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STRENGTHENING INNER PERSPECTIVES IN LEADERSHIP
DEVELOPMENT ON LOVE AND FORGIVENESS
WHITE PAPER
Prepared by Borislava Manojlovic , Thais Corral and members of the
Advisory Council*
Strengthening Inner Perspectives in Leadership Development on Love and Forgiveness
WHITE PAPER
Table of Contents
Forward
Abstract
Introduction
Methodology
Lessons learned
Addressing issues and unmet needs in the field
Programs
The Collective Leadership Institute
Global Academy Foundation
ForestEthics
Global Leaders Academy
U-Process
Adaptive Leadership
Trans4m Center for Integral Development
The Center for Partnership Studies’ Leadership and Learning Program
Society for Organizational Learning (SOL)/SENEC, Brazil
Effective and Sustainable Law Practices: A Mindfulness-Based Perspective
Appendixes
I - Questionnaire
II - Additional programs
III- Advisory Council
IV- Database
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Forward by Thais Corral
I would like to acknowledge the important contribution provided by the Global
Leadership Network (GLN), especially Walter Link and Alain Gauthier, on the analysis
of the field of generative leadership. GLN developed in 2007 a nine month exploratory
study of the emerging field of "generative change agent development" ( GCAD). The
nine month study was based on an analysis of articles, books and websites as wells as
interviews with observers of the field and program directors on five continents. My
earlier participation in this study, as part of the coordinating team, has given me the
knowledge and the insights to guide seven years later this update, which for reason
beyond our control has a more limited scope.
My gratitude goes to the members of the advisory council which provided invaluable
time and contributions to this white paper. In especial, I would like to thank Professor
Alexander Schieffer which provided critical remarks to the first draft. Finally I would like
to thank Borislava Manojlovic that compiled the information provided by the program
directors in the manuscript as well as in the database.
We consider this a work in progress that will be further refined as we engage in the next
fases of the project.
Abstract
The key findings, interpretations and questions summarized in this white paper
resulted from two exploratory studies of the emerging field of generative leadership.
The first one was carried in 2007 over nine months by Global Leadership Network (
Alain Gauthier, Walter Link and Thais Corral). Seven years later, this exploratory
study is conducted within the framework of a project on Strengthening Inner
Perspectives in Leadership Development on Love and Forgiveness, which is part of a
global initiative of Fetzer Institute (www.fetzer.org) to foster the power of love and
forgiveness as an intrinsic force in the generative field of human development.
While keeping in mind the larger leadership development field, we focused our
exploration on development programs for generative change leaders who tend to
work in and across the public, business and civil society sectors. These programs
integrate personal, interpersonal and systemic dimensions of change, in service of
individual, organizational and societal transformation.
Generative in this context is synonymous with creative, as well as socially and
environmentally responsible. Generative change leaders are able to shift the inner and
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interpersonal perspective from which they operate, and enable people to accept
responsibility for changing their own attitude and behavior, as well as to co-create
positive outcomes for themselves, their organization, and the larger whole.
After a brief review of the objectives, context, and scope of the study and lessons
learned the white paper outlines the views on leadership development shared by the
10 program directors of generative programs that we interviewed and how they
integrate love and forgiveness. The paper is largely exploratory in nature, and is
complemented by a database highlighting the resources collected in the course of the
research. These are presented in appendix IV.
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Objectives of the study
The objectives of the exploratory study were to: (1) globally search some of the
programs that could be indicative of generative education, training, and development
programs for leaders, social entrepreneurs, and other change agents; (2) identify
societal change agent development needs that are not currently addressed; and (3)
identify program directors who would be interested in being connected through a
learning and collaborative network. The focus has been on programs for leaders who
come from diverse sectors (private, public, and civil society) – as well as for “change
process practitioners” (educators, facilitators, consultants, and coaches) – committed to
bringing about a more humane, just, and sustainable world.
The scope of the project was global, with an emphasis on identifying potentially
universal principles and practices. Currently, most of internationally known and
applied processes and programs, books and videos originate from North America and
Europe; little is known (except locally) about leading-edge programs on other
continents.
Given the large size of the leadership development field and the resources we had, we
focused our study on the programs that met most of the following criteria:
a. The primary audiences of the program are leaders, social entrepreneurs, social
change agents and change practitioners who work in and across sectors.
b. There is a substantial degree of integration among the personal, interpersonal,
and systemic components of the program.
c. The design has some innovative features that differentiate it from traditional
leadership development programs.
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d. The profile and experience of the designers and facilitators of the program
indicate a deep understanding and practice of the integration between
personal, interpersonal and systemic change.
e. The curriculum is at least a few months long to facilitate meaningful
transformative outcomes.
f. Post-program evaluation results are available.
1.2. Context of the Study
This exploratory study was directed by Thais Corral, as project coordinator and count
with the support of Borislava Manojlovic, senior research from Seton Hall University
in the USA, in consultations with the advisory group which consists of global
leadership experts from four continents: Walter Link, Alexander Schieffer, Scilla
Elworthy, Rama Mani, Graciela Tapia, Hein Dijksterhuis, Mark Gerzon, Ignacio
Martin Maruri, Sue Cheshire and Alain Gauthier. This group began to cooperate
already several years before the beginning of this exploratory study through the
Global Leadership Network. The objectives, scope and methodology build on a
process and a network that started some years ago.
1.3. Representation of the Study
The 10 programs we looked at ranged from longer programs (six months up to 2
years) to shorter programs (one to several weeks). Though the exploratory study does
not cover the field of generative leadership, the programs selected are
representative/indicative of major tendencies in the field. They could be divided in
three sub-groups. The first sub group represents methodologies that are implemented
across the globe and by a very diverse type of institutions: NGO's, collaborative
networks, universities, companies. This is the case of the U-Process, the Society for
Organization Learning and Adaptive Leadership. In this category we identified three
examples, which express some of the core principles of these methodologies.
The second sub group includes programs created by leadership coaches and mentors
who work primarily with individual leaders and through them, with their
organizations. They are also the main resource of the programs. In this category we
have two programs, with organizations that have been created to support the
implementation of the leadership work: Global Leadership Academy and Global
Leardership Foundation.
The third sub group includes organizations that have been formed around certain
perspectives of leadership development such as multistakeholder dialogue, building
collective intelligence across sectors, building partnerships based on feminine
principles of collaboration and respect to the rights of women and children. All of
them offer frameworks and processes to enable a full transformative potential of
individuals, organizations and societies. In this category we have three organizations:
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Collective Leadership Initiative and the Center for Partnership Studies/ Leadership
and Learning and TRANS4M Center for Integral Development.
A final subgroup consists of two programs, which are straightforward expression of
implementation of generative leadership principles - Forest Ethics and Effective
Sustainable Law Practices - A Mindfulness Based Perspective, which is a program
offered in the context of an university.
2. METHODOLOGY
Through our initial framing of the study, literature review, websites’ analysis, and
individual interviews of field observers and program directors, with the help of the
advisory council, we have identified a first list of about two dozen programs in the
world that meet most of the criteria listed above. Specifically, we examine ten programs
in more depth and list the other programs in appendix II. There are certainly other
programs that could be added to this list and they could be added as the time goes on.
2.1. Identification of programs
We used a snow-ball research methodology, asking members of our advisory council
whom they knew as program directors, and then asking interviewees whom else they
knew that led programs that met our criteria. We were not able to interview all the
program directors we had identified, mostly due to time and resources constraints. We
recognized that the snowball methodology could introduce a certain bias in the
selection of the programs and were attentive to other possible sources and referrals as
we progressed through our search. See the programs considered in appendix II.
2.2. Interviews and website research
The interviews used an open one-page questionnaire , created in consultation with the
advisory council – which was sent ahead of time to the interviewee – as a conversation
starter (see Questionnaire in Appendix I). All interviews were preceded or completed
by some website or literature research in order to focus the conversation on some of the
points not addressed in the website.
2.4. Discussion of findings, hypotheses and questions
The initial findings, hypotheses and questions were discussed and refined with the
advisory council and program directors after the first round of interviews. A few
additional questions and materials were added to the original questionnaire.
We have found that these programs share similar views on leadership development as
well as a number of design characteristics, and that there are a number questions and
unmet needs in this emerging field – that could be best addressed within a learning and
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collaborative network. These findings by the way are guiding the designing and
content of the learning lab.
3. LESSONS LEARNED
3.1. Shared emerging views on leadership development
Most of the program directors and designers we interviewed - this analysis includes
the insights of the study carried by GLN as mentioned earlier - tend to share the
following views on leadership development: 1) addressing complex challenges calls
for a new type of change leadership; 2) developing this new type of co-leadership
requires both a congruent mix of methodologies and instructors/facilitators who
practice what they teach; 3) developmental methods/tools and facilitators/coaches
need to be culturally appropriate to be truly effective; 4) an integral framework is
most useful in assessing both intangible and tangible results, at the individual and
collective levels.
