The Mandalan Quest™
a quest for wholeness
There are projects that never begin, or at least they have no visible starting point, where one can hang a sign and say this is where it all began. Without that embarkation point duration becomes cloudy. How long have I been working on this project? The answer seems absurd, if not embarrassing. With hail storms aplenty along the way, I can easily say 10 years, but it really is more like 20 years, and when I look honestly at my past, it would seem that previous years were in preparation for the journey that continues.
Seeds of thought can drive progress long after germination, far beyond the product of those seeds has wilted, worn, or vanished from view. The memory is an awful-blessed space odyssey. Remembrance can plow through the muck and mire keeping it cozy and dull, and erupt in a scathing rebuke that you let it fall fallow. After a time, with an idea replicating itself throughout thought patterns, there is no hope but to follow the direction it demands, or accept failure.
Years of working in profit making organizations left a scars that in one way or another had their roots in values, or more succinct, the lack of values displayed by people. What was worse was the recognition that the source of much values decline lay in the systems organizations used to guide their activity. Systems rather than aid people in understanding and living sound principles and values did the opposite. Misguided Living systems in organizations encouraged, even demanded, that people look away from understanding moral codes of conduct in order to achieve the goals of the system.
It was here that what would become my driving force coalesced. First, organizations, based on the time people devote to them and the intensity of their mindfulness while there, have major influence in the lives of adults associated with them. Second, influence of the organization cannot help but bleed, good and bad, into their surroundings. Behavior calling for cover-up, obfuscation, heartlessness, or abandonment of honesty does not easily shift to ethical conduct when the work day is done. And, like the flu, behavior-by-example spreads insistently to next travelers.
Fault for the moral lassitude in our general population, in significant part, lies at the doorstep of organizations. The potential for reversal is at the same doorstep. My effort over the uncountable years has been to find practical arrays of systems, concepts, models, processes, and tools to achieve that end.
It has long been apparent that what is needed to achieve this goal is available. Why results have failed in sustainability is imbedded deeply in the systems that also spawn much of the ill moral behavior we hope to reverse. Over focus on use of specialties and specialists, short-term tangible results, and individual achievement and aggrandizement are all out-of-balance values, exacerbating the problem and frustrating the solution.
Story of a Journey
without beginning or end
Writer, Poet & Organizational Design and Development
Roger Marshall
“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.”
—Václav Havel,
Czech playwright
Emma Evans,
Jennifer Marshall-Evans,
and Roger Marshall
It is to dance to find the king,
only to dance,
all to dance.
The Kingly Dance
The King lives, body in sacred loam
where spirit radiates to life’s dancers
stirring healing currents over
thousand-year hatred lingering
in soil and bone.
Kingly spirit lies vapid to life’s marchers..
Spirit lives in life’s rhythms:
searching in tenebrous caves
for own pieces lost,
seeking tides ebb and flow
to wash away hardened façades,
stoking fires to burn away traps
clinging to fear-conquered dreams,
Purchased truth decorates itself
behind gates marking me and mine.
Beamed truth perforates life
with blinding rights and wrongs.
Atrophied truth builds on
neglect and hopelessness.
Gnarled truth fattens itself on
molding walls of satisfaction.
searching on night’s star-beams.
minding morning shadows,
opening to midday's brilliance,
planting in afternoon’s cool breeze,
I am pulled to one side or the other of the ampersand in my vocational descriptions shown at the right. Its improbable combination describes, in great part, who I am. It also describes the attributes and temperament needed to create The Mandalan Quest™ and especially IC Excel.
I have been described as innovative, an outside-the-box thinker, creative, on the bleeding edge of change, and a pain-in-the-ass to those who like the status quo, step-change, or to feather their own nests at the expense of others. I have few accolades in handling detail, sales, business in general, or even feathering my own nest adequately. Success I have attained in creative endeavors is the result of others who have been generous in allowing space for change and steadfast in securing, enhancing, and carrying the work to usefulness.
IC Excel has many contributors, but only one integrator. Had it been otherwise it would have been subjected to favoritism and fragmentation. It would not have been created as a holistic system at all. I have, however, evolved from creator to bottleneck and it is time it finds homes in the capable hands of others.
Why I am not retired.
Copyright - Roger B. Marshall, dba Philemon-Joy & Associated
The Mandalan Quest™, The Mandalan Chronicles™, Mandalan IC Excel ™ are trademarks of Philemon-Joy & Associates
Writer, Poet
Organizational Design
and Development
not shown
Chris, Patty, Patrick, and Erin Marshall
Email Roger Marshall to explore opportunites.
