MIT, Cambridge, Mass.: Starting at home, the Fall U-Lab class was great. Half of the 85 students were mid-career executives studying at MIT and Harvard on leave from companies around the world. What I found interesting is that many of them reported the same experiences in their home organizations (that I am also hearing in other places): “The faster I climb up the ladder of corporate success, the less inspired I get by my work…”

Presencing Global Forum, Cambridge, Mass.: The Global Forum was a huge experience (see my previous blog entry). It felt like stepping into a field of heightened collective possibility—something we have been working toward for many years. The question now is how to take the next steps. The next Forum will be in Berlin, June 18-19, 2012. Then the 2013 Forum will probably be in Bali (late June 2013). The Masterclass meeting (with a group of 72 advanced practitioners) that we held right after the Forum in Cape Cod also created the same feeling of deepened connection and heightened future possibility…

Health Innovation Lab, Amsterdam. I reconnected with a group of Dutch health practitioners working to radically renew their existing health system. We used social presencing theater (including many elements of constellation work) to map the current system and how it could be transformed into a health system of the future. We conducted the same process in two parallel groups and then compared notes. These are the three main elements common to both sets of ideas for transformation: 1. The new does not start inside the system, but from the periphery, from the edges of the system. 2. It starts with citizens (payers), patients, and alternative health providers—but when physicians join the new constellation the axis of the system shifts and the bigger players (insurance companies, hospitals) also need to change. 3. It is essential to include the patients and citizens (the people who pay).

Forum for Global Development, Berlin: On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the German Ministry of Development Cooperation invited me to a two-day Global Development Forum that convened 60 decision makers and change makers from all cultures, regions, and sectors, including the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, and the head of the UN Environment Program, Achim Steiner. The event was designed around Theory U and co-facilitated by two of my colleagues from the Presencing Institute. Unfortunately, I could only attend the first day. On that day we started with some learning journeys. The journey I picked led me, among other places, to the now closed Tempelhof Airport in the center of Berlin. Have you ever been in an airport that’s completely silent? It’s almost surreal. The only time I had experienced an airport wrapped in stillness was right after 9/11 when Katrin and I tried to catch a flight from S.F. to Boston to get back to our children. Everything was closed down, as you may remember. Here is a picture of the Tempelhof Airport:

A few months ago this huge green strip in the heart of Berlin was opened to the public. What’s the result? People LOVE this green field in the heart of the city. They use it for running, skating, kiting, flying toy airplanes, enjoying the OPEN SPACE… Here is a look at that open space:

When you grow up in Germany (as I did) you find several reasons not to feel so great about your country, to put it mildly (nazi past, etc.). That said, I was really pleased to see how the city of Berlin included all its citizens in a process of participatory planning regarding the future of Tempelhof, openly and reflectively dealing with the history of this airport (which includes some Nazi elements, among others). Many other countries still cover up the shadowy parts of their history. Germany today (or at least parts of it) is a great example of dealing thoughtfully with the darker parts of its history. I liked what I saw. The Forum was guided by the same spirit: systemic, self-reflective, open-minded, empathic, willing to explore one’s blind spot, and to explore the future by doing.

a clip on the Forum

Bojonegoro, Java, Indonesia. For the past several years I have been running an MIT executive education program called IDEAS Indonesia. It is based on systems thinking and Theory U and brings together young high-potential leaders from government, business, and civil society and guides them on a nine-month innovation journey—a journey that takes them to the edges of society and the self. The first weeklong module takes place at MIT. The following three modules are held in Indonesia. So every now and then I get to travel to Indonesia to co-facilitate one of the modules there.

This time I managed to visit one of the prototype initiatives that has emerged from a previous IDEAS program. It’s led by Pak Bupati SUYOTO, the Regent of the Regency in the district of Bojonegoro, who was one of last year’s participants. The focus of the prototype was on reducing corruption and improving the quality of government services in the district. After the decentralization of government in 2005 much of the governmental decisionmaking in Indonesia has moved from the center to the 400 Regencies that are governed by the directly elected Bupatis (Regents). While the decentralization generally is a good thing, the corruption of government officials remains a huge problem for the country.