As Alain Gauthier explains in the analysis he did of the data provided by the GLN
exploratory study: "addressing today’s most complex challenges requires both a shift in
consciousness and the skilled, creative and collaborative interventions of ‘post-heroic’
change leaders or ‘social artists’ at many levels and across boundaries. It also calls for
new organizational forms such as ‘living networks’ where individual and collective
leadership enables the emergence of collective intelligence. Most of the programs we
have identified focus on developing leaders and leadership development practitioners in
and across sectors through an integrally-informed approach – which is both inside-out
and outside-in – although they might not use these terms explicitly. Their designers put
equal emphasis on the ‘interior’ dimensions of experience (intention, worldview,
values, vision and culture) and on its ‘exterior’ or visible dimensions (behaviors,
structures and processes), and how they interact for change to be both deep and
sustainable. They also pay attention to the dynamic relationship between individual and
collective transformation. Combining a variety of developmental models, methods and
tools from the West with Eastern and local practices of inner and community
development – seems to be key to both effectiveness and cultural appropriateness. In
the case of international programs, identifying and developing local facilitators and
coaches ensures both local relevance and program sustainability. Evaluation of the
effectiveness of programs is one of the key challenges of programs that have both a
strong inner-work component and field experimentation in the organization or
community. Program designers recognize the complexity of attributing success in
outcomes and impacts to any one program or player, as well as the limitation of
focusing on short-terms results, given the lengthy self-development process of change
leaders and the institutional resistance to change."
3.2. Common characteristics of generative leadership programs
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Generative programs use a variety of selection methods to ensure diverse, motivated
and stimulating classes, although some of the programs cannot be as selective, given
their charter.
a. Programs seek candidates from various sectors and pay attention to racial,
ethnic and gender balance.
b. Most programs address a specific age range (e.g. young, emerging, confirmed or
senior leaders, women), although some of them adopt a wider age distribution.
c. Alumni are often solicited as promoters, nominators and mentors because they
know the program first-hand.
d. Detailed questionnaires, essays, and in-depth interviews by the program director
or faculty of the program are considered crucial to determine whether it is the
right fit and timing for the candidate; some interviewers focus on participants
going through a shift or transition phase (personal and/or professional), as a
time of greater openness.
e. Many programs also pay attention to the candidate’s value orientation (e.g.
service, equity, integrity, authenticity), and to their willingness to both learn
and contribute to the class
f. Endorsement and support from senior management is sought for emerging
leaders’ enrollment.
g. Intensive retreats are faculty-led and based on peer-learning; in most cases,
they place a simultaneous emphasis on personal practices, small and large
group interactions, and planning or review of organizational initiatives
h. In some programs, guest speakers and learning journeys contribute to develop
the participants’ capacity to sense reality from a broader and fresher
perspective.
i. Most programs incorporate individual coaching throughout the curriculum,
using every day’s experience as a practice field. That component is key for
challenging/changing one’s mental models, attitude, and behavior.
Most program we have looked at combined and adapted to their audience some of
the more advanced approaches to leadership development. Many programs blend
and integrate several conceptual frameworks such as Otto Scharmer’s U theory,
Peter Senge’s 5 learning disciplines, Ronald Heifetz, Adaptive Leadership. Most of
the programs use peer learning in their intensive retreats, for co-consulting or
learning teams with a coach, joint research and other action-learning projects, and
mutual support during and after fieldwork. The smaller programs also use these
retreats for community building, and many of them encourage meetings across
cohorts and among alumni to extend the learning experience through network
sharing and support.
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3.3- innovative components
Most programs use a combination of innovative methods and practices that set
them apart from traditional management education.
a. Self-reflection practices such as journaling, action inquiry, meditation,
contemplation, and solo nature retreats are incorporated in many of them.
b. The use of arts for self-expression, communication and trigger for deep
dialogue is also widespread, including drawing, interpretation of paintings,
viewing of provocative films and theater improvisation.
c. Forms of deep dialogue such as collaborative inquiry and circle rituals are also
used by a number of the programs.
d. Several programs use cases emerging in the class as a laboratory or active
experiment in living leadership; faculty is trained to challenge and support the
participants in this type of learning.
e. Hands-on ‘prototyping’ and experimentation is also encouraged by a number
of programs, using field work as an opportunity to seed and ground the
practices learned and insights gained during the retreat and coaching.
Mentoring by alumni and experts in the field is particularly helpful to conduct
these experiments.
f. Peer shadowing and learning journeys are also part of several programs. They
enable participants to broaden their experience and look at their own situation
with fresh eyes; at least two of the programs participate in global classroom
initiatives, connecting their cohort to other cohorts on-line.
g. Some programs offer participants a wide menu of methodologies and tools
that they can use during and after the program, either in the form of a
workbook that they receive during the retreats or on a portal that is accessible
and updated on an on-going basis.
h. Creative technological companies such as Google has created through the
dream of one of his senior executives, the program Search Inside Yourself,
which then became an institute http://siyli.org/, now globally recognized
which method has been adopted by important global companies, articulating
emotional intelligence, mindfulness and neuroscience. More than 1200
executives have been trained.
4. The UNMET NEEDS IN THE FIELD
In the earlier exploratory study conducted by GLN, the unmet needs of the field, were
a particular quest included in the research. Seven years later this was also flagged in
conversations with the advisory council. Through our interviews, we have found that
many of them are also eager to discuss some of the questions and issues they face in
maintaining and growing their programs. Although some of them are connected to a
few colleagues, particularly in the same country or state, most of them feel isolated in a
field that is still emerging and fragmented. For all these reasons, the time seems to be
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right to create a community where program directors and designers could learn from
each other and possibly collaborate.
a. Connecting the developers and directors of generative leadership development
programs together in a learning community that constantly shares and build
strategic collaborative ventures.
b. Promoting a more integral leadership education in mainstream business schools
and corporate executive education programs.
c. Identifying the integral leadership development needs of future and young
leaders/social entrepreneurs through a periodic global survey.
d. Connecting graduates of various programs – particularly social entrepreneurs,
other cross-sector leaders, and socially-minded change practitioners – in
communities of practice (locally, regionally, globally).
e. Mapping out, describing and operationalizing the processes and practices that
best integrate four levels of development: intrapersonal, interpersonal,
organizational, and societal.
f. Developing new funding models to make programs accessible to all potential
participants and keep them viable when foundations shift their priorities, for
example through:
 corporate sponsorship, without biasing the curriculum toward
corporate needs only
 higher tuition for corporate leaders
 funding by local government and international development agencies.
6. PROGRAMS
The programs are analyzed by focusing on their key approaches and concepts, and how
they relate to love and forgiveness. The insights from the interviews with the
representatives of individual programs have been included as well as the review of
relevant literature on theory and practice of the said programs.
The ten programs analyzed in this study are as follows:
1) The Collective Leadership Institute
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2) Global Academy Foundation
3) ForestEthics
4) Global Leaders Academy
5) U-Process
6) Adaptive Leadership
7) Trans4m Center for Integral Development
8) The Center for Partnership Studies’ Leadership and Learning Program
9) Society for Organizational Learning (SOL)/SENEC, Brazil
10) Effective and Sustainable Law Practices: A Mindfulness-Based Perspective
1) The Collective Leadership Institute1
Program Description
The Collective Leadership Institute has been building competence for sustainability
through stakeholder dialogues, engagement processes and collaboration. The Collective
Leadership Institute was founded in 2005 and is an independent initiative supporting
sustainability by engaging stakeholders across all sectors by building the individual
competence to lead collectively and at the systemic level (organisation, cooperation
systems, and networks), by strengthening the collective capacity of collaborating actors
to implement dialogic change and to shift towards more co-creation. The Collective
Leadership Institute enables the participants of their program, whether they are in
the private sector, the public sector, or in civil society, to be more effective in catalyzing
change within a complex, multi-stakeholder environment, increasing change agents’
confidence to face a broad range of challenges associated with such settings.
The Collective Leadership institute is serving systems change and societal transformation
through strategic coaching, process advisory, dialogic facilitation, tailor-made trainings
(based on open courses), and accreditation of organizations in their methodology
leveraging the power of cross-sector networks (StakeholderDialogues.net, Young Leaders
for Sustainability network).
Any attempt to initiate, implement or facilitate cooperation processes is an intervention
into a fragile and often controversial system of actors. So, it requires careful attention to
the quality of the process, the quality of relationships and interaction among stakeholders
(Armistead, Pettigrew und Aves 2007), as well as to the quality of the formal and
informal structures that are created to make the cooperation work (Bryson, Crosby und
Stone 2006).
Complex cooperation processes in sustainable development may be influenced by
external factors that the initiators have little power over, such as political instability or
Data that informed this section are based on the interview with Kristiane Schaefer, CLI, on 26
September 2014 via Skype.
1
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economic crises. But most factors crucial for the success of such initiatives actually can
be influenced to a certain degree. These factors – in combination – can determine the
quality of a cooperation process and, eventually, contribute to its success. Paying
attention to them helps to maintain the dynamic, to keep stakeholders sufficiently
involved and finally to achieve tangible outcomes or successful implementation.
Key Concepts and Approaches
The Dialogic Change Model
The Collective Leadership Institute’s Dialogic Change Model (Kuenkel, Gerlach und
Frieg 2011) is a tool, which assists the result-oriented, structured planning and
implementation of a Stakeholder Dialogue/partnership in four phases.
