Facilitating Consciousness Development

Abstract: The more globalized, dynamic and quickly changing society creates complexity and uncertainty that is challenging for many leaders of today's organizations. To handle this complexity it can be argued that the organizations of today are in need of more consciousness-developed leaders. In can also be argued that today’s formative leadership development programs, focusing on leaders acquiring the right skills and knowledge, do not to lead to the higher development that is needed. If so, this indicates that we need to find new ways of developing our leaders, new ways that lead to a fostering of their consciousness development. Albeit challenging, considering the complexity of this development, there are a few examples of courses or programs existing today that are taking on this challenge. One example is a theoretically unexplored course at the Stockholm School of Economics. Although highly empirically challenging it would be of interest to examine how consciousness development can be facilitated by studying this course in the light of existing theories on the subject. The purpose of this report is to study to what extent it is possible to facilitate consciousness development through formal training. Based on the purpose of this study, a qualitative approach was chosen for this thesis. The data collection consisted mainly of semi-structured interviews with previous attendees of the studied course as well as with its organizers. The findings of this study indicated several hypotheses related to how consciousness development and how it can be facilitated. They included that sharing one’s reflections with others in small groups is a new viable way to facilitate consciousness development, that a more developed consciousness is better able to understand and respect the thoughts and behaviors of others and finally that using a motivation letter in the application process for courses in consciousness development is an effective way of increasing the applicants’ inner motivation to develop. Furthermore the findings supported several key areas within the existing theory. The areas that our findings most clearly supported were that reflecting about and clarifying one’s personal values, more specifically to be aware of and work with one’s unmet foundations values and future values, helps one to develop one’s consciousness. Additionally, our findings support the importance of viewing one’s development as a lifelong process in which one actively, consciously and constantly works on one’s self-development.