The story that we heard in Bojonegoro is stunning. We learned that Pak Bupati SUYOTO came into power without any support from the established interest groups. Since he had no budget for his election campaign, he did the only thing he could: go to the villages and listen and engage in dialogue with the people there. And he did it very effectively, earning the most votes in the election, much to the surprise of the entire political establishment.

What’s even more surprising is that he managed to turn around the regency in the record time of two and a half years. Having always ranked high on corruption and low on service quality (the lowest 20% among the 400 regencies), it is now exactly the opposite: his Regency is now ranked among the top ten nationwide in the quality of government services among the 400 regencies. How was that stunning turnaround possible? I was scratching my head and wondering whether this turnaround could really be possible.

Here is what I have learned so far. On his first day in office Pak Bupati SUYOTO called for a general assembly with all government employees in his regency. When they showed up, many of the senior people expected to lose their jobs because they had actively worked against him during the campaign. The Bupati delivered two main messages. First: No one will be sacked. Everyone will keep their job. He doesn’t want to look back but to look forward, building a future that is different from the past. Second: The three don’ts: No money (no bribes), no complaints, and no “not my job” (“not my area of responsibility”) responses. When he delivered that message people were surprised, but most people didn’t believe it (80% of them remained skeptical). But by consistently living up to his key messages he managed to shrink the percentage of skeptics from 80% to 20% within a year.

One of the most important mechanisms that he used to do it was simply to close the feedback loop between government officials and the citizens of the community. He did four simple things:

1. He gave his cell phone number to citizens and told them that they could text him any time. Since then he has received hundreds of text messages every day. He responds to many of them personally. Many others he forwards to his directors and department heads in charge of the relevant issues. Everyone in his administration is expected to respond to an SMS from a citizen within a day or two.

2. Second, he instituted an open-door policy. Anyone can walk into his office any time.

3. Third, every Friday afternoon he conducts a community dialogue meeting to which all citizens are invited and which all his top civil servants are required to attend. I attended one of these meetings. First a farmer voiced his issue: he had no access to fertilizers. When he sat down the microphone went to the head of the department of agriculture to explain the problem and say what could be done to fix it. The department head was a bit defensive. But he also knew that next week he would be back here facing the same people. So he had every incentive to fix the problem within a week’s time. Next came a young woman in her 20s wearing a hijab (Muslim head scarf). She said she was an educator and needed books to improve her teaching work in the villages. The classes that she wanted to teach included sex education for girls, and there were no instructional materials available. I listened with my eyes wide open, mindful that I was watching a community meeting inside the biggest Muslim country on the planet, with lots of old men and religious community leaders sitting in the audience of 300. She completed her request without any sign of fear or hesitation. The Bupati responded and told her how to find the resources she needed. He said that one of the big U.S. oil companies had come to his office earlier that day (in fact, I had attended that meeting as an observer, shadowing the Bupati) and asked what they could do to help the community. The Bupati told the teacher that she should pose her request directly to the oil company and that she would probably get what she needed. If it didn’t work she should come to back to him. Everyone in the community was listening to the exchange between the young woman from the village and the Bupati—and that shared listening turned the bilateral exchange and her initiative into a legitimate community project.

4. Fourth, the Bupati takes his key officials on a joint trip to two or three villages where they go through a similar dialogue process on a local level every single day.

What do these four mechanisms add up to? A lot of listening. A lot of direct listening by government officials to the everyday experiences of citizens, and a direct dialogue between the citizens and their elected Bupati and his team. When I saw these four feedback loops in action I thought boy, that’s exactly what’s missing in our democratic institutions in the West (and other parts of the world) today. In the West, elected officials and top civil servants spend only a small amount of time authentically listening to their citizens. Instead they listen to the lobbyists and organized interest groups who financed their election campaigns, who buy their influence through bribes in two forms: illegal ones and legal ones in the form of undisclosed campaign contributions.