The different phases of the approach have proven helpful in taking all demands and
requirements of a dialogue process into account and preparing for them adequately.
The CLI Dialogic Change Model is an appropriate tool to design and implement complex
processes that require different interest groups to be included and integrated. A
systematic, methodological knowledge consisting of a dialogic approach and change
management is a pre-requisite for successfully establishing meaningful stakeholder
engagement processes. CLIs open and tailor-made trainings are designed to deliver this
knowledge.
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In Phase 1 (Engaging and exploring) a small team of people builds resonance for the
process, engages with key stakeholders, creates understanding and seeks to understand
the context. Creating and strengthening trusting relationships between stakeholders are
critical for maintaining stability throughout the initiative.
Phase 2 (Building and formalizing) involves the consolidation of the system of
stakeholder engagement by agreeing on a shared vision, objectives and strategies. The
roles and resources required for the effective implementation are defined. The issues of
task allocation, decision-making and communication strategies are also the focus of this
phase. Monitoring and indicators for measuring impact are established.
Phase 3 (Implementing and evaluating) stands for a result-oriented implementation
with the focus on visible results to demonstrate progress and to keep all stakeholders
engaged in the process. Attention is paid to effective communication and continued trust
building between stakeholders to better address crises such as criticism from external
parties, counter initiatives or non-productive discussions. Monitoring systems are used
and results measured.
In Phase 4 (Developing further, replicating or institutionalizing) the stakeholder
initiative is evaluated for further development, replication or institutionalizing. Some
initiatives end successfully in Phase 3.
Stakeholder Dialogues may be influenced by external factors that the initiators have little
power to change, such as political instability or economic crisis. But most factors crucial
for the success of Stakeholder Dialogues can actually be influenced to a certain degree.
These factors – in combination – can determine the quality of a Stakeholder Dialogue
and, eventually, its success.
The Collective Leadership Institute has developed the following 8 key factors based on
the experience of many practitioners since 2005. The factors are interrelated and mutually
supportive. They can be seen as lenses through which a group of initiators or convenors
can look at and evaluate the quality of their Stakeholder Dialogue process and review
which areas require attention.
Figure 1: 8 Key factors for the successful implementation of stakeholder partnerships (Kuenkel,
Gerlach und Frieg 2011)
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Key factor 1: Leadership and high-level sponsorship
The initial collaboration in a complex stakeholder cooperation can be brokered/initiated
by a credible high-level individual or organization. Most stakeholder cooperation projects
build on past, often fragmented project experience and attempt to strengthen impact by
aligning the efforts of different stakeholders. Hence, it is often practitioners in the field
who draw attention to an issue and bring in a powerful sponsor or organization.
Legitimacy within a group of stakeholders is key at the onset, as initiators need a mandate
to start the collaboration process. More generally, initiating individuals can be e.g., highlevel leaders, recognized for their cross-sector experience, CEOs, or politicians. They can
also be large NGOs, private enterprises or foundations. High level sponsorship is vital for
the successful launch of a collaboration process.
Key factor 2: Cohesion and relationship management
Under the assumption that successful partnerships are key to achieving sustainable
results, stakeholders need to move from an individual project management style into
collaborative action (Glasbergen 2010). This is achieved through the principles of
transparency and participation (Kuenkel, Gerlach und Frieg 2011) and the recognition
that equity and accountability in interpersonal interaction/communication are relevant.
Key factor 3: Goal and process clarity
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People engage when they see the bigger picture and understand how they can contribute
to positive change. Clarity about goals and about process go hand in hand in stakeholder
partnerships.
Key Factor 4: Knowledge and Competence
Trust can be based on both the competence and on the perceived intentions of either
individuals or organizations (B. Nooteboom 2006). As stakeholder partnerships take
place around content issues and delivery, expertise and information need to be provided
in a way that helps stakeholders to see the issue’s full picture. If one partner’s
shortcomings are due to a lack of competence, then capacity-building (particularly for
weaker stakeholder groups) may be an option to help strengthen their voices and improve
the quality of their contributions, e.g., educating stakeholders about the concepts,
information, and tools that are key to its work (Keast, et al. 2004).
Key factor 5: Credibility
Partnerships need credibility to be effective. Firstly, the reputation, neutrality and
credibility of the initiator, convener or facilitator are especially important to lend
credibility and legitimacy to the initiative and facilitate collaboration (Gray 1989).
Secondly, it is important that all stakeholder groups be equally represented in the
dialogue process in order to remain credible not only to stakeholders within the process,
but also to those observing it. Thirdly, the reliability with which recommendations or
inputs from different stakeholders are taken into account can affect the overall credibility
of the decision-making process. Finally, how embedded the Stakeholder partnership is in
relevant societal processes also contributes to its credibility. Scholars call this the degree
of structural embeddedness (Bryson, Crosby und Stone 2006). The more partners have
interacted in positive ways in the past, the more social mechanisms will enable
coordination and safeguard exchange (Jones, Hesterly und Borgatti 1997).
Key factor 6: Inclusivity
Stakeholder partnerships that exclude important stakeholders will lose credibility and will
cause mistrust among non-participating stakeholders. They will also be less effective,
because stakeholders who are important for implementing or supporting results are absent
from the dialogue process. In a study in the health sector in the US, Lasker et al. (2001)
identify one of the main indicators for the effectiveness of leadership in stakeholder
partnerships as being the degree of inclusiveness and openness exhibited in the
collaboration process.
Key factor 7: Ownership
People implement what they have helped to create. Ownership develops when the goal of
the stakeholder partnership is relevant to all stakeholders and when they perceive that
their contribution counts. Keeping people engaged is an important road to success. If
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participants in a dialogue process have the impression that their recommendations are not
being implemented and feel that their concerns and perspectives are not being taken into
account, there is a high probability that they will reduce their engagement and fail to
implement decisions, become passive observers, or completely withdraw from the
process altogether.
Key factor 8: Delivery and outcome-orientation
Bryson et al. (2006) argue that the main objective of cross-sector partnerships should be
the creation of sustainable “public value” that would not otherwise be created by a single
sector alone. This is most likely to occur by making use of each sector’s characteristic
strengths while also finding ways to minimize, overcome, or compensate for each
sector’s characteristic weaknesses. Focus on outcomes is a prerequisite for commitment.
The Collective Leadership Compass
The Collective Leadership Compass is the core of the practice-oriented approach to
leading complex change in multi actor settings used by the Collective Leadership
Institute. It is applied to strengthen our individual leadership skills, to enhance the
leadership capacity of a group of actors and to shift systems of collaborating actors
towards better co-creation. Quotation? “This model empowers leaders to navigate
collaboration successfully by attending to a pattern of interacting human competencies in
the six dimensions: future possibilities, engagement, innovation, humanity, collective
intelligence and wholeness.” Engagement and Collective Intelligence are the two
competencies referring to the initiation and development of a collaboration process that is
supported by the Dialogic Change Model (see above), designed and evaluated through
the 8 success factors as described.
Figure 2: The
Collective
Leadership
Compass
(Source:
www.collectivele
adership.com)
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The six competencies of Collective Leadership
1. Future possibilities
Inspiring and empowering others, staying open-minded, observing trends, developments
and new knowledge, going beyond problem diagnose, sensing and enacting future
possibilities, following-through, taking a stand for sustainability.
2. Engagement
Building meaningful stakeholder engagement processes that create trust and cohesion,
invigorating network connections, fostering collective action that leads to tangible
outcomes and enhanced collective impact.
3. Innovation
Venturing into the unknown, driving excellence, fostering creativity, acknowledging
diverse expertise, building a climate of trust-based co-creation and developing the
potential to spot innovative solutions to sustainability challenges.
4. Humanity
Acknowledging diversity in the world and in humanity, accessing our humanity in
ourselves and in others, creating an atmosphere of mutual respect, cultivating reflection,
attending to inner balance.
5. Collective intelligence
Respecting difference, inviting diverse perspectives, experiences and viewpoints for
better solutions, fostering structured dialogue, valuing contributions, ensuring iterative
learning.
6. Wholeness
Placing our actions in a larger context, opening up to seeing the bigger picture of a
situation, acting in favour of the common-good, continuously improving our contribution
to sustainability, creating networks of mutual support.
Integrating love and forgiveness
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In the process of developing competence for collaboration, love and forgiveness are
essential human resources. Through Stakeholder Dialogues, leaders delve deeply in their
inner self searching for clues as to why they are doing what they are doing and what is
driving them. This is necessary for leaders because, as Petra Kuenkel, founder and
Director of CLI, suggests, “we become disconnected from our heart. …we let ourselves
be driven by superficial stimulation and the desire to excel. We take on more and more
new challenges, frequently change jobs, engage in extreme sports or indulge in
stimulants. We become restless in our unconscious search to access the deeper force of
life that is the source of genuine passion. We focus on outward achievement only”. 2 By
focusing on interconnectedness of individuals and groups, by connecting our inner self
with the wider consequences of our action, it is possible to see the wider picture in which
love for the other and the environment becomes clearer. As the vision expands, people
become more aware of the need to understand the intricate web of relationships that we
are embedded in and to forgive others and ourselves.
