Coherence (Part 2) ~ It's Not a Process, It's a Field

What it means to be a Chief Coherence Officer...and why we need them NOW

Divining the Role of a CCO from the Heart

Earlier this week, I offered Part 1 of this essay on what it could mean to be a Chief Coherence Officer for companies and organizations. This is a role I am divining/creating as it comes to me. To my knowledge, it doesn’t already exist. Please feel to correct me if I’m wrong about this.

The specific coherence I’m talking about facilitating in groups is very high. In Part 1, I wrote:

The highest coherence I can achieve, I achieve through spiritual service and alignment with the Divine. This is me as Love in action or embodying Love. This is the farthest thing from woo-woo. This is like becoming a tuning fork for the Sacred, for Truth and for Love. I am standing in a Truth that makes lesser truths show their ragged edges. It’s glaringly obvious to anyone willing to pay attention to what’s real and what’s not. This is the field a Chief Coherence Officer can transmit, radiate, offer, bring…words fail here because it’s a channel, an imprint, a way of being, not a verb.

What I am coming to understand is that this role is one among many that needs to be created and practiced to get us to the future we all want to be a part of; the future Charles Eisenstein called, “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” I call it the New Earth or enlightened culture. We could call it a second Renaissance (more on that below). We can conceive of it as a Golden Age. Whatever you want to call it…it’s becoming more clear to me that this new era is all about THE HEART. It may be more accurate to say, the era is a manifestation of the Collective Heart. When enough of us are solidly centered in it, the center of culture will shift. And we will move from humanity’s current orientation around “lower mind” and the solar plexus qualities of individualism and power, into the realm of the higher mind and the heart where the frequency is LOVE and UNITY.

This is a phase shift of enormous proportions and it is already underway. How do I know? I can feel it! The implications are enormous and will only dawn on us as it happens…Stop worrying. Start walking. We cannot plan it or strategize or see the way forward from where we are now. We have to live into it. It takes trust and surrender in equal measure. Our guides are those who have done it, those who have walked before. How will we know them? They will be resonating at the frequency of Love. We will feel them.

The Chief Coherence Officer is someone who is already established in the heart center and relating to reality from the frequency and perspective of LOVE. When they are introduced into a system, the field creates the potential for change…an up-leveling of coherence of the whole…to meet that. Basically, everything that is not born of Love and done with Love will fall away. It will become incoherent to the whole.

It’s important to say here that the LOVE I am talking about is not the sentimental aspect of love we idolize and fetishize here on earth right now. It’s a cosmic, evolutionary force. It is the fire of transmutation. It is the great dissolver of paradox and separation. It is AUM, OM, HOME. It is a generative aspect of GOD and we can create from this place, live and love in this place, re-create culture and commerce (such as it is - production of goods and offering of services) from this place.

Right now, the number of organizations that are ready to resonate at the frequency of Love is quite low. But, I know they exist. I’m not talking about being perfect or getting it all right…I’m talking about organizations with a sincere desire to uphold the highest ideals and values for the benefit of people and planet. If the WILL is there, the WAY will show itself.

All of this is new to me, too. How to marry LOVE and BUSINESS? I think I would have told you years ago it wasn’t possible. At the time, I would have pointed to all the flaws in business and capitalism to make my point. But, I have finally come to know the heart, to know a higher aspect of Love, and I can see that the insufficiency was in me. I didn’t have access, couldn’t see, that Love is always available, always an option, and absolutely everywhere…including in business. Anywhere people and other living beings—even unseen and disembodied beings—are congregated, Love is the law. The degree to which we’re aware of this and understand it, is the degree to which we can manifest it more fully and abide in it here and now.

It’s Not What We Do, It’s Who We Are

It’s not enough to just sit and resonate at the frequency of Love. The CCO embodies Love in Action and Love in Service. There are aspects of “work” here.

Just as a good coach or mentor helps an individual self-actualize; refine their character; integrate unconscious aspects; and reach their highest expression of Self—a Chief Coherence Officer helps an organization or team actualize into its ultimate expression as a collective. They help an organization or team operate in coherence with its highest expression or “original impulse.”