So in a nutshell, what I saw in Bojonegoro was the seeds of a regenerated democracy. It was deepening our existing democratic forms by making them more dialogic, direct, and distributed. We need the same kind of renewal in the West, but also in many other places around the world. I felt the power of connecting directly to the community of citizens in the State Hall of Bojonegoro when I was asked to address the community at the end of their gathering. I felt the power of being in synch with the base of your community.

Below is a picture of Pak Bupati SUYOTO. It’s a shot taken maybe five minutes after the end of the Friday dialogue I referred to above. While walking out he was approached by one of the citizens with a concern. He sat down with that guy on the doorstep of the meeting hall to talk it over. At the end of that 2-minute meeting the Bupati wrote and signed an order that helped the citizen get access to the department that could help him. This was direct, dialogic, and living democracy in action…

Bali, Indonesia. The presencing workshop with thirty leaders from government, civil society, and business across Indonesia was a transformative experience for all of us. One element of this five-day workshop was a collective mapping of the current situation in the country (“sculpture 1”) and how it could be transformed (“sculpture 2”). Inspired by some temple visits in Bali, we added three “observers of the system” when mapping the current reality: Brahman (the creative capacity), Shiva (the destructive capacity), and Vishnu (the capacity that holds the space) Vishnu emerged as the critical enabler by paying attention to and connecting the most marginalized players in system, holding the space for them. Like in the Netherlands before (and in many other constellations previosly), the new sculpture mapped the formerly marginalized players in the heart of the new configuration…

Sao Paulo, Brazil: Two experiences. I was invited to give a talk on transforming capitalism at the Institute for Democracy and Sustainability (IDS) in Sao Paulo. The people in attendance were a really interesting group of social entrepreneurs, formers Ministers and grassroot change makers. Many of them were from Marina Silva’s team, the Green global thought leader who won a stunning 20% in the 2010 Presidential election in Brazil (she herself was attending the climate conference in Durban). At the end of the discussion one participant said: “OK, Otto, I notice you’re trying to connect three different themes and communities: the first one is inspired social entrepreneurs, the second group is leaders of really big institutions in business and government, and the third one is intellectuals and economists who are thinking and reflecting on the transformation of capitalism. These three groups usually do not mix, they tend to stay separate.” I thought that was a great observation and insight. It’s true that these three groups tend to not mix and blend very well. Yet, in this age of disruptive change that we have entered now, it seems to more important than ever to accomplish precisely that…

Most of my time in Sao Paulo earlier in the week I spent working with Natura. Natura is a Brazil-based company that focuses on individual and collective well-being. Natura, founded in 1969, and today a $4.5 billion cosmetics company, has always inspired me since at its core it is about achieving well-being by bridging the three big divides of our time: the ecological divide, the social divide, and the spiritual divide. The company has always been an ecological innovator. It works with 1.3 million “consultants” at the base of the socio-economic pyramid in the country, and its essential mission is to connect people to the deeper sources of our humanity.

During this visit I had the opportunity to get to know two of the company’s founders: Luiz Seabra and Guilherme Leal. It was SUCH an inspiration to meet the two of them! Luiz embodies the presence of the open mind, open heart, and open will in a palpable way that continues to inspire his community of a million-plus collaborators (who touch more than 100 million customers with their products). Next I met with Guilherme Leal and some of his close collaborators. In his journey as an entrepreneur he extend his material entrepreunerial interest from business to people and planet, turning Natura into a pioneer in sustainable development, and joining Marina Silva as her running mate in the last presidential election. Both conversations and both men inspired me for different reasons. But what intrigued me most, maybe, was how they interacted with each other together: how respectful and supportive they were of each other, how they not only tolerated but appreciated the differences in each other. Seeing them interact made me understand the real origin of the empathic culture of Natura.

