued by them, wondering how they occurred. Over the years my curiosity has grown, particularly about how these experiences occur collectively within a group or team of people. I have come to see this as the most subtle territory of leadership, creating the conditions for “predictable miracles.”