In the past few years, people have been talking about consciousness in business. Often they use consciousness as a synonym for ethics, for social or environmental responsibility. There is another way of using the word ‘consciousness’, however, evoking the learning organisation, ‘presencing’, ‘U-theory’, and the legacy of Gregory Bateson (who provided the first solid cybernetic foundation for thinking about ecology, organisation, and person as sharing the property of Mind). I am one of the latter group.

I’d like to explore with you a bit of what we know about consciousness, what I regard (from an interested layman’s perspective) as the leading account of consciousness in humans, and what implications this has for designing thriving ‘conscious’ organisations.