INTRA ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE:
TRANSFORMING CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURE

It's after midnight and Michael Rennie's face is bathed in the bluish glow of his laptop screen. Rennie and I have been talking for hours. Now, perched on the edge of a desk belonging to one of his partners at McKinsey (because Rennie's office is floor to ceiling with the evidence of his having just moved to New York from Australia), he is showing me one slide after another, graphic displays of and testimonials to the dramatic changes from McKinsey's Performance Leadership Program—the program that had its debut with John Akehurst at Woodside Petroleum. Tall and lanky, and appearing every inch the polished corporate executive, Rennie only just now loosens his tie a bit as he excitedly explains each PowerPoint slide. We've begun a bit of a duet. He clicks on a slide, says a few words, and then I chime in with “Wow!” And it's a genuine “Wow”—the work that Rennie and his partner-in-transformation, Gita Bellin, have done with one company after another is remarkable. With each soft click on the computer, I can almost hear the hard metal plates that create the rigid structures of the traditional corporation crashing to the floor. Rennie smiles at me, his face lit with delight. “It's really subtle, isn't it?”

Subtle wasn't the word that came to mind. Rennie—who is something of a miracle himself, having cured himself of a rare cancer that had literally riddled his body with tumors—has been working with Bellin for the past eight years to realize his life's mission: “shifting consciousness in business.” His personal transformation, which he attributes to “a dramatic mindset shift” that enabled him, “just by choosing to,” to heal himself, led him to experiment in the field of his own expertise—business. Why business? Because he recognizes that business is the most powerful force on the planet. And in these corporations that network thousands and thousands of people, Rennie sees the potential for a “delivery system for a higher consciousness, more effective ways of thinking” that could bring life on earth to a new level of cooperation and innovation. Currently, however, he believes that “these large organizations are actually a lag on the consciousness of the planet,” because they are at odds with individuals who are searching for a greater awareness with which to navigate our chaotic and confusing world.

“Organizations don't change; people do,” is Rennie's entry point to creating intraorganizational change. He and Bellin use personal transformation to create the energy for changing an organization's culture. “Transformation,” says Bellin, “is a metamorphosis. A true transformation can never return to what it was before. So the work that we're doing—a shift in root perspective—is like becoming a frog that can breathe through lungs. You can never return to being a tadpole that breathed through gills.” By teaching a combination of interpersonal skills, meditation practices, and personal mastery techniques, they release the desire for authenticity, dignity, and real human connection within a critical mass of individuals in a given organization. They then use these values to dismantle the policies and internal structures in the organization that have helped keep the machine's consciousness-numbing hierarchies in place.

Rennie and Bellin claim that it's possible to significantly move individuals out of the feudal mentality of victimization that operates in the corporation in a weekend and state that they “can make a global shift in the organization” in twelve months to three years. “For some people, the shift in that first weekend is dramatic,” Rennie tells me, “and that's it; they are moving on a new path of systemic relational thinking. For others, the situational demands within the organization have to support the shift.” Both the personal transformation and the situational change are critical, he explains, because “behavior is situational. While some behavior comes from inner unconscious patterns, psychological research suggests that our situation affects our behavior dramatically. So we need to work on both at once.” Unless we change the context, he says, “people walk back into a situation that reinforces their old behavior and you get this incredible backlash. A war of ideas goes on that slows organizational transformation.”

Bellin teaches “the concept of creative cause—total responsibility for one's life—because until you turn people's vision around and get them to be absolutely one hundred percent accountable for their lives, their choices, and their experience, the transformation process won't happen. You will not get the shift in root perspective.” Moreover, she says, “you can't make a permanent shift unless you reprogram, through meditation, the neural pathways that developed during the preverbal stage of life.” Ultimately, the purpose is to get individuals to develop three abilities simultaneously: “where they can be a player in life, they can be a spectator in every moment, but they're also the referee—so they're constantly, moment by moment, consciously at choice in regards to what they do and how they respond.” Rennie comments that “the reason the work is so powerful is that we're actually working with individuals fully—as energetic beings as well as physical and mental/emotional beings. But as you work with those three, there's a deeper thing that happens—you're actually shifting the energetic or the quantum level of being.”

Such an energetic shift within individuals can begin to transform the field of human awareness within the organization as a whole. Rennie has powerful data that shows how, as a critical number of individuals in one part of the organization reach a higher perspective, a field is created that has an effect on individuals elsewhere in the organization. The released consciousness spreads like a slow-burning brush fire. And when a culture of commitment and care is created, then the corporation and its leadership can begin to bring greater consciousness and conscience to the broader networks of which it is a part. Interorganizational change becomes possible.