Outlined Treatment of Dissertation
February 17, 2015
By Joan E. Conger
For Dissertation Committee, to compare to Treatment of
January 5, 2015
(Note to reader: The major difference between earlier and
current outlines is that this outline narrows down to focus
solely on the contents of chapter two from the previous
outline and includes as brief illustrations elements from
other chapters in the previous outline.)
DISSERTATION
(estimated 175-200 pages, 50,000-55,000 words)
LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS,
THE FALLACY OF MISPLACED CONCRETENESS, AND
HIGHER MODES OF THOUGHT-FEELING:
AN [APPLICATION] OF
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ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD’S PROCESS PHILOSOPHY
[TO ORGANIZATION [THEORY] [CHANGE]]
[TO LEADERSHIP [AND FOLLOWER-SHIP]]
Introduction
(estimated 5 pages, 1,500 words)
Introductory Précis
For those concerned with effective leadership, process
reality confirms that with width of grasp comes greater
choice for more effective leadership. Leaders who
acknowledge the world as fundamentally processual, process-
relational, and process-thoughtful can only approach
concreteness as an ongoing, recurring width of grasp that
actively creates greater choice for more effectiveness, then
passes away into the abstract. Any degree to which one
abstracts from the concreteness of this fundamental doctrine
will be reflected in the degree to which one’s real
effectiveness is curtailed. Process recognizes the
fundamental fact that the only actual entities are the
present moments of grasp, whose width, depth and complex
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reach will always, because the universe is a process
universe, determine their effectiveness for that entity
within the rest of the whole.
Grasp.
In Alfred North Whitehead’s understanding of Process
philosophy (1929/1978) a prehensile grasp of reality shapes
the current instance of reality for each entity, or occasion
of becoming. This grasp transpires for every occasion,
whatever its perceptual reach into the whole of reality at
the moment of becoming and whatever the degree of
intentional complexity with which it uses the data from this
reach to decide its form in the moment of becoming. From
this understanding, Whitehead adopts the word prehension to
show that all occasions of becoming embody within their very
existence and coming-to-be a dipolar inclusion of sensate
physicality of given form and conceptual sense of
potentiated aim. For occasions of higher complexity,
especially as consciousness becomes more evident in each
occasion, the breadth of grasp includes more of the
conceptual pole.
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Choice.
Those occasions that approach conscious awareness are
therefor influenced more strongly by acknowledgements,
conscious or unconscious, of process principles. Width of
felt-thought grasp creates a greater pool of discernments
and possibilities, whether given or envisaged, from which to
choose. Process thought affirms for this constitutional
grasp, whatever the grade of complexity, at least the
fundamental principles of experiential awareness, inter-
relational perspective, and intent for creative advance.
These underlying process principles manifest concretely as
experiential flow, interdependent unity, and continually
emergent change through rare but important creative novel
advances. Greater grasp provides greater creative response
from within an occasion’s more complex felt-sense of what is
“good” from that occasion’s perspective. An ever more
coherent grasp of concrete process reality originates in
each occasion the potential for ever more appropriate
choices.
Effectiveness.
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With increasing dipolar complexity these choices come
ever nearer to approximating the most effective outcome for
the occasion given the prevailing emergent conditions
throughout the whole. In other words, the more effective an
occasion the more of a grasp it has achieved of its
attunement to the experiential flow of the whole, its
irreducible interdependence with the whole, and its non-
local significance for the vector of the whole toward a best
outcome. A constriction of effectiveness occurs, however,
when more complex, ostensibly more conscious, occasions
commit what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,
when a conscious occasion of becoming, or decision, mistakes
abstractions like mind-matter dualism, enduring substance,
and independent location in “time” or “space” for the
concrete realities of process nature, including the
fundamental real facts of experience, relationship, and
intent. Process awareness creates choice, but process
reality itself is not a choice. Process reality is
fundamental to all reality. If these realities hold
throughout all of nature, including human nature and
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organizational reality, then effective decision arises as a
central element for enduring, surviving, and thriving.
Leadership.
Any condition of becoming is potentially a moment of
influence on all else to come, always vectored however
narrowly broadly toward enjoyment. The intensity of
enjoyment that underlies each decision to become can be
narrowed in its effectiveness for the good of the occasion
and the good of the whole by mistakes in misplaced concreteness:
abstractions of awareness, reasoning, or expectation are
taken to be concrete reality. No occasion of “effective
leadership” is exempt from Process reality. The wider the
grasp, with good or ill intent, the wider the influence any
single occasion’s perspective has on the whole. The
implications of such abstractions are innumerable, for
example, leaders cannot be characterized as
epistemologically acting from rational “choice,”
ontologically singular individuals under the influence of
(or influencing for others) some set of external “forces,”
nor does the overarching nature of leadership ever exclude
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“followers.” Process reality completely changes the
conceptualization of leadership however it is engaged,
whether witnessed, practiced for intended consequences, or
performative of concrete accomplishments. The entirety of
this radical alteration of fundamental modern Western truths
of epistemology, ontology and, indeed, metaphysics, lies
beyond the scope of this dissertation, however, except where
these truths, succinctly explored, illuminate our present
topic. I limit the present discussion to one of the first
implications Process principles will have for anyone
attempting to engage the field of leadership from any
perspective (practitioner, interventionist, researcher,
etc.). Anyone interested in leadership must be ever-vigilant
of falling victim to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,
however else they put to use a Process understanding of
reality.
