The current structures relating to money and work in Western civilisation along with the institutions holding them in place date back to the Enlightenment three to four hundred years ago. What we now call capitalism and the industrial revolution were consciously put in place by enlightened leaders of that time to spur scientific and technological progress and the advance of material wellbeing. This part of mankind’s history must be seen as an extraordinary success. From railroads to central heating, motor cars, pharmaceuticals, the internet, fibre optics, cellphones and biotechnology there is noone alive today who doesn’t somehow benefit from this remarkable period.
With the gradual conclusion of this era however we are now bumping up against a simultaneous convergence of social, financial, economic and ecological limits as predicted in the 1970s by the Club of Rome. An increasing number of people are becoming aware that the very behaviours that provided solutions to earlier problems are not only unable to resolve the crises of today but successively showing themselves to be an integral part of today’s problems. It’s clearly necessary to stop and reflect, time for radical re-thinking and re-acting in the most fundamental way. Coming from an integrated perspective that doesn’t reject the past or react to it or any of its present institutions but seeks new ways forward, on a contemporary par to the enlightened thinkers, actors and leaders of 300 or 400 years ago.
To re-start from a quasi blank slate however is easier said than done. Even the seemingly most modern, latest hi-tech organizations and successes are at base still operating out of the same old model.
Peter Koenig who in the early 1980’s was pioneering vision and organizational transformation processes for companies discovered that the relationship to money, time and work has become so deeply ingrained culturally and globally, that a mere intellectual understanding of this fact and of contemporary world issues, no matter how brilliant, how well-defined and how much discussed in Davos and other Think Tanks, is inadequate to dissolve the drives of this embodied and embedded conditioning. In short, change projects that fail to include the relation to money as an integral part of the process, automatically and inadvertently recreate the status quo.
The ‘moneywork’ he pioneered represents more than 30 years research and development from scratch of a simple and refined methodological tool to enable individuals and organizations to break out of this box. It enables people to free themselves successively from these drives, so to be able to respond increasingly freely and creatively to the conditions and circumstances they’re presented with. The person’s relation to money is used as the entry point to this work, because in this relation is so much valuable information on the particular characteristics of the conditioning that leads to set and driven behaviour patterns, not just with money but with other life aspects too. Indeed, the ‘moneywork’ laps over automatically into other life areas because the relation to money normally winds its way into all other aspects of a person’s life. Relation to work, to time, family, health etc., etc.
So also into the person’s professional life, business and the organizations in which he or she takes part. Koenig maintains that it’s impossible for organizations to transform, for values-based initiatives to take root, for spiritual movements to be really spiritual, for politics to be ethical, for economics to be a science, for contemporary global challenges to be competently handled, without leaders who are willing to examine their relation to money head-on. The ‘moneywork’ is therefore for leaders in any of these fields who recognise sovereignty as a capital word, who feel ready to be led into this challenge, and who really mean business.