As a child, I loved Winnie the Pooh. I was and probably still am a strict Pooh devotee, yet in the background, there was an incredibly wise owl in the Hundred Acre Wood. Maybe this is where the seed was planted.
On this path to wisdom, the next steppingstone we come to is in ancient Greece with the Goddess Athena. She was frequently portrayed with owls and Athena valued wisdom. In turn, history has made the assumption that if she was often seen with an owl, then owls must be wise. I can’t say for sure, yet my first name has roots in ancient Greece, and I’ll make the connection no matter how tenuous.
As time progressed Athena’s Roman counterpart, Minerva, also served as the goddess of wisdom and claimed the owl as one of her symbols. The owl played several other roles in Roman mythology, many of which were associated with wisdom.
These positive attributes are also observed by many other more “modern” cultures around the world, including the Celtics, Native Americans, Christianity, in India, and elsewhere.
One of the owl’s special skills is staying awake at night and having the ability to see in the darkness. Many believe true knowledge can only be gained by observing the dark side. Owls have special structures in their eyes that supercharge night vision.
In truth, science suggests that owls are not even that smart compared to other birds.
For me, much of the attraction to owls is much simpler – in a complex way. Given the mythology above, to us owls represent the wisdom of nature.
The Wisdom of Nature
If coherence is the quality of forming a unified whole, then it is natural that we would want to pay attention to nature in her amazing wholeness. Can your business survive operating with a divisive nature?
Using biomimicry, countless business challenges – worth billions of dollars – have been solved by observing nature. From pharmaceuticals to fabrics to recycling there too many real-life examples to list here. We believe that it’s time to start understanding human’s role in nature. I recently read that the world’s first individual trillionaire will be the one that cracks this code of “humans as nature.”
To me, nature is the ultimate multi-stakeholder business.
At Coherence Collaborative, we believe, as supported by science, that brain coherence is the next step in human evolution. When we integrate our brains into a unified whole we operate on a wholly different level.
Athletes and artists talk a lot about obtaining peak performance and a flow state. What if your entire team was in a flow state? What could you achieve? We can say with certainty that in our work, strategy, leadership, and organizational development all receive benefits. Please read into our “cute” owl story, the absolute bottom-line benefits your business needs to succeed today.
Humanity needs humanity to be better if we are going to collectively survive and thrive.
This is what our owl logo symbolically means to us.