According to Kristiane Schaefer, co-founder of CLI, many of CLI trainings and courses
are dialogic practices, which provide insight and generate certain dynamics among people
– which help participants to realize their inter-connectedness and integrate the ‘human
dimension’ as an important element of all collaboration and engagement efforts. CLI
works with people to become more self-aware, as well as to analyze the system of
stakeholders that they are operating in. At any time, there may be different kind of people
such as movers, followers, supporters, opposers and observers. By becoming aware about
these action modes, initiators of Stakeholder Dialogues and change processes can develop
a process to mke them work together. The CLI model also has a deeper layer with love as
a central force. For an ineffective system to be changed, there has to be a confluence of
the different elements. There are people who will compete, but change cannot be
achieved without the support of those who will help the system to move to the next level.
“We could call that a love energy, with the people who are taking care of the system and
what it needs. Once people have started a course, we can see the trust and people opening
up. How they communicate, dialogue, and collaborate with others is so closely linked to
their human side and the human side of others that they are collaborating with.” In the
CLI’s Collective Leadership Compass, there is this strong element of humanity together
with wholeness, or the interdependency, and the acknowledgement that we are all
interdependent. CLI’s initiatives are connected by a real passion for change and a passion
to connect to the work for the larger good.
References
Gerlach, Silvine, and Vera Frieg. 2011. Working with Stakeholder Dialogues.
Norderstedt: Books On Demand.
2
See: http://petrakuenkel.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/when-passion-lives-a-remote-life/
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Armistead, C., Pettigrew, P. & Aves, S., 2007. Exploring Leadership in Multi-sectoral
Partnerships. Leadership, 3(2), p. 211.
Bryson, J. M., Crosby, B. C. & Stone, M. M., 2006. The Design and Implementation of
Cross-Sector Collaborations: Propositions from the Literature. Public Administration
Review, December.pp. 44-55.
Kuenkel, Petra. 2008. Mind and Heart. Mapping Your Personal Journey Towards
Leadership for Sustainability. Auflage: 1., Aufl. Norderstedt: Books on Demand.
Kuenkel, P., Gerlach, S. & Frieg, V., 2011. Working with Stakeholder Dialogues.
Potsdam: a publication by the Collective Leadership Institute, BoD.
Glasbergen, P., 2010. Understanding Partnerships for Sustainable Development
Analytically: the Ladder of Partnership Activity as a Methodological Tool.
Environmental Policy and Governance, Issue DOI: 10.1002/eet.545.
Gray, B., 1989. Collaborating: Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems. San
Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Jones, C., Hesterly, W. & Borgatti, S., 1997. A General theory of Network Governance:
Exchange Conditions and Social Mechanisms. Academy of Management Review, 22(4),
pp. 911-45.
Keast, R., Mandell, M. P., Brown, K. & Woolcock, G., 2004. Network Structures:
Working Diff erently and Changing Expectations. Public Administration Review, 64(3),
pp. 363-361.
Nooteboom, B., 2006. Trust and innovation. October.
Nooteboom, S. G., 2006. Adaptive Networks: The Governance for Sustainable
Development. Delft, The Netherlands: Eburon Academic Publishers.
Routledge. 2014. “Adaptation to Climate Change through Water Resources Management:
Capacity, Equity and Sustainability (Hardback) - Routledge”. Text. Accessed September
4. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415635936/.
“Living Collective Leadership | This Is the Personal Blog of Petra Kuenkel on Living
Collective Leadership. I Write for Anybody Who Believes That This World Needs More
Collective Action for Sustainability and Wonders How Best to Get There. It Is Meant to
Inspire You with Thoughts, Experiences, Hints, Links, Tools, and Open Questions. Your
Comments Are Most Welcome!” 2014. Accessed September 4.
http://petrakuenkel.wordpress.com/.
Lasker, R. D., Weiss, E. S. & Miller, R., 2001. Partnership synergy: a practical
framework for studying and strengthening the collaborative advantage. The Milbank
Quarterly, 79(2), pp. 179-205.
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Petra Kuenkel, Kristiane Schaefer, “Shifting the way we co-create. How we can turn the
challenges of sustainability into opportunities”, Collective Leadership Studies – Volume
1
2) Global Academy Foundation3
Program Description
Global Academy Foundation (GAF) is inspired by the ancient understanding of the
academy as a living organism, which integrates personal and interpersonal development
with transformational action in the world. From this perspective GAF supports
individuals, organizations and societies to develop towards their overall individual and
collective potential.
GAF’s Global Leadership & Innovation Approach (GLIA) therefore integrates personal
and interpersonal development with organizational and societal transformation. It
integrates ancient eastern and western wisdom traditions, modern science and psychology
with hands-on leadership experience across diverse sectors, cultures and societies. It aims
to integrate the depth of human inspiration with the pragmatism to effectively act on real
world issues at this time of tremendous challenges and opportunities.
GAF’s services range from innovation support and strategic advise, individual and team
coaching, leadership and culture development programs and social investment banking to
network and movement development, conference organizing and media offerings,
executive and academic education programs – all of which empower generative change
agents and their organizations and movements who want to develop themselves and make
a real difference in the world.
GAF’s content areas include innovation, leadership and management development;
education, peace work and conflict transformation, social and environmental
sustainability, human rights and justice, sustainable business and economic development,
governance and respectful globalization, responsible science and integrative medicine as
well as the intellectual and psycho-spiritual maturation that GAF considers to be core to
excelling in any of them. This diversity of topics is integrated by GAF’s integral view of
the emergence of a unifying evolutionary movement that impacts all aspects of human
life around the world as we move towards new paradigms of civilization. Ultimately it is
this emergence that GAF wants to support.
GAF’s clients and partners include civil society organizations and social movements such
as Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka and ForestEthics in North America and the Global Leadership
Data that informed this section are based on the written responses to the questionnaire by Walter
Link, Chair of the Global Academy Foundation, shared on 14 October 2014.
3
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Network, Ashoka and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which are active globally;
progressive companies such as Triodos, Europe leading sustainability bank and members
of the sustainable business movements SVN and Empresa as well as global technology
leaders such as Philips and Tata Communications; universities ranging in the USA from
Berkeley and Stanford to the Buddhist inspired Naropa University as well as the
University of Panama and Peking University in Beijing; holistic learning and research
centers throughout the former Eastern and Western Europe as well as Omega Institute
and IONS in the USA; governments and multilateral institutions such as Latin America’s
Cumbre, the International Finance Corporation and United Nations.
Incorporated in the USA in 1999, GAF’s group of related organizations has been active
in the field of generative change agent development since 1985. From its beginnings it
used a network approach to organizing that focused not on building a single institution
but rather a flexible network of individuals and organizations that collaborate as needed.
While GAF’s founder and chair Walter Link has been involved in many of its activities,
GAF has therefore many co-leaders who are highly respected in their respective fields.
Therefore co-leadership is a core principle of GAF’s work. In this context GAF created
and co-created, led and co-led hundreds of change agent development programs around
the world, which were offered both under its own name and under those of other
institutions.
Selected Programs
In our research study, we include five programs, which exemplify GAF’s diverse yet
integral approach to generative leadership development:
1. GAF’s ongoing leadership, innovation and culture development program for the
top leaders of Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka’s largest social movement across their
extensive spiritual and educational, civil society and business activities.
2. The USA’s first fully accredited MBA in Sustainable Management at Presidio
Graduate School in San Francisco, for which GAF played a major role in program
design, delivery and board leadership.
3. The two-year Visionary Leadership Program and ongoing coaching process with
top leaders at Triodos, Europe’s leading sustainability bank, which GAF codesign and co-lead with Hein Dijksterhuis.
4. GAF’s ongoing Mindful Leadership Development Program at ForestEthics, one
of North America’s leading environmental campaign, which is now collaborating
with GA to co-create an international campaign training program
5. GAF’s online media and learning platform GlobalLeadership.TV, which as its
first program series, The Heart of Innovation features in-depth dialogues with
some of the world’s most innovative leaders who credit their diverse paths to
personal development with their impact on the world.
Each of these programs intends to empower specific individuals and organizations as well
as co-create with them models that ground this emerging paradigm of civilization into
concrete reality. By offering successful examples, which demonstrate that real change
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throughout all sectors of society and in diverse cultures around the world is not only
possible but already happening. In a world filled with bad news that can lead to
withdrawal and cynicism GAF and its partners aspire to provide evidence-based hope and
inspire active engagement because GAF believes that each of us is a potential change
agent for meaningful innovation.
Innovative program features
The most innovative features of GA’s programs can be summarizes as:
 Diversity: Adaptation of the programs’ form, content and language to very diverse
contexts, while maintaining coherence through a unifying theory of change.
 Conscious Theory and Praxis of Change: Programs are intentionally designed
based on a specific understanding of how transformation actually happens in
individuals, organizations and larger societal systems.
 Integral Approach: GAF’s Global Leadership & Innovation Approach integrates
diverse organizational and societal change work with deep inner and interpersonal
work approaches.
 Faculty Selection: Diverse faculty members range from senior psycho-spiritual
teachers and experienced educators and scientists to leadership and innovation
experts and successful social and business entrepreneurs.