Chapter Summary
Process principles.
Leaders are no different from all other occasions of
becoming. Indeed, Process philosophy would characterize
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leaders the same as any other concrete (in-process-of-
becoming) entity in the universe: as a recurring occasion of
continually emergent, holistically interdependent, sense-
making decision of self-creativity. If effective leadership is
about creating the best outcome over the largest possible
sphere of influence (and this contention will be explored
along with other fundamental concepts in chapter one), then
in a Process world an always dipolar width of grasp (illustrated
in chapter two), has the potential to create these best
outcomes from within at least three Process principles: the
self-organizing ontological principle, the radically
interdependent principle of relativity, and the creative
intensity of the principle of process (explained in chapter
three).
Misplaced concreteness.
I will use these three core Whiteheadian Process
principles to examine who effective leaders are from the
perspective of rejecting three misplaced concretenesses
(enumerated in chapter four). Leaders are emotional-rational
beings, never exclusively one or the other (to believe so is
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an instance of the fallacy of bifurcation). Leaders are
radically interdependent in their self-formation even as
they radically participate in the recurring coherence or
incoherence of the whole, and are therefor never substantive
or enduring with essential and accidental qualities in-
themselves (which is an instance of the fallacy of
substance-quality). Finally, leaders are continually
emergent from the whole of experience and creativity,
neither separated nor bounded as if contained “within” or
lying “on” a surface-linear progression of an externally
occurring space and time (which is an instance of the
fallacy of simple location).
However, just because these abstractions are a fallacy,
non-commission is not a discrete choice that negates
entirely the potentials available in the commission however
much that commission may restrict outcomes. For example,
abstraction has its place in the stability, personal
perspective, and limitations on choice, required at key
moments in the innovation process. Fallacies of misplaced
concreteness can thus be committed to varying degrees of
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complexity, whether unwittingly habitual, consciously
dogmatic, or fully judicious, and remain effective to
varying degrees (also explored in chapter four).
Higher modes of thought.
Effective leaders make coherent, consonant, and
appropriate decisions for the good of all within their
sphere of influence. In a Process universe, effectiveness
must accord with Process principles, and leaders who seek to
be effective will replace fallacies of misplaced
concreteness with the cultivation of higher modes of Process
thought (interpreted in chapter five). When these leaders
begin to adopt Process principles (the ontological
principle, the principle of relativity, and the principle of
process), they will gradually begin to approach leadership
from the unattainable breadth of full cosmological grasp (in
the Greek etymological sense of cosmos, “the all”). However,
with progressively more capacity for awareness, broader
perspective, and more intentional creativity comes the
effectiveness of the process natures of the self-organizing,
interdependent, self-enjoying creative unitive experience of
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the whole (what Whitehead calls the the primordial nature,
the consequent nature, and the superjective nature (e.g.,
1929/1978, pp. 342-351), also interpreted in chapter five)
from whence the highest coherent, harmonious, and
appropriate experiences for the Good of All emerge.
Chapter 1
(estimated 20 pages, 6,000 words )
With Width of Grasp Comes Greater Choice for More Effective
Leadership: Conventional Wisdom
This chapter will take up an initial, brief recasting
of familiar constructs into Process terms: “nature, process,
concreteness, abstraction, fallacy, width of grasp, choice,
effective, leadership, and organization.” In this way this
chapter broaches the idea of higher modes of thought-
feeling, without yet Whitehead’s technical language or
special constructs and compares Process thought to an almost
too-brief glance at conventional philosophical assumptions
that underlie these words commonplace definitions. Finally,
through three appellations normally used to refer to Process
Philosophy, “processual, process-relational, and process
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thought,” I will be inviting you to follow Whitehead into a
wholly different application of the notion of “value,”
whether logical or effective, and the power to discern and
declare such value.
Our exploration of the value Whitehead’s Process
philosophy (e.g., 1925, 1927, 1929/1978, 1929b, 1933, 1938)
might have for leaders and the improvement of leadership
effectiveness is not a purely analytical, nor a purely
constructive, nor a purely phenomenological, nor even a
purely socially critical exercise. While these approaches
are not incorrect, they can prove insufficient in an
inherently processual world, and Process thought brings them
into a resonance that widens their reach into a more
compelling field of influence. I will be venturing with
Whitehead into the world of Process where value means “of
interest” and thus creatively effective at a material level
potentiated by the felt-sense-of-concept. I will have
created a dissertation of value if you at least find your
felt-sense-of-appropriateness to have become more
interesting, your practices to have developed more import
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within and beyond your perspective, and your performative
manifestations of the new to have become ever more widely
influential inside yourself and within your world of
possibility, because these two “places,” inside and outside,
are essentially the same. This chapter begins the journey
with a shared vocabulary of nine concepts that will make our
encounter together on these pages more interesting, and thus
more effective.
Chapter 2
(estimated 23 pages, 6,900 words)
Six Assertions of Dipolar Process Reality: Concreteness
Begins Here
( Three pages, 900 words)
Concreteness is a processual movement of becoming
around two poles of formation. Whitehead, and indeed many
other Process Philosophers before and since, have affirmed
many principles of a process universe not included in the
scope of this work. I confine this investigation to an
initial maxim: for Process thought to be an effective guide
for action it must first not fall victim to the fallacy of
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misplaced concreteness. Concreteness cannot, first and
foremost, be abstracted from the dipolar nature of becoming.