The first rule of taking on a project as a Chief Creative Officer (CCO for short, though not to be confused with a Chief Creative Officer or a Chief Culture Officer) is that you must be coherent with the original impulse of your client. In order to do this, it’s critical to identify what that original impulse is. It has to be something you feel aligned with in order to protect and support its ultimate expression in the world. The CCO becomes a “harmonizer” of the energy of the impulse within the company—and does this by embodying, resonating, and listening to that impulse. To do it with heart, it’s got to be something you believe in.

I found a scientific paper in the journal Nature that looked at “the role of coherence as a design element in realizing function.” What a beautifully precise articulation of what coherence can do for a system. I also enjoy the work of the HeartMath Institute who have studied how to “change your heart rhythm pattern to create physiological coherence; a scientifically measurable state characterized by increased order and harmony in our mind, emotions and body.”

An excerpt from my recent conversation on the Entangled World podcast with Najia Lupson:

A Transitional Role

This is not the first time I’ve created a role for myself in the corporate world. In 1997, just out of college, I found a job working at Landor Associates in San Francisco. I sat in meetings with huge brands—sometimes the only woman and usually the youngest person at the table. I was intuitive with a gift for pattern recognition, and had an adventurous social life. Soon, I realized this gave me access to a wealth of valuable information these marketers wanted about youth culture. I convinced one to hire me as a trendspotter. I had no idea how to do the job, but knew instinctively it was my thing. I figured it out and eventually made my way to New York City where I spent 10 years in advertising as a top strategist and trends expert. I loved it, until it no longer suited me and I began to joke that I was the first futurist to predict the end of futurism.

What I am describing as a paid role of Chief Coherence Officer is a transitional step for these transitional times. It’s a way to recognize and value what will ultimately get us to the future faster—bring the future through into this time now. I hope it inspires others to recognize the value in what they are bringing through in their heart-centered visions, too. The following “job description” is written as an IDEAL. It’s what would be ideal for me—at least as a starting point. You may have other ideas and I’d love to hear them.

While we still have a system that requires money and material wealth to survive and thrive, we must find a way for people doing the hard, and often-invisible, relational and sensing work to be compensated. In the old/current system we’re still ensnared by the cloak of invisibility that surrounds, obscures, and takes for granted (DOES NOT COMPENSATE MONETARILY) so much valuable work: emotional labor, the strengthening of relationships, healing and repair of social ruptures, diplomacy, inspiration, care and tending, teaching and training and mentoring…You know, the fabric of what keeps human communities vital and flourishing.

First, a few definitions. The CCO is the client’s trusted advisor on frequency, resonance, and interference.

1. Frequency is the baseline vibration of the effort or the potential vibration of the field the group of people is creating together. Most companies today are resonating at a pretty dense frequency. Or they are running at a speedy frequency that is incoherent and therefore chaotic. Frequency is impacted by many conditions including—the source of the original impulse, vitality of the system and people within it, working conditions and culture…Higher frequency is better, but we have to start by being coherent where we are. Frequency can be raised but that will eventually exclude any beings and ideas that can’t abide the higher frequency. A CCO can help a group notice and adjust to frequency shifts. (BTW, the frequency is shifting all the time due to major influences like the planets and world events…so this cannot be underestimated as a condition for working, creating, and bringing things into manifestation.)

2. Resonance is the synchronous vibration of two or more beings - a basis of knowing and feeling what is true for you and what is True. Sometimes people I work with report feeling “truth bumps” or goose bumps or tears in the presence of truth. We know it when we feel it! Resonance helps us move with confidence in the absence of empirical data. At the moment, we are not used to basing major decisions on gut feelings, but the more refined we can get in our own body-instruments, the more we will do this and it will help us move into the miracle field! Resonance is a way of knowing, navigating, and aligning with others that other animal species count on…we’ve just lost our connection this vital instrument because of our overreliance for the past millennia on thinking, mentation and reason.

3. Interference from an outside influence changes coherence. It can be of a helpful, benign, or malignant nature. Helpful interference can come from the addition of new people or energies, unseen “guides,” or new information and can be received and harvested for inspiration and new direction. Benign interference can show up as resistance or unconscious conditioning in participants within the system. This can be unpacked or integrated to bring more light and information into the system. Malignant interference is problematic. It’s best dealt with proactively through protection. Sometimes outside forces that have the (malevolent) intention of interrupting coherence in systems that are doing much good in the world. A CCO can offer protection or at least awareness when these outside interferences are present.