 Peer-to-Peer Activities play an important role in GAF’s programs not only as
interactions during course time but beyond it as shared support and joint action in
the world, where much of the integration occurs.
 Nature: GAF’s theory of change includes that experiencing nature deeply
provides access to an important source of inspiration and guidance, nourishment
and maturation.
GAF suggests that we live in a time rich with inspiration to change - on individual and
relational, organizations and larger societal system levels. That is an important step
forward and GAF’s media products contribute to this effort. They include the pioneering
book Leadership is Global, which was co-authored by 22 leadership experts from around
the world and which GAF’s chair Walter Link co-edited with Thais Corral and Mark
Gerzon as well as its Global Leadership TV (GLTV) series The Heart of Innovation, in
which Walter dialogs with some of the world’s most innovative leaders about the how
their personal transformation process is at the core of their success in the world. To move
from inspiration towards transformation GLTV also offers concrete practices that viewers
can engage in to get a taste of the methods that helped these leaders to excel. With these
media products GA wants to create a bridge to its and other transformative programs that
help people change, not only their ideas but who they are, what they do and how they do
it.
GAF believes that faculty plays a key role in this process because in its view they don’t
only teach what they know but impact others by who they are and what they can do.
Walter Link: “We understand that together with the participants we co-create a living
field that invites and facilitates change. Its catalytic impact depends also on who shares
this space both as faculty and as participants. This is why GA very carefully assembles its
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program faculties to range from successful leaders who played important roles in
innovation and changing organizations and sectors to faculty members who have deep
levels of psycho-spiritual realization as well as the capacity to facilitate the unique
transformation processes of diverse participants.
And we try to co-create a strong peer-to-peer development community among the
participants. In our programs everybody is supported to learn from everybody, also by
doing things together because much development occurs in the context of mindful action.
We call that the Path of Action, a contemporary version of Engaged Buddhism or
Kharma Yoga, Lived Christianity or ancient western philosophy for which mindful action
was the primary practice for transformation. This is particularly relevant as the majority
of humanity will not become meditators. But they are in constant action and that action –
if reoriented towards aware activity – can become even more transformative with support
for conscious practice.”
GAF‘s programs don’t have a standard form but adapt to participants’ contexts. For
example when GAF works with Sarvodaya’s community leaders in Sri Lanka who grew
up in a rural Buddhist culture, GAF uses Buddhist terminology, values and processes that
make it easier for participants to engage in the change program. As Sarvodaya now
creates a fully regulated (yet socially and environmentally responsible) bank out of its
non-profit micro finance institution, GAF helps to bridge various divides between the forprofit and the not-for-profit culture inside and around the Sarvodaya movement by
helping them to understand, respect and integrate each other orientations so that together
the movement can reach its shared objectives. On the other hand when working with
western activists or global business leaders who don’t see themselves as ‘spiritual’ and
are possibly even anti-spiritual, GA uses secular, science and action based
conceptualization and language for what may or not be more or less the same content.
Walter Link: “What matters to us is positive impact. We keep asking ourselves: what
works? That’s why we sometimes refer to our work as inspired pragmatism. In our
observation, it is not enough for people have good intentions and learn new ideas and
behaviors if they don’t change more fundamentally. New ideas and good intentions work
when the sun is shinning though even then it lacks the power that comes with authentic
transformation. But in the midst of crises when we most need these new ways of
perceiving and thinking, communicating and acting, we tend to revert to our old
conditioned behaviors. This dilemma makes transformation an imperative for new action
in times of crises - and crisis is fast becoming the new normal.
Wanting to transform requires us to be humble and patient in our expectations because
humans develop at their own pace and not according to their or our expectations. That’s
why we can’t wait for all individuals to change but need to co-create institutions and
communities that support people to behave in better ways. The Nazis of Germany didn’t
die out overnight. A new cultural, social and political context helped Germany to
gradually grow into a peaceful democracy. Therefore the personal development favored
by the inner change communities and the societal change goals of the outer work
communities are mutually enhancing. The debate over which is primary helps nobody.
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What we need is mutual understanding, respect and collaboration. That’s why GAF tries
to bridge these communities to develop integral views and practices.”
In its effort to support deep understanding and effective action in participants GAF uses a
wide variety of approaches from diverse fields of practice. They range from various
approaches to innovation and leadership, management and organizational development to
transformation approaches such as Buddhist mindfulness, the Diamond Approach’s
inquiry and the knowledge of neuroscience and psychology. This integral approach
combines scientific research with direct knowing gained through action and
introspection, emotional maturation with business effectiveness, understanding internal
protection mechanisms with societal transformation dynamics, social and environmental
sustainability with corporate success and economic development, constructive
confrontation with love and forgiveness. Walter Link: “When we understand reality
deeply enough, what appears at a more superficial level as paradoxes or polar opposites,
reveals itself as mutually challenging but supportive elements of an integral whole.”
In co-founding Presidio’s MBA for Sustainable Management, GAF helped to pioneer the
integration of social and environmental sustainability as well as personal and
interpersonal leadership development with hands-on business courses to demonstrate that
on can realistically co-create an integral paradigm for business and its education. In
support of this integration, the carefully selected faculty included not only academics but
successful social and business entrepreneurs as well as leadership and inner work experts
who supported students to do meaningful inner and interpersonal work. The
understanding of how to make such as program not only inspirational but also pragmatic
grew out of GAF’s extensive experience of co-creating and co-leading progressive
business networks in which companies tried to implement this new paradigm of business.
One of these companies was Triodos, Europe’s leading sustainability bank, which asked
GAF to co-create and co-lead a 2-year Visionary Leadership Program for its top level
bankers. The program objectives ranged from reinventing the role of banking in support
of sustainable society to finding deep inspiration and meaning in ones own work and life
because Triodos understood that only when their leaders’ visions are grounded in
transformation are they robust and sustainable. Because Triodos had used Theory U to
develop its strategic plan, the program integrated the U-Process with GAF’s Global
Leadership & Innovation Approach, which easily adapts to the U form. Also here the
main faculty consisted of leadership and transformation experts while the important
adjunct faculty included globally respected business and social change innovators. The
multi-layered program invited participants into several retreats in nature as well as to
enter challenging social contexts such as Brazil’s favelas that challenge the status quo of
their predominantly European experience.
Inherent in these diverse programs is GAF’s detailed Theory of Change. Walter Link: “In
all their diversity, our programs are unified by our clear and consistent Theory and Praxis
of Change. It is simple and yet also complex and can be understood to the degree of
shared experience. Therefore I can only point here in its direction: In our view
transformation in individuals and their collectives occurs through the interaction of
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awareness, understanding and action, all of which can be greatly refined and empowered
as we develop. This triad is mutually reinforcing within a constant feedback loop. In
order to transform beyond our powerful status quo that limits change, these three
elements have to occur on all relevant levels – intellectual and deep mind (head center),
emotions and essential feelings (heart center), body and energy (belly center) including
also the diverse qualities of presence, space and emptiness that determine their
functioning. Therefore each program addresses all of these levels in both a conceptual
and experiential manner.”
GAF also points out that if one learns how change works on the inside, one also become
much better at helping to cause it on the outside. Walter Link continues: “Because of this
unifying Theory of Change, we can use many forms of process, conceptualization and
language. Unfortunately many people focus too much on form at the detriment of the
essence that actually does most of the work in whatever form we use. Of course good
forms can significantly help. But no form can save us if the essence is lacking, while the
right essence can make most forms work. So people debate whether it is better to use
Buddhist mindfulness or other approaches to develop sensitivity, awareness and
understanding. Or they debate whether the U-Process is better than Kotter’s Seven Steps.
In our view, there is much more common ground between these approaches then people
realize. Reinforcing their distinctions limits us in understanding what really makes them
work. And it hinders us in cocreating and being perceived by mainstream society as a
coherent field that is needed in addressing the pressing challenges and opportunities of
our time. By cocreating organisms like the Global Leadership Network and the Global
Change Agent Development research project, which studied thirty diverse programs from
around the world, GAF has been trying to contribute to advancing mutual understanding
and respect.
Integrating Love and Forgiveness
Walter Link: “Love and forgiveness are always central to GAF’s work because they are
at the heart of our Vision and Mission, our Theory and Praxis of Change. However
depending on the context these terms may or not be used because we don’t impose
terminology but rather adapt to what works in diverse contexts. For example Sarvodaya
frames its activities under the term of awakening and compassion. This relates more
easily to its cultural context. Yet the organization is a living manifestation of what Martin
Luther King would have called Agape love. Sarvodaya is also one of the world’s experts
in multi-ethnic reconciliation and collaboration, which in a country with a 30-year civil
war history requires an especially deep understanding and practice of forgiveness.”
Another example is ForestEthic’s fundamental principle of ‘Fierce Compassion’, the
wording and framing of which grew out of its change agent development work with
GAF. Fierce Compassion could also be called ‘courageous love and forgiveness’.
