Quallobration from Oneness – Seeing Unity in Diversity

Grand challenges facing humanity such as climate change, social inequality, and bio-extinction, will not be solved from the same level of thinking that created them. As the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley, has rightly observed recently: “the pandemic has taught us that national solutions to global problems do not work.” We define quallaboration as operating together from a qualitatively deeper shared understanding and oneness among all the stakeholders. Artificial Intelligence and other innovations create powerful opportunities and challenges that will require business organizations and other entities to repurpose their strategies and operations to survive and thrive (Christensen, 2013). At the same time, there is a growing consensus that business has the responsibility to play a central role in creating a better world through more sustainable ways of managing their organizations (Laszlo, Cooperrider & Fry, 2020; Polman & Winston, 2021). The Academy’s theme for 2022 is Creating a Better World Together. The qualities needed in managers in such a world could be the empathizing and synergizing quality, the visionary and transformative quality, the moral quality, and more. All these and similar qualities can be subsumed under the idea of an integral (Wilber, 2000), holistic (Dhiman, 2017), higher consciousness (Maheshwari, 2021), quantum empathy (Pavlovich, 2020), or quantum management (Laszlo, 2020), towards the appreciation of the total interconnectedness (Tsao & Laszlo, 2019) and oneness of the world (Laloux, 2014). One of the challenges to be discussed on this path is what new concepts, holistic and functional, are emerging to model the future of collaboration in organizations? From an increasing convergence of quantum science and spirituality, we hope to offer a useful, grounded, and generative perspective called quallaboration that could offer a new ontology and epistemology for the new interconnected world. This may be the key to accelerating pro-social and pro-environmental behaviors for business-led flourishing.