In a Process world, an always dipolar width of grasp creates
decisive outcomes for each concrete (extant) occasion of
becoming from within concrete (foundational) process
principles. This chapter will survey six of Whitehead’s
clarifications of dipolar Process reality with the aim of
providing an initial foundation for understanding
“concrescence,” which will be needed in subsequent chapters
on the three principles process that offer a first glimpse
into the realm of processual width of grasp, the three
fallacies of misplaced concreteness that narrow dipolar
grasp, and higher modes of thought that can provide breadth
for effectiveness.
In each section, I will provide supporting references
to Whitehead’s work, and I will begin introducing for
critique selected representative modern, Western epistemic,
ontological, and metaphysical assertions concerning
individuals, their relations and their world, for example,
dualistic cognitivism, materialistic objectivist
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reification, hypostatization of formalized theoretical
constructs, universally reductionist explicability,
totalizing intellectualist-mechancial essentialism,
prescriptively idealizing determinististic-normativistic
teleological incrementalism, naturalized functionalist-
controlling voluntarism, agentially individualistic
subjectivism, naturalistic empiricist realism, Popperian
scientism (propositionally stabilized eliminativism),
logico-grammatical representationalism, humanist-rationalist
reflexive transcendentalism, etc. I will continue this
practice throughout the dissertation. These habits of
thought (unwitting, dogmatic, or judicious) are fraught with
long histories of argument and almost infinite
concatenations of subtlety, and I cannot within the scope of
this work analyze the entire oeuvre of Western thought for
its fallacies of misplaced concretenesses. However, I can
hope to illustrate enough of the myriad abstractive mistakes
to introduce the beginnings of alternative practices for
practitioners and suggest further implications for those who
would “measure to explain” or “intervene to develop” higher
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modes of leadership effectiveness.
To assist me in grounding these six aspects’ high-
abstractions into lived experience, I will briefly introduce
three identified challenges to effectiveness from a selected
set of sources in leadership literature. In chapter four, I
will call them up again to help me illuminate the fallacies
and degrees of commission. I select these exemplars to
illustrate manifestations of processual dipolarities because
they are directly identified by practitioners in the field
(command positions in the US military, clinical
administrators in mental health services, and leaders of
multinational organizations, respectively). These selections
are in keeping with this dissertation’s focus on
practitioner perspectives of direct experience. While
meeting peer-review rigor, these examples have pragmatically
applied, but never initially limited themselves to,
particular scholarly theoretical constructs or research-
intervention modalities.
The first challenge reveals a global context for
leadership that is “VUCA,” inherently volatile, uncertain,
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complex, and ambiguous (USAWC, 2004, pp. 11-12;) and
requires leader development toward an entirely different
order of strategic capacities than traditionally taught to
emerging leaders (Chia & Holt, 2009; Petrie, 2011). Another
challenge was discovered by Sandra Bloom and colleagues, the
eventual creators of “Sanctuary” leadership programs for
mental health facilities, where they reveals the
pervasiveness of “trauma-informed work environments” found
throughout a wide range of management contexts that is
consistently resolved by emotionally safe, least-
hierarchical, deeply interactive organizations. (Bloom
1997/2013; Bloom & Farragher, 2011, 2013). Finally, through
“presencing” (Scharmer 2009; Scharmer & Kaufer, 2013) Otto
Scharmer, a heir-apparant to participative action research
and learning organization theorists (Argyris & Schön, 1978,
1996; Lewin, 1951; Schein, 1992; Senge, 1990; Senge et al,
2004; Torbert, 1976, 1991, Torbert & Cook-Greuter, 2004),
hopes to rectify leaders’ “blindspot” (2009, p. 6-13) toward
the source of their own mental models in the hopes of
becoming more receptive to the emergent future when facing
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fundamental systemic difficulties that require fundamental
systemic change. These exemplars retain some degree of
misplaced concreteness in their models, and this issue will
be taken up as well in ensuing chapters.
Dipolar Foundations: Experience and Creativity
(Three pages, 1200 words)
Metaphysical reality (the real, concrete universe)
consists only of the activity of experience emergent from its
cardinal condition, creativity, and nothing else. Matter is
experience arising out of creativity, period. (e.g.,
Whitehead 1929/1978, p. 21, 166-167)
Dipolar Becoming: Physical and Conceptual
(Three pages, 1200 words)
In the metaphysical reality of each occasion,
experience ranges in complexity from the mere passage of
formation to the intensity of full consciousness and is
composed around two poles of experience: physical reception
(ingression) and conceptual formation (prehension). (e.g.,
Whitehead, 1929/1978, p. 45)
Dipolar Objective Causality: Efficient and Final
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(Three pages, 1200 words)
Ontological creativity is a causal determination
(satisfaction) that continually arises from the efficacies of
givens (datum) and potentials (eternal objects) and from final
intensities and aversions (appetitions for satisfaction of aim
and form), and such determinations (superjects) continually
pass on into the next occasions of creative determination as
real and primal (not abstract, epiphenomenal, imaginal, or
derivative) givens and potentials. (e.g., Whitehead,
1929/1978, p. 45)
Dipolar Subjective Prehension: Form and Aim
(Three pages, 1200 words)
The ontological decision to become just this, this
time, turns on the question of the enjoyment of relevance
that is answered simultaneously from within the occasion’s
considerations of form (what the occasion is meant to be)
and aim (what it means to be), whether that phrase
“considerations of form and aim” is taken as a less complex
“to become real again” or a more complex intentionality to
realize existence ever more fully, coherently, harmoniously,
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and appropriately. (e.g., Whitehead, 1929/1978, p. 19) To
“realize” means simultaneously “to manifest as matter
(experience arising out of creativity)” and “to experience,
to attend to what matters;” these are not negating
categories. For an occasion to “consider” is not an
anthropomorphic psychologism, but an experienced degree of
complex self-formation within causal efficacy and presentational
immediacy.