Compassion here means the love and care for nature and people that depend on it is
fundamental and primary to ForestEthics orientation and action. The fierceness is
required to stand up to the world’s most powerful governments and corporations whose
actions can and often do harm nature and people. Effective action includes to vigorously
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challenge these institutions. Love and forgiveness guides us to do so without making
these institutions and the people representing them into enemies but rather to fiercely
offer them options for change, in which adversaries become partners. In a world often
split between hostile activism and non-challenging advice, Fierce Compassion is a model
of impactful campaigning that achieves ‘peace by peaceful means’ – which is a
fundamental principle of GAF’s Theory and Praxis of Change. (See further details in
ForestEthics program description of this study.)
References
Dialog between Thais Corral and Walter Link. December 1st, 2014.
ForestEthics website. Accessed November 28th 2014 http://forestethics.org
GAF website. Accessed November 28th 2014 http://global-lead.org/gaf/.
Global Leadership TV website. Accessed November 28th, 2014 http://globalleadership.tv
Link, Walter, Thais Corral, and Mark Gerzon, eds. 2006. Leadership Is Global: CoCreating a More Humane and Sustainable World. Shinnyo-en Foundation.
Presidio Graduate School website. Accessed November 28th, 2014
http://presidioMBA.org
Sarvodaya website. Accessed November 28th 2014 http://sarvodaya.org
“Walter Link and Bernie Glassman – Living a Life That Matters Workshop.” 2014.
Accessed November 28. http://global-lead.org/integratingactionworkshop/.
3) ForestEthics4
Program Description
ForestEthics was born out of a coalition of North America’s leading environmental
organizations, which after the limited success of traditional campaign methods realized
that they needed a radically approach to protect endangered old growth forests.
ForestEthics’s campaigns so far helped to protect 70 million acres or 30 million hectares.
However ForestEthics’ focus has significantly broadened. It is now considered to be one
of North America’s most impactful environmental organizations, helping for example to
4
Data that informed this section are based on the interview and written responses to the questionnaire by
Matthew Westendorf, Chief operating officer, ForestEthics, shared on 14 October 2014.
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lead the campaign against tar sands, the most polluting and climate endangering form of
carbon products. Due to the effectiveness of its campaigns the Canadian Prime Minister
placed it at the top of an illegal black list of environmental organizations he intended to
destroy with the help of various government agencies. Eventually the press was informed
of these governmental activities, causing a public outcry that further strengthened
ForestEthics impact.
ForestEthics pioneered a new approach to corporate and market campaigning based on
the “conflict to collaboration” model. This approach successfully transformed the
behavior of global corporations and governments in North America.To support its work
ForestEthics asked Global Academy Foundation to co-create a mindful leadership
development program that is now offered to all staff members. The program integrates
deep inner and interpersonal development practices with organizational change and its
outside oriented coalition building and campaign activities. The program started in 2009
with one-on-one coaching for the organization’s top leaders and grew to include the
entire staff in a variety of interactive program offerings, which are continuously being
adapted to ForestEthics evolving needs.
The objectives of the program are as follows:




Strengthening ForestEthics’ staff members’ capacity to work and live according
to their shared values, while advancing personal and interpersonal, organizational
and systemic innovation, sustainability and regeneration.
Enhancing the effectiveness and overall success of ForestEthics campaigns and
other activities that serve the protection of forests and more generally nature,
climate and the people who depend on them.
Serving as a model and support for transforming the environmental and other civil
society fields by integrating inner and interpersonal work with action in the world.
Affecting change within the global systems of public policy, business, and
media—all of which have a powerful impact on shaping culture and
understanding of how humanity can live in harmony with the natural world.
Its reputation for successful campaigns and inspiring leadership has prompted other
campaigners and campaign organizations to ask ForestEthics for support in developing
their leadership capacities. Therefore, ForestEthics is now teaming up with Global
Academy Foundation to co-create an international training and development program for
campaigners as well as other activists and social entrepreneurs in and beyond the
environmental arena.
Innovative Aspects of the Program
The most innovative aspect of the program is the seriousness and comprehensiveness
with which it aims to implement mindful leadership into every aspect of ForestEthics’
work. They understand that this is much more than developing certain ideas, skills and
tools. It is a way of being and acting that is both collective and individual to each of
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them.
The program also put an important emphasis on opening into nature as a source of
inspiration, guidance and sustenance, reminding everybody that being in deep contact
with nature is central to who they are and what they serve. Therefore the program
supports participants to refine their awareness and sensitivity to deepen their contact with
nature. One opportunity for this is their annual 5-day retreat, which during the past years
was hosted at the Bbar Ranch, adjacent to Yellowstone National Park in Montana. In this
powerful natural environment they work on strategy and other work related topics and
integrate that work with mindfulness practic as they hike and river raft and do specific
meditations and interactive sessions in nature.
A variety of practices is used in the program ranging from Global Leadership Practices to
Buddhist mindfulness and Diamond Approach’s inquiry, from inter-hierarchical feedback
sessions to work with the Superego/Voice of Judgment and Discernment. Because of
ForestEthics’ focus on running the organization based on strong guiding principles such
as ’the best idea wins’, the program constantly looks at how to integrate hierarchy with a
very open process of contribution. That creates a challenging but also creative
governance process, facilitated by the use of inner and interpersonal work to enhance
creativity and initiative and to support very frank feedback up and down hierarchical
lines and to transform conflict, which inevitably arises under such pressured
circumstances.
Another result of the program is that organizational meetings now start with a meditation
on the meeting’s objectives to be achieved by a mindful meeting process that attends to
the quality of interaction as well as concrete outcomes. When meetings get stuck,
participants return to self-awareness, then start fresh and often find that they are saving
time and increase creativity and effectiveness by spending time to become mindful.
ForestEthics’ leadership approach is grounded in the very diverse communities in which
they do their work. These communities range from the indigenous communities and the
environmental movement to forest workers and farmers, local and national governments
to global corporations and the media. Each of these communities requires specific forms
of interactions, which the program supports with its mindful leadership practices.
Key Concepts and Approaches
A key element of ForestEthics approach that is supported by its leadership development
program is its attempt to rigorously implement its cultural principles. They provide a
framework for who they are, how they do things, what matters to them, and what they
value most. Here the self-explanatory list as it hangs in their offices:
We Do the Impossible: We know that a better world is out there - our role is to push
toward that place. We will get there by doing what has never been done, doing what
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some say cannot happen, doing what is believed to be impossible.
We are Pragmatic Idealists: Cynicism is easy; dreaming big isn't, but that's what we
do. We take our dreams and make them real by adopting outcome-driven strategies, by
overcoming adversity, and by maintaining our focus for as long as is needed to
succeed for people, forests and wild places.
Relationships are Crucial: Respectful relationships are essential to our work and to
our lives. Collaboration is our preferred approach, but we won't take no for an answer.
If confrontation becomes necessary, we don't see our adversaries as enemies but as
potential partners with whom we temporarily disagree.
Best Idea Wins: Creativity and innovation are the lifeblood of ForestEthics'
strategies. We find the best ideas when curiosity, experimentation, risk-taking and
collaboration are used as tools to foster breakthrough thinking and uncommon
solutions.
Leverage and Dynamic Tension: Significant progress requires power: we are
constantly searching for leverage and applying it at the precise location needed to
unleash the forces of change. To maximize this leverage, we reject dogmatic
thinking, we are comfortable with uncertainty, and we embrace uncommon allies.
Balance: Sometimes we have to sprint, and we sprint hard. Significant change,
however, is a marathon. We go above and beyond to accomplish our goals and we also
take the time to balance our professional and personal lives so we can bring passion,
creativity and excitement to the next challenge we face.
Fierce Compassion: Investing in our team is a priority and we do so through
leadership training and mindfulness practice to tap into the immense power resident in
each of us. That great capacity is harnessed to speak truth to power - and to speak truth
to ourselves, our colleagues, our allies, and our adversaries with skill and grace.
These principles also guide the leadership program, which in turn offers support to
actually live them. The program breaks these principles down into specific leadership
capacities – skills of doing and enabling qualities of being – the development of which is
supports, also by co-developing with participants specific work practices for day-to-day
functioning.
While pushing hard to achieve their goals, ForestEthics mindful leadership program
stresses balance in their staff’s lives so they can sustain passion, creativity and excitement
in the face of the great challenges and pressures they face as they build complex
coalitions and stand up to major governments and corporations. Therefore investment in
the team is a priority and it is done on practical levels such as through healthcare benefits,
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paid vacation and limited working hours as well as through leadership training and
mindfulness practice that ForestEthics claims has had a powerful impact on the success
of its campaigns.
The theory of change underlying the program is adapted from Global Academy
Foundation’s perspective, which is confirmed by the ForestEthics experience:
Transformation occurs in the interplay of awareness, understanding and action. These
elements reinforce each other in a constant feedback loop. To unfold their biggest impact
these must occur on all relevant levels – intellectual and deep mind (head center),
emotions and essential feelings (heart center), body and energy (belly center) and the
qualities of presence, space and emptiness that empower them. The program addresses all
of these levels in both a conceptual and experiential manner.
Evaluation
The program is assessed on a regular basis using the following methods. The leadership
team periodically engages in direct feedback and inquiry sessions with participants to
assess how individuals are engaging with and benefiting from the work. Participants are
also invited to unanimously share their views on how the program impacts them
professionally and personally and how it can be improved. Additionally participants’
work performance is assessed by observing the way they think, communicate and act.