I also remembered the remark made by an audience member about the three separate communities: inspired social entrepreneurs; leaders of large institutions; thought leaders on transforming capitalism. I realized that on the other side of that lunch table I faced two men whose relationship with each other crossed the boundaries of these three communities. That is exactly what inspires me about working with Natura: helping company to advance the transformational leadership journey it is on, and linking personal transformation with systemic transformation in society and capitalism today…

Going home. As I type these words on my flight back to Boston, I’m thinking about how all this relates, how to connect all the dots. I feel as if we live in a field of intensifying connections and heightened disruptions and possibilities. What does that heightened field of possibility want us to do? Create a landing place for the future? Create a whole set of interconnected landing strips? Landing places that would reside in Brazil, Indonesia, Europe, Africa, the US? It could be called “u.school” -– or it could be called something else. But to bring IT into reality is a call of the future that I feel. How to make it happen is the question I’m returning home with…

Which reminds me of a recent review meeting with the top 20 civil servants in the Ministry of Health in Namibia, who we helped to see and transform their system for the better. Reflecting back on their two- or three-year learning process, they referred to our quarterly meetings as a “University of Democracy,” which I thought was a very interesting name…

–otto

The intention that crystallized during that meeting was to form an initiative called the Presencing Institute, which would function as a global holding space for people engaging in presencing-inspired work for change. We didn’t want to start by talking about change—but by doing it. We would leave the talking to a second phase.

This week, with the opening of the 1st Presencing Global Forum, we have entered that second phase. What has emerged since our first walk in the snow is a rather amazing global ecology of people, initiatives, programs, and projects—an intentional global community. This Monday and Tuesday in Cambridge, 250 members of that community from all continents and sectors, and from a multitude of cultures, came together in person to talk about what we have created and how to move forward. Another 380 people joined us from 38 countries from around the world via live-streamed parallel events. While participating remotely in our live-streamed event in Cambridge they also created their own local content and breakout sessions.

In opening the meeting I said that this event and our presencing-inspired movement would integrate three streams and traditions that historically have often been separate. One stream is civic engagement in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Henry David Thoreau. The second stream is action science, action research. and systems thinking in the tradition of Peter Senge, Ed Schein, and Kurt Lewin. The third is mindfulness and consciousness; it is linked to all of mankind’s wisdom traditions and is represented Buddhism, particularly the Shambala tradition; Confucianism, particularly the Confucian essay on The Great Learning that says a good leader must know and cultivate his self; and the Western tradition of mindfulness as represented by the work of Rudolf Steiner, who blended mindfulness with a Goethean phenomenology as a science that is performed with the mind of wisdom, that is, with a mind that can see itself.

On the second day of the Forum, the whole group went through a mini U experience. We began with participants telling fascinating frontline stories about profound systems change; then, using Social Presencing Theatre (in 25 groups of 10), we acted out the emerging transformation of capitalism; next we transitioned into a moment of stillness; and then we moved on to crystallizing and prototyping new ideas. When all these ideas were prototyped and many had been presented, we reconvened as a community, where we felt as if a new field of collective possibility was emerging among us. An incredible precious, powerful, and delicate field connected all of us—inside the room and beyond—in a new way.

After the Forum concluded, 72 of us embarked on a Presencing Masterclass and 4-day presencing retreat. Interestingly, after returning from our solo experience in nature and sharing our individual experiences in our circle of 72, we again felt that same field experience of profound openness and future possibility.
As I write this at my computer, just after the Masterclass meeting, I have only two more minutes of battery power. (Another) blizzard has just hit the Boston area; a power outage has switched off all the lights in the region and my computer will die in just a few moments. I am thankful to be sitting here in the darkness and reporting on these moments of grace to all of you who feel connected to the deeper movement of awareness-based change that our crisis-filled world is now calling for.

My opening remarks to the Forum are posted at this link. I hope that you will be able to attend the next Forum in June 2012 in Berlin, either in person or via a live-streamed parallel session in your own community.