Dipolar Grasp for Decisive Choice: Intensity and Contrast
(Three pages, 1200 words)
The epistemology of enjoyment, whether simply of self-
existence or more complexly of self-realization, is the
occasion’s private synthesis of both the intensities of what
has been and contrasts with what could be, an ordering that
lends a felt-sense-of-conceptualized-rightness to the
accomplishment of that moment’s togetherness, or unitive
experience, its coming together to be just this, now. (e.g.,
Whitehead, 1929/1978, p. 83-85)
Dipolar Effectiveness: Symbolic Reference and Imaginative Extension
(Three pages, 1200 words)
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To move epistemologically beyond “blind [or] excess
zest” for becoming, higher modes of feeling-concept can open
within the prehensive mode of symbolic reference. The occasion
entertains possibilities within a broader common ground of
contrast, and its intensities begin to inform more adaptive,
more creative, and thus more enjoyable unitive (self-
creative) decisions to become this new adaptation to the
givens and the potentials. (e.g., Whitehead, 1929/1978, p.
163) With further complexity, imaginative extension introduces
symbolic reference to the first glimmers of the originative
freedoms of consciousness and thence to ever fuller
awareness. (e.g., Whitehead, 1929/1978, p. 168)
The Process Reality of Leadership: [The Dipolar Nature of
Effective Leadership]
(Two pages, 600 words)
In this concluding section I will more fully draw
parallels to width of grasp, choice and leadership
effectiveness, including references to the literature, that
summarize the above theoretical concepts.
Chapter Three
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(estimated 20 pages, 6,000 words )
Three Principles of Process Reality
(Three pages, 900 words)
This chapter will articulate how the dipolar width of
grasp illustrated in chapter two creates decisive outcomes
from within at least three process principles: the self-
organizing ontological principle, the radically
interdependent principle of relativity, and the creative
intensity of the principle of process. Whitehead listed more
than forty Process principles in Process and Reality (1929/1978,
pp. 20-30) alone. I choose these three because in various
places Whitehead directly relates them to the capacity to
acknowledge the fallacies of misplaced concreteness. In each
section, I will provide supporting references to Whitehead’s
work, and to illustrate manifestations of these principles I
will briefly identify certain remedies for effectiveness
from leadership literature, appealing in one way or another
to a presence-based leadership stance, a category which I
briefly defend in this introduction. Again, these selected
authors’ works have stood the test of time in the field of
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leadership development. Not only has each enjoyed longevity
for two decades or more in the popular press, demonstrating
a solid appeal for practicing leaders, each author, or
colleagues continuing their work, has also published at
least one recent recommendation that expands their
conclusions more than ever in the direction of Process
thought, though most not expressly so. I list these
references below.
Ontological Principle
(Five pages, 1,500 words)
Every processual decision to become just this occasion,
as is, derives from nowhere else but the occasion’s own
decision to become itself amid all the actuality and
potentiality presented before its own modes of form and aim
seeking unity. (e.g., Whitehead, 1929/1978, pp. 24, 43, 147-
148, 243) Thus substance is never bifurcated, form from aim.
Actuality cannot be abstracted from the dipolar felt-sense
of self-concept, both wholly receptive of all other passed-
away entities’ constitutions (whether acknowledged or
ignored) and wholly conditioned by its own aim to enjoy its
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own unity. (pp. 18-19)
This section will engage exemplars of presence as an
acting-deciding-potentiating from within a self-forming
identity that acknowledges its radical unboundedness. True
constraints of the given world are recognized simultaneously
with a degree of openness to novelty and potential for
greater enjoyment of self-in-world and world-through-self.
In Whitehead’s process thought this is the ontological
principle, but these authors exemplify this principle with
varying degrees of fit: Daniel Goleman writes about
emotional intelligence (1995, 1998, 2006; and with Boyatzis
& McKee, 2002) and focus (1977/1988, 2013), Martin Seligman
writes about learned optimism (1972, 1990, 1999; Peterson &
Seligman, 1983; with Maier & Geer, 1968) and flourishing
(2002, 2011), and Peter Senge writes about learning
organizations (1990, 1994, 1999; with Scharmer, Jawarski, &
Flowers, 2004) while Otto Scharmer continues his work with
investigations into “presencing” (2009; with Kaufer, 2013).