Lastly ForestEthics seeks input from their stakeholders who so far reacted positively to
the changes they observed. Their best feedback may well be that they are asking
ForestEthic to help them develop the similar leadership capacities, which is now causing
ForestEthics to develop its open subscription training and development program with
Global Academy Foundation.
Integrating Love and Forgiveness
Love and forgiveness are central to ForestEthics’ work. For example, one can find this
orientation in the organization’s cultural principles that are fundamental to all of their
work.
One of these fundamental principles for action is “fierce compassion”. It could also be
called ‘courageous love and forgiveness’. Compassion here means the love and care for
nature and people that is primary to ForestEthics orientation and action. ForestEthics also
aims to love and care for their team and network partners. And this love aided by
forgiveness also extends to those ForestEthics opposes and whose views and behaviors
they seek to change. ForestEthics staff respects them as human beings and organizations
even as they do all they can to motivate change in their views and behaviors. If necessary,
they organize media and action campaigns, which put strong enough pressure on their
adversaries’ financial and other interests to motivate dialog and ultimately
transformation. This is where the word ‘fierce’ comes into play because their compassion
needs courage and fierceness to challenge very powerful people, organizations and
overall systems that maintain or even advance a destructive status quo. It would not be
loving and caring to nature and people, and not even to the potential of those they try to
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change to let them do this. At the same time they refrain from judging and attacking them
personally but rather try to understand that their adversaries find themselves in a difficult
situation facing opposing pressures.
With this approach, many adversaries have been turned into allies. Case studies include
their work with logging executives in the Great Bear Rainforest Campaign and corporate
leaders at 3M and Staples (office supply stores), and the catalogue giant Victoria’s Secret
that prints millions of catalogues and now has not only changed its paper sourcing
policies but went way beyond to implement an ambitious environmental agenda. Each of
these cases features powerful leaders and organizations who were unwilling to consider
change. Yet with fierce compassion, skilled negotiation and where necessary hard hitting
campaigns, , not only did they eventually agree to ForestEthics’ specific demands, but
they also became partners and allies in their ongoing work lobbying other companies and
governments to collaborate with ForestEthics.
To walk this line between fierceness and compassion in the midst of situations of extreme
pressure in which they challenge some of the world’s most powerful corporations and
governments, requires developmental support to mature as professionals and human
beings.
References
“2008 ForestEthics Annual Report.” 2014. Issuu. Accessed November 28.
http://issuu.com/forestethics/docs/2008_forestethics_annual_report.
“ForestEthics | Annual Reports.” 2014. ForestEthics.org. Accessed November 28.
http://forestethics.org/annual-reports.
“ForestEthics | Community Success Stories.” 2014. ForestEthics.org. Accessed
November 28. http://forestethics.org/community-success-stories.
“ForestEthics | Stay Out of Our Parks Kinder Morgan!” 2014. ForestEthics.org.
Accessed November 28. http://forestethics.org/blog/stay-out-our-parks-kinder-morgan.
“ForestEthics | Walking the Talk on Oil Trains and Rail Safety.” 2014. ForestEthics.org.
Accessed November 28. http://forestethics.org/blog/walking-talk-oil-trains-and-railsafety.
“ForestEthics: Because Protecting Forests Is Everyone’s Business.” 2014.
ForestEthics.org. Accessed November 28. http://forestethics.org/.
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4) Global Leaders Academy5
Program Description
Global Leaders Academy (GLA) brings together individuals who understand that
leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. Those individuals who wish to
continuously break through on multiple levels and achieve extraordinary things in their
lives. GLA provides a profound learning journey of inquiry and action, delivered through
a forum of monthly learning circles supported by retreats, international learning journeys
and other experiential activities that might inspire. GLA enhances abilities in personal
mastery by offering knowledge, wisdom, tools, resources, skills, a nurturing community
and the opportunity to be in service to others.
The best way to generate continuous learning and to catalyze real growth is to have an
integrated approach where people create the habit of learning. In this way one has a
regular, monthly space for regeneration, renewal, inspiration, and learning. Rather than
sudden bursts of unmanageable change, your organization receives you as a leader who is
consistently bringing new and valuable perspectives to the business in a continuous and
digestible flow. It is this commitment to continuous co-creation of collaborative and
systemic learning which sets GLA apart from other leadership development programs,
and which offers maximum added value for its clients and all the systems they touch –
whether it is their business or their family.
Key concepts and approaches
Global Leaders Academy (GLA) brings together a community of like-minded,
inspirational individuals who are all leaders in their chosen field, both in business and
society. Members are invited to join a circle (peer group) that meets monthly to discuss
and confront the challenges and opportunities they face. This dialogue is further
enhanced by the regular introduction of 'Guest Experts' who offer wisdom and inspire
further dialogue around specific subject areas. GLA is building a community of resilient
leaders who are dedicated to raising their own consciousness across the 4 interconnected
learning domains of personal, interpersonal, organizational and global. Such a systemic
approach enriches members' own lives and the lives of those within the systems they
touch, to make a positive difference and impact in the world.
The curriculum, while focusing on the business challenge, encompasses learning with
and from respected peers using dialogue, questing into concepts and challenges,
experiential activities that take participants outside their comfort zones, and learning from
outside guests who are masters in their field. This unique forum and format keeps the
experience vital and different.
5
Data that informed this section are based on the interview and written responses to the questionnaire by
Sue Cheshire, Global Leaders Academy, www.globalleadersacademy.com on 17 October 2014.
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Circles are facilitated by an expert coach; a teacher, who catalyses the learning and
ensures a dynamic, challenging experience, particularly when guests are included as
subject matter specialists. In each session, GLA uses different techniques to deal with any
challenges or opportunities executives may be facing in their work and lives. These
processes open up new ways of applying the learning to their own employees and coworkers. GLA is developing a totally new type of program that reinvents how leadership
is cascaded throughout an organization, blending innovation and sustainability. Whether
across 30, 100 or 300 days, GLA ensures teams deliver outstanding real-world
deliverables on projects core to the future of the organization. This is truly learning
through doing; and doing through learning rigorously upholding the GLA values of
courage, curiosity, compassion and integrity.
The underlying principles of any program are based on the belief that the world has
increasingly become very linear and hierarchical, straight lines, queues, boardroom tables
etc. GLA methodology of holding circles for the gatherings is not a new process but
simply a way of remembering the benefits of some ancient rituals and ways of being
together - a new way of valuing, bringing things together, holding conversations that
matter; sitting as equals, where there is no beginning and no end, and where we truly
value each person. There is no place to hide and everyone is truly seen. Allowing for
emergence within the circle sessions is key using many processes and models to explore
issues, e.g. Constellations, Voice Dialogue, Appreciative Inquiry, Role Play etc.
Experiential activities include going into the community and switching experience,
whereby gang leaders become the teachers for a workshop to the CEOs on Anger
Management; introducing Daoism by taking the business leaders on a “nothing” retreat –
two days without any agenda; learning about invisible leaders, leaders who are doing
remarkable things in some of the most challenging parts of the world by bringing them
together in different sectors, across borders, across countries. The program takes the
participants for walks with wolves, walking safaris, mindful walks and learning about
leadership and deep ecology from the natural world. There are impromptu workshops,
learning ‘gravitas’ by going on stage, exploring deep community issues with leaders who
care, discussing the meaning of happiness, leading learning journeys e.g. to Auschwitz to
explore collective healing and confronting the concept of ‘willful blindness’ etc. These
workshops and experiences are designed to create dissonance and open up the heart as
well as the mind.
In-Company Learning Circles
A key offering of GLA is the creation of in-company learning circles whose participants
address a core challenge or opportunity facing the organization. Each circle will work on
their defined project within a defined time limit, typically 100 days. During this time
there will be intensive personal development alongside the team, including 360° reviews,
individual coaching and experiential team exercises. Each circle presents their project
outcomes to the board at the end of the 100 days. Learning circles create an ideal vehicle
for participants to capture, share and embed the required learning. Participants easily
interact with each other during the sessions, such that they become co-learners and cocreators of their agenda.
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The adoption of circles is used in all GLA activities as a core principle and way of being
together. Sue provides an example: “I run one program in a major marketing agency here
in London, where I run a circle for the board every month. Although there is a board
meeting, they know that the meeting in a circle is about using the principles of circle
technology, checking in and talking openly; operating differently, sharing leadership.
With different clients we will put together a program within the circles that not only we
feel meets their needs, but also that allows for emergence of new ideas and continuing
personal and business development of all involved.” Again building strong focus on
values driven behavior. The members of the Board then cascade the circle processes to
their own individual teams thus cascading the learning throughout the organization.
A different case study of the circle work is a program where GLA ‘catalysts’ focus
primarily on the personal mastery of the top 23 heads of countries of a major corporate.