Otto

live-stream

http://15october.net/

its that capacity that we need more than anything else to meet the biggest challenges of our time. its that capacity that we need to develop as a whole generation of change makers at the begin of this century. Its that capacity that people miss in our institutions today — particularly in Wall Street — and that keeps fueling the quickly growing Occupy Wall Street Movement. That movement, in spite of an incredibly condescending treatment by the US media at first, has swept the spirit of the Arab Spring to this side of the pond.

Wall Street top executives managed to destroy through their actions $34 trillion of assets and to eradicate about 30 million jobs–and yet, they got a full bailout without any conditions attached (which in any other industry is unheard of–ask the executives of GM who got fired after government went in). OK, so we are not taking on the big guys. So what do we do instead? We turn against the weakest members in our community by criminalizing illegal immigrants and their children–an act of shame that is currently going on in Alabama…

So what is needed? the youthful spirit and entrepreneurship of Steve Jobs applied to the big collective issues that we face as a society. First step? Visit the site that sparks the Occupy Wall Street movement by making us aware of the first person experience of our economy today (link below):

what do you think? what do you see going on?

Another common element is that both of these bubbles or boom-to-bust cycles are closely linked to a third bubble that has been in the making for a long time: the bubble of business schools and conventional economic thought. The essence of the old economic thinking is its blindness to social and ecological “externalities.” Both the financial and agricultural bubbles would have been unthinkable without modern economic thought and its whole set of management tools. It’s time to seed the beginnings of a new, post-bubble era of economics and management practice.

My colleagues and I are trying to contribute to post-bubble economics and management practices in two ways: by writing a book on the mindful transformation of capitalism, and by initiating a project we are calling the u.school, which would convene key innovators and leading institutions from business, civil society, and government around a platform for creating profound societal innovation and building personal and institutional capacity. Here is a link to a first concept paper on that initiative. Let us know what you think!

–otto

(1) Efficiency: The pursuit of efficiency is one of the main causes of this 4F system breakdown. Our systems are over-focused on efficiency. These efficiencies tend to maximize a single variable (return on investment; yield per hectare; energy return on investment) instead of optimizing a broader set of variables that would improve the viability and health of the larger ecosystem. This over-focus results in a lack of resilience and a blindness to externalities.

(2) Externalities: Over-focusing on efficiency leads to not seeing the negative externalities in the larger system. A financial sector on steroids inflicts huge negative externalities on nature, on people, and on the real economy. A food sector on steroids inflicts huge costs on nature (soil erosion, groundwater pollution), on people (working conditions for workers, health issues for junk food consumers), and on society and culture (agricultural mono-cultures). A fuel and energy sector on steroids leads to technologies like nuclear energy production that are cheap only when and if all the risks and negative externalities are socialized (while privatizing the profits). In other words, it becomes a business model that the Wall Street oligarchy perfected and deployed leading up to the financial crisis of 2008. Which leads me directly to observation no. 3:

(3) Powerful special interest groups hijack regulation, public investment, and government. We have a revolving-door issue: The offices in Washington, D.C., that are supposed to oversee and regulate Wall Street are often occupied by people who come and go from the Wall Street oligarchy (Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase). They are full of people whose thinking has been framed by these institutions (assuming that what’s good for Wall Street must also be good for America). The same revolving-door issue exists in the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) with Monsanto, the agri-business multinational, which is at least as problematic as Wall Street. I don’t know all the facts about the energy sector. But I do know that the nuclear power industry was (along with Wall Street) a major contributor to the Obama campaign. And every dollar really paid off for them when you consider the banks got a bailout package with no conditions attached, and when you consider how quickly Obama returned to business-as-usual, saving the nuclear power industry from what its colleagues experienced in Germany: that the nuclear option for future plants is effectively dead, and that all the old power plants are being taken off the grid right now.