Principle of Relativity
(Five pages, 1,500 words)
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The process-relational potentiality of every past
occasion is present in and becomes less or more relevant to
every current decision for self-enjoyment. (e.g., Whitehead,
1929/1978, p. 7, 22, 28, 50-51, 58-59, 149, 220) Thus
substantive composite character is never a mere quality of
enduring substance but instead is the outcome of the
influential intensity of the presence of all other
previously actualized entities, from which the occasion can
never be abstracted and remain actual. (e.g., pp. 58-59)
This section will engage exemplars of presence as
acting-deciding-engaging from within a productive influence
that always includes a felt-sense of creative advance. This
felt-sense of rightness is not a permanent thing to be
possessed or located in the “right” decision. This sense is
continuously inherent in and continually emergent from the
field of shared experience. Envisioned potentialities of the
“good,” however that may be defined in that moment from that
perspective, take on a sense of real possibility, rather
than imagined aspiration. This field of energy and
information acts as a continually emergent source of
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individual and communitarian agency. The field acts as a
continuous background against which decisions are made,
while it also remains continually immanent in the making of
each choice. In Whitehead’s process thought this is the
principle of relativity, but these authors exemplify this
principle with varying degrees of fit: Richard Boyatzis and
Annie McKee write about emotional intelligence and resonant
leadership (2005, 2006; with Goleman, 2002), Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi writes about flow (1990, 1996) and “good
work” (2003; with Gardner & Damon, 2001), and Howard Gardner
writes about frames of mind and mastery (1983/1993/2011,
1993, 2007; with Laskin, 1995).
Principle of Process
(Five pages, 1,500 words)
Process thought must derive from an acknowledgment of
the principle that constitution, concreteness, is a
continual, iterative becoming. (e.g., Whitehead, 1929/1978,
p. 16, 23, 153-154, 228, 235) The central tenet of process
is the ongoingness of the felt-sense-of-things (prehension)
as an intuition of all else that exists (whether simple
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reception or complex understanding, pp. 153-154). This tenet
lies at the very core of the creative advance that is the
concrete universe and from whose conceptual ordering the
decisive occasion can never be abstracted and remain fully
coherent (e.g., p. 235).
This section will engage exemplars of presence as
acting-deciding-appreciating from within a purposive
emergence that comes from choices wielded not external
forces imposed. One’s recurring search for attainment of
highest aim recognizes the concerns of a given reality while
remaining open to potentials not yet realized. In
Whitehead’s process thought this is the principle of
process, but these authors exemplify this principle with
varying degrees of fit: William Torbert writes about
participative action inquiry and attuned post-conventional
cognitive development (1973, 1974, 1976, 1989, 1991, 1994,
1998, 2000; with Cook-Gruter et al, 2004), Karl Weick writes
about collective sensemaking first as retrospective of past
mistakes (1977, 1988, 1995) then as anticipatory of emerging
futures (2004, 2010, with Roberts, 1993; with Sutcliffe,
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2001/2007), and Francisco Varela wrote about autopoeisis
(with Maturana, 1980, 1998) and becoming aware in the
specious present (1999; with Depraz &Vermersch, 2002).
Processual Width of Grasp, Process-Relational Choice,
Process Thoughtful Effectiveness
(Two pages, 600 words )
In this concluding section I will more fully draw
parallels to width of grasp, choice and leadership
effectiveness, including references to the literature, that
summarize the above theoretical concepts. In this section I
will consider whether the appellations for process thought,
namely “processual,” “process-relational,” and “process
thought,” are interchangeable, or whether they subtly
contrast for a more informative understanding of the lived
experience of higher-mode thought-feeling, especially for
leadership effectiveness.
Chapter Four
(estimated 55 pages, 16,500 words)
Fallacies of Misplaced Concreteness and Degrees of
Commission
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(Three pages, 900 words )
The dipolar grasp so far described can be narrowed in
its effectiveness by mistakes in awareness, reasoning, or
expectation that derive from lack of acknowledgment of at
least those principles of process described above. These
mistakes, nevertheless, can attain a relative degree of
effectiveness even when committed at varying degrees of
complexity: from unwitting or semiconscious habitual
abstraction, to conscious yet dogmatic abstraction, to fully
judicious intentional abstraction. Asserting that a fallacy
can have a “degree of commission,” rather than only fully
and logically negated, is itself a practice of processual
thinking and I will address this paradox during the
discussion. This chapter will have two parts. The first will
describe each fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and the
second will describe the degree to which the fallacies may
be committed and result in ineffectiveness or effectiveness.
In each sub-section, I will provide supporting references to
Whitehead’s work, and I will revisit, to more fully engage,
certain challenges to effectiveness from leadership
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literature, particularly “VUCA,” “Sanctuary,” and
“Presencing,” that illustrate manifestations of these
fallacies and their “degrees” of commission. [Please note
that, to turn in this outline in good time, I do not extract
exact references to Whitehead’s text for these and the
remaining concepts. Do know that they are all duly marked in
the primary texts and await full citation in the paper to
come.]
Abstraction Misplaced as Concreteness
(25 pages, 9,000 words)
(Five pages, 1,500 words)
When one commits a fallacy of misplaced concreteness
one ignores or denies that the basic unit of reality is the
creative experience of the concrescent occasion and that
this actual entity is both medium and mode of a creativity
emanating from pure experience. This fallacy of abstraction
from actual process concreteness can take at least three
forms: the bifurcation of nature, substance-quality
thinking, and simple location.
The fallacy of bifurcation of nature.
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(Five pages, 1,500 words)
The fallacy of bifurcation separates elements of the
fundamentally dipolar width of grasp in a concrete moment of
creativity, some of which were illustrated in chapter two.
