Expanding your playing field to be at choice 
How do you approach working with others? What is your resonant mode? Here's my two cents:
Competition - "I win if you lose."
Cooperation - "I will agree to go along with you here, if you agree to go along with me here" - which may involve some compromise on both parts - a chipping-off or sacrifice of something.
Collaboration - "We work together in a way that includes what is important to both of us and our stated goals and visions without having to compromise."
Cocreation - "We work together in a way that includes what is important to both of us without having to compromise AND what we emerge is new, unexpected and greater than the sum of our original visions."
The boundaries between these modes, of course, are permeable with overlaps. The key is that co-creation can contain collaboration, cooperation, and even competition under its umbrella, but competition generally does not contain co-creation. By consciously choosing to expand to a co-creative framework, our playing field opens up and we are at choice when to compete, cooperate, collaborate, or co-create - instead of doing only one of the modes on autopilot.
Every time we expand our habitual paradigm or mental playing field, new choices, options and possibilities open up. New interpersonal dynamics are possible. We do not have to negate one way of being to embrace another. By, to use an improv term, "yes-anding" each mode, we have creative choice on how we want to work. We can move in and out of different modes fluidly in a way that serves the purpose we are working toward rather than be "boxed by habit" into only one or two approaches.
One of the things I value most about the principles of improvisation is they establish an environment for lively co-creation. Within that larger container, participants have choices which other modes to engage at any given time, based on relevance within purpose...setting a fertile ground from which creative ingenuity can thrive.
Michelle James ©2007
, will guide participants through an experiential tour of some of the key elements of Integral Theory with a specific emphasis on unveiling the "bigger canvas" that we can work on in any aspect of our lives, professional and personal. Participants will begin to apply Integral Theory to actual issues in their own lives to get a taste of the power of this expanded way of seeing the world - which includes previously unrecognized creative options and choices. Tom, a psychologist and lawyer, has been involved with Wilber's Integral Institute and Integral University since each institution was founded. 
