MY NEIGHBOR NEXT DOOR: REACHING OUR COMMUNITIES THROUGH CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE - 8021

It was the seminal work of Otto Scharmer at MIT and his colleagues who have brought attention to the challenges we face both as leaders and as a community in the 21st Century. We are fundamentally a culture with blind spots. In using the term “culture” here, I am speaking on a scale that is as small as the micro of the small worlds and tribes we move in and out of, and as expansive as the global macro of the entire world. These blind spots are all-encompassing socially, ethnically, economically, vocationally, collectively, institutionally, and systemically. In the same way in which the tectonic plates at the depths of the ocean floor are ever shifting and ever creating challenges at the fault lines of the earth’s surface, so too are there shifts taking place that are exposing all our human fault lines at the surface of the cultural ground we stand on and the ways in which we relate to one another. David Bohm’s work on the collapsing of boundaries based on what he called “the implicate order” of Creation itself serves well to remind us that unless we are willing to come together in a spirit of dialogue, we will continue to live and behave in fragmented waves. We have lost our ability and are blind to what it means to see things as “wholes”. The implicate order is about a holism that is essential not just for surviving, but for thriving. There has to come within each of us a willingness to relate to one another, not based on an “us and them” mentality, with a strategy to “divide and conquer”, but rather to transform our relationships from me-centered ones to we-centered ones. How do we do that in such a divided tribal consciousness? I have had the distinct privilege of coming to know, first from a distance, and then as a dear friend, Dr. Oliver Phillips. Oliver is a global expert on Cultural Intelligence, and at this point I would say, he is the distinctive quintessential thought leader alive on the planet with the ability and experience to talk about it scientifically, philosophically, anthropologically, and even theologically. His expertise is unparalleled. His own life experience has groomed and shaped his years of both challenges as well as achievements in collapsing perceived boundaries amongst those willing to embrace what it means to be culturally intelligent and actually live it out. I have discovered late in my journey in life that you will only understand the truth if you are willing to actually live it. Oliver, in his latest work, “My Neighbor Next Door: Reaching Our Communities Through Cultural Intelligence” scans the horizon of the places we all live, in search of a point we can all navigate toward in hope, radical hope of changing things at a micro level. If the late David Bohm is correct about what happens at the micro level in the quantum world, where the smallest movements undetected by human ways of knowing can yield global effects, so that the macro will be impacted for the greater good, then Oliver is really onto something. If we can change the way we relate to our neighbors, all sorts of distorted views in the culture can change…everywhere. That is why for Oliver, we all have to start with our neighbors. The real question has always been however, “Who is my neighbor”? Our reluctance to embrace the truth about that prevents us from caring enough, listening enough, and learning enough, to actually love our neighbors as fellow human beings. There may have been a time when my neighbors all had my color skin, shared my cultural values, talked my cultural language, and ate according to my cultural preferences. The Digital Age has collapsed so many boundaries that one post on twitter or Instagram can go viral globally in a matter of seconds. Boundaries have already collapsed in the virtual world. Can we make an on what it means to be human all across the globe? Oliver thinks so, and I agree with him.
ASIN: B09Y69DF77
VSKU: BVV.B09Y69DF77.VG
Condition: Very Good
Author/Artist:PHILLIPS, DR. OLIVER|CHIRONNA, BISHOP MARK
Binding: Paperback