This abstraction from dipolarity denies formative effect
(and purposive lure) for one element by contrast with the
other. In other words, this fallacy dismisses one pole of
becoming as accidental in order to favor selected
explanatory powers of the other. Thus it simplifies, but
erroneously erases, the generative contrasting tension and
the integrative satisfying movement within the decisive,
creative choice of each moment. This section must briefly
touch on, but does not undertake a full discussion of, the
implications this has for abstractions of materiality and
mentality, objects and subjects, epiphenomenalism and causal
dualism, etc.
The fallacy of substance-quality thinking.
(Five pages, 1,500 words)
The fallacy of substance-quality thinking abstracts
movement and change away from the essential experiential
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nature of a creative cosmos in order to better conceptualize
and manipulate what are assumed to be fixed, solid, non-
volitional entities. For example, within these abstractions,
entities’ qualities are measurable accidents rather than
spontaneous attributes of a private experience influencing
public, shared consequence. Mental dispositions such as
certainty and prediction become possible, as do the
avoidance through ignorance of chaotic elements, such as
emotional turbulence or the abyss of the unknown.
If the actual effectiveness within the cosmos is
experiential and creative, then each entity is an occasion
defined by a choice that necessarily engages the messiness of
uncertainty. The substance-quality abstraction, furthermore,
fails to recognize that choice must arise out of valuations
of relevance, aversion, and judgments of responsiveness and
responsibility within each and every concrete moment of
creativity, no matter how simple or complex its grasp. This
section must briefly touch on, but does not undertake a full
discussion of, the implications this has for abstractions of
subjectivism and representationalism, mechanism and
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constructivism, etc.
The fallacy of simple location.
(Five pages, 1,500 words )
The fallacy of simple location abstracts
interrelatedness away from the essential becoming nature of
an experiential cosmos in order to ease the impossibility of
containing the infinite complexity of importance and
potentiality, unfolding and enfolded, that characterizes the
whole within a single occasion’s decisive felt-
conceptualization.
Effectiveness must include both types of grasp: the
ordering of stability of form and the novelty-seeking of
satisfaction of aim. Furthermore, it must include both types
of organization: ordering endurance and chaotic novelty.
Only then can efforts of accomplishment properly benefit
from the efficacy to be found within the vectors of tendency
held in tension between the habits of located endurance and
the creative impulses of contrastive intensities across the
whole of creativity. This section must briefly touch on, but
does not undertake a full discussion of, the implications
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this has for abstractions of time and space: that reality
happens in fields of influence not on flat planes of
geometric distance between separate “points,” that
progressive creative advance does not happen on determined
trajectories but an ever-emergent vector, that “stages” are
not discrete nor time a substance “within which” each
occasion resides, etc.
Unwitting, Dogmatic, Judicious Commission of the Fallacies
and Higher Modes of Thought
(Second part: 25 pages, 7,500 words)
(Five pages, 1,500 words)
The fallacies of misplaced concreteness are fallacies
of abstraction from actual, processual reality. Identifying
such modes of thought as fallacious however, does not entail
negating them entirely. Effectiveness is still to be had
within the degrees of unwitting, dogmatic, or judicious
commission of the abstractions from the process nature of
nature. Chapter five will more fully present the higher
modes of concrete thought that makes full use of the
effectiveness of process principles for processual, process-
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relational and process-thoughtful leadership.
Unwitting-habitual commission of fallacy.
(Five pages, 1,500 words)
Unwitting, unconscious commissions of the fallacies are
largely ineffective, but mysteriously so to the subject,
because the unacknowledged mistakes of bifurcation,
substance-quality, and simple location in time and space
contrast so counter-intuitively with the common-sense
assumptions about choice and effectiveness that saturate
Westernized expectations for reality and adequate response
to that reality.
Dogmatic-insistent commission of fallacy.
(Five pages, 1,500 words)
Conscious, yet dogmatic, commission of the fallacies
are parochially effective within a narrow relational reach
and a confined span of space-time. Dogmatism supports, for
example, situated power-relations or stabilizing rules or
norms, treating them as durable, inviolate, or insensitive
to the particular. However, these structures or functions
often become unsustainable when confronted with the process-
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actuality of substance-as-experience, larger fields of
relations, more impactful amplitudes of response, or longer
time-scales of change. When this disharmony arises, when
expectations are destabilized, the leader can choose (or be
forced from habit or dogma) to revert to unwitting
confusion, or the leader can implement a cultivated, more
complex, judicious stance to the process reality.
Judicious-conscious commission of fallacy.
(Five pages, 1,500 words )
Conscious, yet judicious, commission of the fallacies
can be moderately effective at much larger scales of
interconnectivity and creative dynamics. Such an abstraction
may, for example, allow a decision-maker to hold on to a
convenient fiction or to make assumptions about a degree of
stability, duration, and explicit certainty (for example,
ceteris paribus) in order to make room for more detailed
understanding of a particular aspect, a more decisive
action, or a more emotionally-stabilizing anticipation.
However, to make judicious abstractions ever more effective
as the iterations build over time often requires some
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capacity for higher-mode processual, process-relational,
process-emergent thought-feeling from which one may make the
judicious abstractive decision, or “cut,” from a felt-sense
of whole-system coherence, the as-yet-unharmonized potential
of the future that wants to emerge, the appropriate
perspective to see an effective depth of “rightness-of-
feel,” etc.