I want to make it very clear that coherence is not about homogeneity or stability or some kind of artificially imposed order. As I said in the first part of this essay, I’ve been to extremely coherent concerts and clubs where I couldn’t hear myself think and sporting events or speeches where there’s a lot on the line and you can hear a pin drop. We can be absolutely coherent with chaos as divine order if that’s what’s happening. It’s not about controlling the system. It’s about recognizing where we are and realizing the potential in the creative process, system or experience.

Conditions and Engagements (Partial List)

1. The CCO’s ultimate boss is the Heart, the Future, God, the Absolute, the Sacred, Life, Truth. They work on behalf of the new paradigm and are probably outside consultants. Outsider status helps them maintain objectivity and keep their finger on the pulse of greater cultural currents.

2. The CCO is always asking “What’s actually happening?” and looking through surface-level illusion to the deeper layers of energy and meaning in a system. Shadow dynamics are revealed and healed.

3. CCOs are helpful at the inception of a project or effort as deep listeners to the original impulse. They can help a team of people get very clear on the nature of the call and the origin of the WILL that is bringing this system into being. They can even download commands or blueprints from higher sources. They can help the team create some guidelines to follow to stay in alignment with their mission.

4. CCOs are also helpful when there is a period of chaos, challenge or stagnancy within an organization. When a well-intentioned effort is continually stymied or running up against a wall, it’s worth checking to see where the signal is getting lost. The CCO can observe and maybe even embed with an organization temporarily to identify blocks and incoherence in the system…or interference coming from outside the system.

5. Safety and radical honesty are pre-conditions for a coherent system. We need to ensure all members of an organization know they are safe to speak their truth and won’t be penalized for expressing what they see, know or feel as long as it is also done with care for the system and a healthy self-responsibility. (This already rules out many clients firmly established within the current paradigm where profit comes before people.)

6. A CCO should be counted on to represent and interpret outside and unseen perspectives and energies. If we’re going to move beyond scientific materialism, we have to have a way of including these forces. There must be humility and a recognition that we are all embedded in a vast ecosystem that is way beyond our comprehension! A CCO helps us orient to that complexity. The client must have an openness to this; a willingness to embark on a journey that is beyond reason.

7. This is one of the keys to what makes a good CCO—discernment about subtle (sometimes unseen) energetics and presences within a system and those acting on a closed system from outside. A CCO needs to hold strong boundaries and be able to identify and rectify porous and vulnerable aspects of their own and the client’s system.

8. The field a CCO creates through ritual, deep listening and sharing, channeling, prayer, and contemplation is a sacred space. Being in this space regularly will acclimatize team members to higher truths and eventually teach them to feel for themselves. Wisdom is distributed throughout the group and downloads can land with anyone; but, there must be an ultimate authority or protocol for making decisions.

The New Renaissance Is One of Consciousness

Right now, I’m resonating with the notion that we’re in the early days of a full-scale cultural Renaissance. I love what my friend, Daniel Pinchbeck, has shared about this recently. In a post on July 29, entitled The Regenaissance, he writes:

I think the shift from materialism to a paradigm that realizes consciousness to be the foundation of reality is a massive turning point for humanity — as significant as the shift from believing the Earth was at the center of the universe to the heliocentric paradigm, which Galileo and Copernicus risked their lives to reveal. Now we know the sun actually revolves around an enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way, time is relative, and the universe, in any case, is not “locally real.” Recognizing that consciousness, not matter, is the “ontological primitive” will have dramatic consequences, over time.

And this morning, in a post entitled, The Occult Olympics, he writes:

What struck me as I wandered the Uffizi, time-traveling from the late Middle Ages to the early Renaissance and then, finally, the high Renaissance of Boticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo and, particularly, Leonardo da Vinci, was the trajectory of intention bringing together the human and the divine.

How do we get ourselves from the Dark Ages to the High Renaissance? As he suggests, through the trajectory of marrying the intention of the human with the intention of the Divine: coherence at the frequency of Absolute Truth. Creation—whether of a product, business, or movement—is humankind in the role of The Creator. It’s time we took that responsibility to heart. LITERALLY.