(4) Marginalized people pay the most. In all these crisis situations the greatest pain is suffered and the highest price is paid by those who have the least: the poor. While Wall Street bankers are back to enjoying their bonus payments—for activities that not only don’t help the real economy, but also often harm the people working in it, —most people on Main Street are still suffering the ripple effects of the financial meltdown of 2008. They are paying for it by losing their jobs, losing their schoolteachers, losing nutritional support for their children, losing services that have kept afloat those who are struggling the most. In the food system it’s the same situation. What happens when food prices go up? It hurts those who can’t pay the higher prices: the poor.

(5) Delayed feedback prevents learning. All of these systems operated with delayed feedback loops that prevent decision-makers (in government and at the top of global companies like Monsanto and the Wall Street Big Four) from experiencing the negative externalities that their decisions inflict on the larger system and hence prevent real learning and change from happening. As Vandana Shiva, a global civil society thought leader from India, once put it so eloquently: the raw material streams move from the Global South to the Global North, while the streams of waste (and other negative externalities) move from the Global North to the Global South. That description, with some modifications (mainly through the rise of the emerging economies) still describes today’s situation.

(6) Money flowing the wrong way. Another flow that’s moving in the wrong direction concerns money. Money flows readily to those who already have (lots of) it, while those who don’t have it have to struggle even harder to fund ventures that may be high in positive externalities and low or even negative in financial return. The global agriculture business, the non-renewable energy industry, and traditional Wall Street–type banking all have privileged access to capital and money in all forms. It dwarfs the capital that other sectors (renewable energy, social value-based banking, and organic sustainable agriculture, for example) can attract.

(7) Consumer awareness. Consumer awareness, of course, is the key to turning all of this around, which is precisely why the traditional vested interests do everything possible to keep consumer awareness at the lowest possible level. Yet the more consumer advocates succeed in creating transparency about the ecological and social footprint of products in the marketplace, the more numerous and influential will conscious consumers become – gradually shifting and rebalancing the distribution of power between producers and consumers.

(8) Arenas of Awakening. What is it that we have not seen in any of these crisis situations? Arenas of Awakening. Places that facilitate the process of the system becoming aware of itself. The Tahrir space of the food system, of the banking system. Etc. Which is why we haven’t yet seen the toppling of the old tyrants in these systems (as of yet).

What does all of this have to do with Fukushima? Everything. (1) The nuclear power industry is an example of extreme efficiency that makes total sense as long as you disregard all of the (2) negative externalities. (3) It is facilitated by a regulatory framework that privatizes the benefits and socializes the risks. (4) In the case of disasters like Fukushima, the industry put the biggest burdens on the poor, who pay with their health and their lives. (5) The overall structure of the system prevents learning because the negative externalities do not affect the decision-makers themselves (the people who die from radiation overdoses are the workers, not management). (6) Money keeps flowing in the wrong direction, e.g., federal funds continue to be poured into old industries instead of into new, renewable energy technologies. (7) The current structure prevents consumer awareness by not allowing people to choose between nuclear and renewable energy. (8) We also do not see any attempts to create Arenas of Awakening. By contrast, the press conferences of government and Tepco officials are a painful example of communicating the truth too little and too late. Even today the Japanese and the world community have not heard the true and complete story from the leaders of the system.

How can we turn things around? Just reverse all the above principles: (1) multi-variable health (instead of mono-variable efficiency), (2) internalize externalities, (3) use transparent and inclusive multi-stakeholder processes to develop regulatory frameworks, (4) give special attention to and co-create with those who live on the margins of the system, (5) close the feedback loop between decision makers and those impacted by these decisions, (6) reverse the flow of money, (7) empower consumers and citizens, (8) create Arenas of Awakening where the whole system can see itself – and leverage the collective awareness that flows from that.

What do you see going on? What are some other examples you see that are related to these eight observations? Are there additional observations that you consider relevant? What can we do to turn things around?