Higher-mode thought-feeling acknowledges Process principles.
(Five pages, 1,500 words)
Higher-mode feeling-thought-decision-action
acknowledges at least the main principles of process reality
presented in this dissertation: dipolarity of nature and the
ontological principle, the principle of relativity, and the
principle of process. In this sub-section I will consider
more fully whether the appellations for process thought,
namely “processual,” “process-relational,” and “process
thought,” are interchangeable, or whether they subtly
contrast for a more informative understanding of the lived
experience of higher-mode thought-feeling, especially for
leadership effectiveness.
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I hold in abeyance until chapter four a discussion of
whether and how higher modes of thought acquire
effectiveness through acknowledgments of the three
principles of process, and furthermore, how three highest
natures of the unitive experience of the whole (the
primordial nature, the consequential nature, and the
superjective nature) might elicit ever higher forms of
leadership effectiveness.
Rationalism’s ‘Estimates of Success Are Exaggerated’
(1929/1978, p. 8)
(Two pages, 600 words)
Rationalism often pretends to present fully-formed
certainties, instead of recognizing the essentially
tentative nature of any scheme meant to discriminate.
“Productive thought has proceeded either by the poetic
insight…or by the imaginative elaboration…Progress is always
a transcendence of what is obvious.” (1929/1978, p. 9) For
Whitehead “importance” is the touchstone of the creativity
(effectiveness) necessary for a flourishing “survival, or of
self-enjoyment…’being’ and of ‘well-being’” (p. 9), and only
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by accepting that “rationalism is an adventure in
clarification…in which even partial success has importance”
(p. 9) can one participate in the successes of an
essentially creative nature. I advance a reinterpretation of
certain challenges to effectiveness from leadership
literature, particularly “VUCA,” “Sanctuary,” and
“Presencing,” wondering if they might instead be calls to
adventure that are frequently taboo. These challenges could
be considered paradoxical to conventional approaches to
leadership effectiveness: including the adventures of grief
in strategic failure, joy in managerial love, and fear in
non-violent developmental anarchy.
Chapter Five
(estimated 40 pages, 12,000 words)
When width of grasp creates greater choice for more
effectiveness, then leaders begin to acquire higher modes of
un-bifurcated thought-feeling. These higher modes can be
established through an acceptance of process principles and
by gradually attempting to approach the unattainable yet
increasingly potent natures of the unitive experience from
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whence emerge coherence, harmony, and the most appropriate
outcomes. This chapter, also, will have two parts. The first
will describe higher modes of thought available through the
dipolar nature of concrescent moments, and the second will
describe the natures of the unitive experience (primordial,
consequent, and superjective). In each sub-section, I will
provide supporting references to Whitehead’s work, and I
will revisit, to more fully engage, certain remedies for
effectiveness from leadership literature that illustrate
manifestations of Process principles, such as presence-based
leadership, sensemaking, active inquiry, and learning-
organization theory.
Higher Modes of Thought-Feeling
(Two+ pages, 750 words)
Acknowledging the principles of Process.
(Five pages, 1,500 words)
In a process world, to lead effectively is to make good
choices from a processual, process-relational, process
thought-feeling orientation that creates, in the moment of
decision, a width of attunement, awareness and perspective
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for ever more coherent, adequate and appropriate choice in
order to become just this satisfaction, now, while
acknowledging a dynamic relationship with the decided
massive past and increasing the invited possibilities for
the present such that one’s aim toward an enjoyable,
sustainable, thriving future. By acknowledging fundamental
Process principles one may more adequately cultivate such an
orientation.
Symbolic reference and imaginative extension.
(Five pages, 1,500 words)
Whitehead presents a complex yet important discussion,
primarily in Part II, Chapter VIII of Process and Reality
(pp. 168-183) and his lectures on Symbolism: Its Meaning and
Effect (1927), of a “symbolic reference” that synthesizes the
dipolar nature of the concrescent decision into an
“originative freedom.” I will parse his discussion of how
symbolic reference expands further into “imaginative extension”
and leads to consciousness, in order to more fully to
clarify how the nature of higher modes of thought provides
the basis for my interpretation of Whitehead’s philosophy
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for leadership effectiveness, that “width of grasp creates
choice for effectiveness.”
The Highest Natures of Unitive Experience
(Five pages, 4,500 words)
If all of this is true of leadership, may not we
attempt to approach the nature of attuned, valuing,
perspectival width of grasp that characterizes the unitive
experience of the creative actualization of the whole
process-universe in each moment? Whitehead names this mode
of actualization the primordial nature, the superjective nature, and
the consequent nature of the fullest experience of the creative
absolute. This entitive occasion comprises the totality of
our universe in its timeless moment of form-aim-satisfaction
and in its continually concrescent attuned grasp of each
occasion of the whole. (These are aspects of the nature of
what Whitehead calls “God,” and I will support my reasons
for choosing an alternate appellation, “unitive experience,”
for the purposes of enriching the pursuit of effective leadership
by practitioners, interventionists, researchers, etc.)
Primordial nature.
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(Five pages, 4,500 words)
If the nature of the universe does indeed create a
generative dipolarity for width of choice, and if we accept
the ontological principle that every occasion is “positively
somewhere, in potency everywhere” (Whitehead, 1929/1978, p.
40), then I posit the question: can leadership develop a
width of presence that resonates with the unitive
experience’s primordial nature of “absolute wealth of
potentiality” (p. 343) for “general creative advance” (p.
