Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Other

Vol. 8 No. 2

Exploring the Implicate Order: Learning from the Theater of Engagement

Submitted
August 4, 2010
Published
2010-08-04

Abstract

In Wholeness and the Implicate Order, physicist David Bohm argues that reality is the interplay of two orders—the explicate (manifest) and implicate (latent)—that operate simultaneously and interactively. We apply this conceptualization to engagement. In the explicate order—largely transactional
and instrumental in nature—partners work together on projects to achieve valued goals and administrative leadership provides necessary institutional support. However, there is also an implicate order, often deeply held but difficult to express, that influences and is influenced by the explicate order. One way to comprehend the implicate order is to access the highly personal interpretations that emerge from experiencing engagement. In this paper, images of participants’ memorable engagement experiences are used to explore the implicate order. Storytelling, metaphor, and isophor (experiencing one thing in terms of another) are shown to be valuable means for unearthing the implicate order of engagement. Bohm asserted that totality could not be “understood solely in terms of . . . objects . . . or events. . . . Total order is contained in some implicit sense, ‘enfolded’ within it” (149). In Leadership and the New Science, Meg Wheatley (1994) urges leaders to think more holistically about leadership and change: “The more provocative view, expressed in Bohm’s work, is that at a level we can’t discern there is an unbroken wholeness. If we could look beneath the surface, we would observe an ‘implicate order’ out of which seemingly discrete events arise” (42).