How we’re doing can no longer be assessed by the fruits, or the numbers, alone. We can’t use data to excuse any “evil” in the way we got to output. The end no longer justifies the means! They say the Devil is in the details—yes, the details that are revealed when we pay attention to the unconsciousness that pervades so much of our processes. How we do things makes all the difference. This is where coherence comes in. Coherence is the field that makes exemplary production and creativity possible by showing us where we are in- or out-of-alignment with our best intentions and ultimately with Truth. Well-intentioned people care about this. More and more of us—as we wake from the trance of consumerism and scientific materialism—care about this.

Heaven on Earth is not a distant possibility or an idealistic trope. It’s already here when we make it so through our thoughts, words and actions. If, as Pinchbeck says, consciousness is indeed the “ontological primitive,” then we have to ask ourselves what are we really doing when we dream and do things together? Can we pay more attention to that? Can we create something truly worthwhile and life-affirming moment-to-moment? Can we be lifted up through that effort, that service to the sacredness of life, into an exalted state that where the process is the fruit. As the Buddhists say, can we “take the fruit as the path.”

I think in our heart-of-hearts this is what most of us want and also know is possible. Even if it’s scary to parts of us that have been disappointed, scorned, or worse; parts of us living out a survival or dog-eat-dog story; parts that still believe this life is a zero sum game. A Chief Coherence Officer plants the flag of High Ideals for a group and stands by it as a champion—ever-ready with awareness and reminders when we stray or trespass against our own best intentions, divine intentions.

Not every situation or organization will be responsive to coherence or be improved with more coherence. Many of our legacy ideologies, institutions, and companies are so dedicated to confusion and obscuration or profit and dehumanization—that’s their essence—what you’d have to get coherent around. My daughter, who is 13, just read Animal Farm—sadly, it endures as a teaching tale for these times. But, there are some emerging companies and small groups of dedicated people working on worthwhile projects. Even better, there are small groups of people working on sacred projects—divinely-inspired projects. These are the folks I want to work with and support.

Here’s some good advice: be careful what you dedicate yourself to amplifying in the world. Karma is real.

In Conclusion

David Whyte says, “The way you know you’re on your own path is it keeps disappearing.” I’ve felt that way since the moment I quit my job as an executive in advertising 18 years ago. The other part of that wisdom is the mantra I was given in a dream when I asked how to enter the Sacred Heart. The answer was, “Stop worrying…start walking.” No obvious path? No problem! Count yourself fortunate…you are walking into the unknown at a time when much of what is known about work and industry in the world is old paradigm; ready to be transmuted or retired.

Ultimately, it may be true that the best companies in the next era will be completely populated with people who resonate at the frequency of the organizational mission—they’ve come together in order to express this particular thing into the world. It may be a temporary expression, not a solid organization with goals that require year-on-year growth, etc, etc. A completely coherent organization—if there is such a thing, and I do believe there is, is the material expression of the collective dream of a particular group of people at a certain time. It originates in Love and comes from the Heart.

My hope in making all of these personal musings public is that it will inspire others to do the same or to add to this “open source” idea about coherence within groups. I know there are many brilliant people—smarter than me—already working on this. I’d be open to hearing about their work. My way in the world is to sense first, research later :) I hope some of this has resonated as true for you. Please let me know…

Can you think of a company that’s ready for this?

How have you seen LOVE as a core value at work or in an organization?

What is coherence worth?

As far as I can tell AA is the best example of a non-religious, inclusive organization that talks explicitly about God and a Higher Power in a way that feels welcoming to many. Do you know of others?

When you contemplate the POWER of LOVE, what comes to you?

How does this idea of the Second Renaissance sit with you? Do you feel it? Where do you see it happening, if so?

What’s the most coherent group experience you’ve had?

Let me know in the comments or email me at schuyler@artofemergence.com.

When we perceive through the center of the heart, the heart as MIND, we are coherent with the Universal Heart and with the Power of Love itself. This is the ultimate tuning fork and the still center-point of culture and relating in the New Earth.

Offered with Love and hope for a better world,

Schuyler

This is the second part of a two-part essay on Coherence in the workplace and the role of a Chief Coherence Officer. If you’d like to read Part One first, you can find it here.