344) that lends a “poetic…freedom…[for a] “vision of truth,
beauty, goodness…[and] zest” (p. 345) to this creativity?
Consequent nature.
(Five pages, 4,500 words)
If the nature of the universe does indeed create a
generative dipolarity for effectiveness, and if we accept
the principle of relativity as “every being is potential for
every other becoming to follow” (Whitehead, 1929/1978, p.
22), then I posit the question: can leadership develop a
width of presence that resonates with the consequent nature of
the unitive experience, a nature that “shares in every
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particular completion, feeling each novelty” (p. 545) giving
each occasion in which the leader participates enough
“perspective…to become free from discordance” (p. 88)
because acting “guide” (p. 88) with a “patient” (p. 346)
“determination…[toward] necessary goodness” (p. 345)?
Superjective nature.
(Five pages, 4,500 words)
If the nature of the universe does indeed create a
generative dipolarity for leadership in the process sense,
and if we accept the principle of process as “breadth
reacting with intensity” (Whitehead, 1929/1978, p. 16), then
can leadership develop a width of presence that resonates
with the superjective nature of the unitive experience and by
this presence infuse each co-constructive interaction with a
“pragmatic value qualifying transcendent creativity” (p. 87)
that does not enforce a strategy or force an outcome but
achieves success in a participative “weaving by rightness of
feeling” (p. 346) as a “fellow sufferer…[with a] tender care
that nothing is lost” (p. 346)?
Broadest Width of Grasp: Effective Leadership Emulates the
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Breadth of Unitive Experience
(Five pages, 4,500 words)
Following to its conclusion the argument that, given
the Process nature of the cosmos, effectiveness best derives
from an acknowledgement of the Process principles and
cultivation of higher modes of thought-feeling, then the
higher natures of the unitive experience might indeed prove
to be the best and truest direction of increasing capacities
for increasing capacities for width of grasp in leadership
itself. I advance a reinterpretation of certain remedies for
effectiveness from leadership literature, particularly
presence-based leadership, active inquiry, sensemaking, and
learning-organization theory, likening effectiveness to the
capacity to enact the Good. I wonder if an emulation of
these qualities by which the unitive experience “leads the
world” (to paraphrase Whitehead, 1929/1978, p. 346) means to
engage in patience, peace, poetry and the envisionment of
truth, beauty and goodness. These higher calls to adventure
are frequently taboo, and certainly paradoxical, to
conventional approaches to leadership effectiveness.
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I also will explore the implications of at least three
very recent theoretical and methodological “turns” for an
application of Whitehead’s Process Thought to modes and
mediations of effective leadership. Might these new models
provide ready-made pathways for a Process-Creative
Leadership? Throughout this thesis I have been using works
that have followed the turn to presence-based leadership, and
I will expand on that choice here. I also wonder about the
consonance Process leadership might have with the practice-turn
(e.g., Nicolini, 2012) in the social sciences, and I wonder
about performativity in critical social theory, particularly
its interpretation by the philosopher Judith Butler (1990;
2004b; 2012).
Conclusion
(estimated 10 pages, 3,000 words)
With Width of Grasp Comes Greater Choice for More Effective
Leadership: Process Thought
Depending on what emerges in the body of this
dissertation, this chapter might revisit the familiar
constructs now recast into Process terms: “nature, process,
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concreteness, abstraction, width of grasp, choice,
effective, leadership, organization.”
This chapter summarizes the idea that through higher
modes of thought-feeling the leader may avoid fallacies of
misplaced concreteness and with a subsequent width of grasp
acquire choice for the effectiveness promised by a full
acknowledgment of the fundamental Process principles of
reality.
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Appendix A: Lexicon
(estimated 10 pages)
To avoid the “fallacy of the perfect dictionary” (1938,
p. 235), this glossary of terms is not a definitive
dictionary of usage but a comparative lexicon of terminology
listing quoted treatments from various theorists specific to
this study, much like the Oxford English Dictionary.
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Appendix B: Concrescent Occasion
(estimated 10 pages)
In this appendix I attempt a judiciously abstracted
explanation of the elements and their movements within the
concrescent occasion of becoming, an explication that is the
key to understanding the rest of Whitehead’s Process
Philosophy. I will include graphics if my own devising, ones
that I have used to make my own sense of Whitehead’s
concrescent moment. I will couch this explanation in
language that I might use for a workshop of leadership
scholar-practitioners with an advanced level of interest in
the subject, and I will include citational references to
Whitehead’s work.
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Appendix C: “God,” The Unitive Experience
(estimated 5 pages)
In this appendix I expand on my choice to replace
Whitehead’s word “God” with the phrase “unitive experience”
or “Unitive Experience.”
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Appendix D: Leadership Development Workshop
(estimated 5 pages)
In this appendix I will write a brief treatment of an
imaginary workshop, in which I would take the leader-
attendees through a program of experiential learning to
acquire an introductory understanding before they begin to
apply the above Process approach to one of their concrete,
lived challenges. The workshop will likely take the form of
a workshop preparatory to Scharmer’s action-research
Presencing curriculum, expanding or changing Scharmer’s work
to reflect an awareness of the fallacies of misplaced
concreteness, the principles of Process and the mindful
presence-practice-performative advance of Whitehead’s higher
modes of thought.
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