Thanks for your input. All the best — otto

Seeing the awakening of that leadership spirit in today’s young entrepreneurs and change makers is one of the most important sources of hope in our current age. Let me give you a few examples from my travels over the past few weeks:

–I spent a week in the Philippines with a group of young leaders from NGOs, education, and the business sector (ELIAS Philippines: Emerging Leaders Innovate Across Sectors). One of them is Bam Aquino the co-founder of Hapinoy. Hapinoy is a social business enterprise that is composed of dedicated young professionals who work in partnership with thousands of micro-entrepreneurs in the country. The guiding vision of this enterprise is to use microfinance to empower socially and economically challenged families. This social business enterprise uses business models to further social and ecological objectives. Today, Hapinoy has developed a full-service program that supports thousands of micro-entrepreneurs. The next evolutionary stage of this network would be to localize the distribution and the production of some of their products, thus offering even more entrepreneurial opportunities to those living at the base of the pyramid.

–Then I spent four days with a global group of over 600 biodynamic farmers from around the world, including other key players in the sustainable food value chain, as well as from schools, health, medicine, and inclusive education. Nicanor Perlas and Vandana Shiva (both of them recipients of the “alternative Nobel” Right Livelihood Award) also participated in this conference, which took place at the Goetheanum near Basel, Switzerland. For four days we took this group through the entire U process—a really powerful collective experience that sparked many new initiatives and generated an enormous amount of inspiration and energy. The younger farmers and participants in particular stepped up their leadership role in the movement. This experience reminded me that the whole economic process and all economic theory must start – where? – with NATURE—that is, with the EARTH, that is, with AGRICULTURE. This is why the biodynamic farmers, who are reinventing farming based on sustainability and social and spiritual awareness, are really interesting “acupuncture point” partners in transforming and evolving the economic system. Now everyone is back on their farm, and we will see how this story continues to unfold…

–After that I spent two days with principals and teachers of schools in the Netherlands. In the masterclass with 200 participants I started by asking how many of them already apply Theory U methods and tools in their everyday leadership and education practice. Half the hands went up: about a 100(!) of them. I was surprised to see that—and I don’t think they are representative of other countries. But it’s interesting how an almost unreadable book (Theory U) has slowly begun to reach the mainstream. Very slowly, though. What I found interesting about Holland is that it has (like Denmark) a rather progressive professional education community that now is dealing with a right-leaning government that emphasizes test scores and other short-term noise. Yet that noise from the political system has not kept the overall professional community from progressing (at least in many cases) toward better educational environments. I think that’s really cool.

–Even in Davos at the World Economic Forum, where I had the opportunity to present in three sessions (on cross-sector innovation, on transforming capitalism, and on mindfulness-based leadership), I found that more and more people are aware of the larger wind of change that is now starting to reshape and shatter even some of the most entrenched institutions on earth. What’s next? Who is the Mubarak in global finance that will crumble next? Who is it in the global food system? There is a lot that we can learn from Egypt—and we are just at the very beginning of that unfolding story.
–My final stop was in Zurich, where I was privileged to meet with two leaders of a group of Deans and Rectors who share a passion of mine: how to reinvent the 21st century business school? The name of the initiative is World Business School Council for Sustainable Business. Its members, Deans and Presidents of 20 globally leading b-schools, want to reinvent their institutions, working toward sustainability, social innovation, and entrepreneurship. They have asked me to work with them at their first strategic meeting in New York this spring, where they want to collectively create a new vision of the 21st-century business school. I find this initiative extremely inspiring since it squarely addresses a deep aspiration I have always had: to contribute to co-creating a global, green, generative leadership school (what I have called a g.school)—a topic I will return to in future blog entries.

For now I am happy to be back home and beginning to focus on a new book about transforming the economy and economics toward business and society 4.0.

That’s my little report. How does that resonate with your experience? Where do you see the winds of change happening? Thanks for sharing some of your experiences from wherever you happen to be on this planet!

otto

What is the future calling us to do?
Five years ago when a small group of us started the Presencing Institute, we envisioned a global Presencing-in-Action Leadership School that would integrate science, consciousness, and profound societal change. As a first step, we decided to prototype a much smaller version of it and call it the Presencing Institute (PI).

