THE ORIGINS
While working for different US companies during the 80's, I got the opportunity to study Traditional Chinese Medicine. This is how I spent
numerous years balancing back and forth between the corporate world and the more intimate bodymind realm. Expert 5ATM is the fruit of this double
life.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) proposes a global approach to organic functioning. This ancient healing discipline, systemic by essence,
uncovered the way our ten organs (liver, gall bladder, lungs, colon, kidneys, baldder, heart, small intestins, spleen, stomach) work together
according to a precise synergic modality. To be exact, TCM has shown that our ten organs work in pairs, each of the 5 pairs playing a specific
physiological role. One thing that stroke me during my research, was that each of these five pairs of organs is highly specialized and perfectly
autonomous in its way of functioning. Organs are constantly engaged in information exchange but do work independantly. I thus came to realise
that an organic system is defined by five physiological functions and their relationships, rather than by the elements of which it is composed.
Soon after returning to Europe, I began to think along the following lines: if Traditional Chinese Medicine is capable of discribing in great detail
the way our ten organs work together, this means in return that we actually know how Mother Nature proceeds to work efficiently. Why am I saying this?
Because in Nature the minimum expenditure of energy is the driving force for changes and adaptation. In other words, when it comes to organic
functioning and, as I discovered later for social functioning as well, efficiency is the bottom line. Therefore, efficiency is the result of this
functional synergy. Traditional Chinese Medicine appeared to me as a very sophisticated systemic science indeed!
Once I reached this understanding, I spent nine years of intense research on the possibility of applying Traditional Chinese Medicine systemic
principles to the study of social processes, and more specifically to the study of work organizations. My individual and corporate consulting
clients became my laboratory.
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