A wee video loop made for the University of Saskatchewan Leadership Conference in May.

The Archegyre is a model that describes both the conscious and unconscious aspects of human behaviour. It is used as a way of gaining profound insight into the unknown and uncertain assets and opportunities that all businesses have.

Dream Practitioners acknowledge and celebrate the human aspects of an organisation. They illuminate and reflect the individual and collective intentions, needs and viewpoints of the people who actually make the business happen and who are often overlooked in management fads and initiatives.

I value – Self Worth

I think – Self Expression

I feel – Meaning Given

I love – Love Given

I doubt – Truth Given

I decide – Other Identity

I need – Other Worth

I believe – Other Expression

I ensure – Meaning Received

I differ – Love Received

I dream – Truth Received

1. Your dreams will find your dreams.
2. You create the dream that dreams you.
3. What happens inside, happens outside.
4. If you have a why, you will always find a how.
5. You are dreaming right now.
6. A symbol without a space is like a bull without a china shop.
7. If you want to know who you are, look at what you are doing.
8. All need is unrequited love for the self.
9. If we never listen to the truths of others, we will never hear our own truths.
10. Meaning is what really matters.
11. Our dreams and stories don’t always give us the endings we expect, but they always give us the endings that we need.
12. The closer you get to the edge, the more you realise that there is no edge.
13. The best story always wins.
14. Own your own dreams.
15. Change your myth. Change your reality.
16. If you want to know about dreaming, ask your dream. In a dream.
17. Creativity and play are serious survival strategies.
18. Our shared spaces connect our private myths and our public dreams.
19. Other people are the best mirrors we have.
20. Show others how to dream their own dream, rather than forcing them to be in your dreams.
21. Your dreams need space. Walk in a wild place and listen to your heart sing.
22. The most successful organisations are the ones that dream.
23. Your future arrives one dream at a time.
24. Your dreams are in the spaces all around you.

Only our unconscious really knows what our conscious strives to know. Our dreams are answering questions that we don’t even know that we are asking, and remembering all that we have consciously filtered and forgotten. This is what Sufi mystics termed anamnesis, the end of forgetting who we really are. When we dream, our fragmented identities connect to a more fundamental awareness and we begin to truly understand the mystery that we are trying to unravel.

Solving the mystery of who you are, who you have been and who you will be cannot be accomplished as a detached observer, evaluating your situation from a distance. Stepping fully into your dreams is the only real way to meet the person who you dream of being and to truly live your dreams you really have to be in them. Your dreams are not some vague things that may or may never happen. They are happening right now as you read these words and you can choose to immerse yourself in them or try to keep hiding from them.

And if you try to hide from your dreams, they will keep searching for you until you truly find your own self and can at last speak your own clear truths. As your dreams discover you, you begin to realise that you are not just living ‘the’ dream, whatever that might currently be. You are living and breathing your dream, the one unique, big dream that only you can dream. This dream is not just something that is happening to you, you are happening to the dream.

Remembering how to dream is as simple as becoming aware of the space and time that we unconsciously create. Our dreams take us to the edge of the known and unknown and illuminate all our realisable possibilities and potentials. They eloquently celebrate our individual uniqueness in a wider celebration of our universal awareness. Dreams invite us to step into our true power which can be scary. And magnificent. They honestly show us our beauty, our love and our truth. Your dreams are in the spaces all around you, waiting to be dreamed. Be your dreams now.

Most business analysts attempt to predict the future by analysing past patterns and extrapolating them in to a state of favourable future conditions. However, past experience shows us that this approach doesn’t always work. Although historic patterns do tend to repeat, our constant search for newness often invites the unpredicted into our lives. Rather than arriving in a long awaited and neatly packaged parcel, the future usually arrives in our current reality in the form of sudden flashes of insight and unexpected fragments of opportunity.

In planning for the future, the unexpected is usually associated with unpleasant surprises. When the unforeseen inevitably occurs, we repeatedly try to ignore it. If it’s not in the plan, it can’t exist. Rather than exploring these unanticipated opportunities, we retreat back into the comfortable past, waiting for the future to arrive and set us free. But the more we try to hold on to the old, the more that fragments of the future begin to appear unexpectedly in our lives.

We first become aware of the future in our dreams. Our unconscious awareness beams out from us in time as well as space and usually begins to sense the future before we become consciously aware of it. Like our dreams, the future arrives in seemingly disconnected fragments that we usually filter out because they seem to make little sense to us. We hear these fragments all around us in snatches of conversation, and see them in signs that we are not allowing ourselves to notice yet. As Henry David Thoreau observed, ‘Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven’.

These flashes often illuminate surprising insights and all of a sudden we see what is new. Our insight may appear to be a stroke of absolute genius, but usually all we have done is to notice something that we have been unconsciously aware of for sometime. It may seem to have happened suddenly, but like most overnight sensations, it has probably been knocking on the door of our conscious awareness for years. Although our inventive genius may seem like a solitary pursuit, its success usually depends on how many conversations we are engaged in and truly listening to what we are saying and hearing.

The more conversations we are in, then the more connected we will be. And the more connected we are with ourselves and others, the more easily we will be able to connect all the fragments of the future that are continually arriving in our lives. All these fragments are fundamentally connected, and they all reflect what our future looks like. By connecting the fragments that have most meaning for us, it can be surprisingly easy to release ourselves and create the future that we want to be in.