Since then, many more people have become involved in PI, beginning to prototype seven key elements of the presencing-in-action leadership school:

1. Research: While the books Theory U and Presence have been published and each have been translated into 12 languages, we have been working on a new book that reflects on how Theory U can serve as a framework for transforming capitalism and pioneering society 4.0. http://tc.presencing.com/

2. Social Technologies: We created an online open source Theory U toolbox. Currently, we are working on a 2.0 version of the online toolbox that will allow practitioners across our whole community to upload and share their tools as part of our collective knowledge-creation efforts.

3. Capacity Building . Over the past five years, we have been delivering the Presencing Foundation Program in Africa, North America, Asia, and Europe while also pioneering a global online class that blends state of the art online teaching tools with deep reflection practices and action learning (Global Classroom). We have used the Global Classroom for classes on Process Consultation (Ed Schein) and Presencing (Otto). We also developed a ten-month leadership program for high potential emerging leaders from business, government, and from civil society that results in hands-on prototyping initiatives. We currently are delivering this program through MIT executive education in Indonesia (where we just finished the second wave) and will soon expand this program to other countries including the Philippines and China. Another breakthrough this year was the launch of a two-year Presencing Masterclass that links 72 advanced practitioners from 24 countries into an inspired web of connection and co-creation. The participants of themasterclass meet in monthly virtual coaching sessions and convene in person as a global group for four days, four times over a two-year period.

4. Living Examples – Profound Innovation and Change: Perhaps the most important Presencing work is to support and be in service of applied projects and change initiatives in communities, organizations, and cross-sector large scale change initiatives. Currently, directly or through the Master Class, PI is supporting a range of living examples:
the African Public Health Care Initiative that helps leaders in the health system of Namibia to reinvent and improve their system
WWF and the Coral Triangle Initiative to Develop new or alternative models of juvenile tuna management in the Western Central Pacific and its associated fisheries that channel a portion of tuna’s economic value back into sustainable management initiatives
as well as helping leaders in companies like Natura to deal with their complex multi-stakeholder related challenges of creating innovations for social, economic, ecological, and spiritual well being.
5. Social Presencing Theater: Arawana Hayashi has made real breakthroughs this year directing Social Presencing Theatre that blends embodiment, awareness, improvisation, dialogue, and collective creativity. It has become a core component of the PI Masterclass curriculum.

6. Global/Local Presencing Community Building: The PI community now has 20 individuals in its core group , 72 in its extended core (PI Masterclass) and 4800 online community members, as well as a web presence of close to a million hits per year. How to best interweave and leverage these different levels of community is another question we will continue to work on in 2011.

7. Innovations in Infrastructures: Having prototyped the various key elements of a new presencing-in-action leadership school over the past few years, we now ask ourselves how to best take these elements to the next levels:
As our global community of Presencing practitioners and innovators continues to grow, we will continue to build and expand the structures we have created to convene, link, support and strengthen this work.
In addition, we will continue to explore the larger question of how can we reinvent institutions of education such that the next generation moves into the driver seat of profound societal change? At MIT, we have had great experiences and successes with using presencing for students and mid-career executives at the Sloan School of Management and at the MIT Community Innovators Lab. These first successes beg the question how we might take this more to scale.
While most of our funding is generated through our own products and services, we have been helped enormously in many of these explorations by a generous grant from the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

We believe that the question for us now is what are we called to do as global community of change makers? How can we transform capitalism and pioneer a society and economy that is more inclusive, sustainable, and aware? We believe that we live in a time where emerging global communities like ours can have a big impact if we can rise to the occasion. To dialogue about this, and other questions, we are considering convening the first Global Presencing Forum in Fall 2011 (Oct 24-25) in Cambridge, Mass. Let us know what you think and whether such a forum might be of interest and relevance for you!
Wishing you love and light for the coming year!
– otto

I thought that was a really interesting term they used: to describe a governmental leadership learning structure as a “University of Democracy.” What if we could connect, leverage, and develop such an university of democracy across all ministries and sectors in all countries?