This involves one to one coaching, working at a team level and researching and
delivering a sustainable business project by integrating the new wisdoms and conscious
micro skills that we are introducing. Raising the consciousness of every business leader is
a key driver. A different client and a different challenge in another major company that
we are working with has a brand new team that is feeling they are dysfunctional and
struggling with work overload, multiple priorities and real issues around “what’s the
point?” Guilt, inertia, victimhood and bullying show up and these behaviors become
infectious. GLA is introducing mindfulness practices into the workplace as well as
developing personal and emotional mastery. The incentives and training to run their own
company circles are a way of cascading new cultural values and behaviors. The current
values are distilled, helping reshape them to bring in more conscious values and
developing accountability and responsibility ensuring that the values espoused are the
values that are truly lived.
In private one-on-one coaching, GLA is developing dialogue around the deep
philosophical issues of spirituality, purpose and meaning in the work place. In GLA’s
experience, there is a distinct yearning for this depth of work.
In the corporate world it is important to ground everything that is introduced into
business benefits as well as personal mastery. Love and forgiveness are concepts
introduced as much by being as doing. Membership of open circles is primarily for chief
executives and senior leaders across disciplines and sectors. Individual leaders come into
the groups with various levels of awareness and consciousness and they join for many
different reasons. They also need to see the return of investment in their business. But the
reason they stay is because they feel the huge uplift in personal well-being, both mental
spiritual, physical and emotional. They will join for one reason and often stay for
another! They experience a sense of ease in their lives with better relationships with self,
with their colleagues, their families, their communities and the wider planet.
Integrating love and forgiveness
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GLA continuously addresses the patterns of thought and behavior that truly enable
individuals to flourish helping them to go beyond their life’s programming. In essence
confronting them with their own freedom. GLA operates adopting their principle of
“conscious systemic leadership” - catalyzing continuous breakthrough in the lives of
leaders and the wider systems they touch.
A new direction is the introduction of deep inquiries in their CEO circles. Sue mentions:
“The first inquiry ran for 6 months earlier this year. I had 23 CEOs and leaders that went
through the program. The theme was ‘Money and Consciousness”. We had a deep belief
that individuals are often hampered in their own evolution if they do not address their
own personal relationship to money and understand their own projections that they place
on this hugely impactful subject. The results were astonishing and revealed deep
unconscious patterns that enabled the group to own and then go beyond their
programming. Understanding their deeply programmed family and cultural patterns
around money brought about much personal healing, love and forgiveness of self and
others”.
Sue has been using Steven Pressfield’s book called “The War of Art” in her circle
methodology focusing on the concept of resistance. Pressfield states: “Most of us have
two lives: the life we live and our unlived life, and in between is resistance.” Awakening
members to their own ‘resistance’ is a constant driver. The different concepts and
conscious micro skills introduced in their circles have brought awareness to participants
to acknowledge ‘who they have become’ and to then consciously choose who they wish
to be. Love and forgiveness are the cornerstone of any personal mastery development
program. But first we must awaken, and then we can awaken others.
References
“Developing the Global Leader of Tomorrow.” 2014. ABIS Global. Accessed September
29. http://www.abis-global.org/resources-publications/developing-the-global-leader-oftomorrow.
“Global Academy Foundation.” 2014. Accessed November 28. http://globallead.org/globalacademyfoundation/.
“Global Leaders Academy.” 2014. Accessed September 29.
http://globalleadersacademy.com/.
Brochure-6 - Summit_circle.pdf.” 2014. Accessed November 29.
http://globalleadersacademy.com/wp-content/themes/gla/pdf/summit_circle.pdf#page=1.
Pressfield, Steven. 2012. The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner
Creative Battles. Edited by Shawn Coyne. New York: Black Irish Entertainment LLC.
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5) U-Process6
Program description
Theory U or U-process is a change management method to change unproductive patterns
of behavior. It is a methodology for addressing highly complex challenges—for solving
complex problems or realizing complex opportunities. It is a “social technology” for
effecting the transformation of reality, within and across the worlds of business,
government, and civil society.
It was first developed by Dr Friedrich (Fritz) Glasl and Dirk Lemson of the NPI
(Netherlands Pedagogical Institute) in 1968 and presented systematically from the 1980s.
The U-Process has been developed further through twenty years of intensive learning-bydoing by Joseph Jaworski and Adam Kahane of Generon Consulting in partnership with
Otto Scharmer and Peter Senge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the
Society for Organizational Learning. They have done this development in a range of
settings around the world, with corporate executives and line managers, politicians and
public servants, activists and revolutionaries, scientists and intellectuals.
The U-Process is simultaneously a cutting-edge technology and a distillation of ancient
wisdom. It is a process that many creative people—business and social entrepreneurs,
inventors, artists—use when they generate breakthroughs. Since it emerged, theory U has
come to be understood in three primary ways: first as a framework; second, as a method
for leading profound change; and third, as a way of being - connecting to the more
authentic of higher aspects of our self. The success of our actions as change-makers does
not depend on What we do or How we do it, but on the Inner Place from which we
operate.7
Since the early 2000s, Otto Scharmer incorporated his theory of presencing at the core of
the "U" Theory: sensing + presence. In using the U-Process, an individual or team
undertakes three activities or movements: Sensing the current reality of the system of which
they are part, carefully and in depth; Presencing and reflecting to allow their “inner
knowing” to emerge, about what is going on and what they have to do; and then Realizing,
acting swiftly to bring forth a new reality.
Figure 3. U-Process8
6
A significant amount of data included in this section is based on the interview with Hein Dijksterhuis that
took place on 17 October 2014.
7
See more at: https://www.presencing.com/theoryu#sthash.0AsYKfVt.dpuf
8
Source: http://ncdd.org/rc/item/1454
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The U-Process takes what has previously been an individual, tacit, intuitive, and largely
unreplicable practice, and embodies it in a methodology that can be used collectively and
consciously to open up and make visible concrete fields of opportunity. The U-Process
creates shared learning spaces within which teams of highly diverse individuals become
capable of operating as a single intelligence. This mode of operation allows them to share
what each of them knows, so that together they can see the whole system and their roles in
enacting it. This “systems sight” enables extraordinarily effective individual and collective
leadership.
Over the last five years, Generon with Joseph Jaworski and Adam Kahane, and its partners
have been analyzing and synthesizing their work with the U Process, developing a structure
within which the U-Process could be used most effectively, particularly to work on highly
complex global challenges. This structure is called the Change Lab . In a Change Lab, a
diverse group of leaders from different parts of a poorly performing societal system work
together to shift the system—to generate breakthrough innovations that create a new and
better reality. Their work occurs in four phases: Convening the Lab, and then using a
collective version of the U-Process to undertake Co-Sensing, Co-Presencing, and CoRealizing. This process was used, for example, used in Sustainable Food Lab, which brought
together 32 respected and influential leaders of food companies and farmer, civil society, and
governmental organizations, from Europe, North America, and Brazil. They were learning to
see food systems not only from their own particular perspectives, but as a whole from the
multiple perspectives of their teammates. Their collaboration resulted in several global
initiatives to improve food sustainability.
Key approaches and concepts
Blind spot of Leadership
We can observe what we do and how we do it. But the quality of the source (or inner
place), the blind spot from which we operate in “the Now” tends to be outside the range
of our normal observation, attention, and awareness. That puzzling insight into the deeper
source level of social reality creation set us on an intriguing path of inquiring and
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integrating recent findings in leadership, management, economics, neuroscience,
contemplative practice and complexity research.
Figure 4. The Blind Spot of Leadership9
The essence of that view is that we cannot transform the behavior of systems unless we
transform the quality of awareness and attention that people apply to their actions within
these systems, both individually and collectively.10
In exploring this territory more deeply, the insight emerged that most of the existing
learning methodologies relied on learning from the past, while most of the real leadership
challenges in organizations seemed to require something quite different: letting go of the
past in order to connect with and learn from emerging future possibilities. This second
type of learning—learning from the emerging future—not only had no methodology, but
also had no real name. And yet innovators, entrepreneurs, and highly creative people all
express an intimate relationship with this deeper source of knowing. Scharmer started
referring to it as Theory U and “presencing.” Presencing is a blended word combining
“sensing” (feeling the future possibility) and “presence” (the state of being in the present
moment): presencing means “sensing and actualizing one’s highest future possibility—
acting from the presence of what is wanting to emerge.”
The proposition of Theory U, that the quality of results in any kind of socio-economic
system is a function of the awareness that people in the system are operating from, leads
to a differentiation between four levels of awareness. These four levels of awareness
affect where actions originate relative to the boundaries of the system. Consider the
example of listening. We call the first level of listening downloading. Downloading
describes habitual behavior and thought and results in “same old, same old” behaviors
9
Source: https://www.presencing.com/theoryu#sthash.0AsYKfVt.dpuf
10
Ibid.
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and outcomes: This type of listening originates from the center of our habits, from what
we already know from past experience.
In contrast, level 4 listening, called presencing, represents a state of the social field in
which the circle of attention widens and a new reality enters the horizon and comes into
being. In this state, listening originates outside the world of our preconceived notions. We
feel as if we are connected to and operating from a widening surrounding sphere. As the
presence of this heightened state of attention deepens, time seems to slow down, space
seems to open up, and the experience of the self morphs from a single point (ego) to a
heightened presence and stronger connection to the surrounding sphere (eco).
Principles of Presencing
(1) Energy follows attention. Wherever you place your attention, that is where the energy
of the system will go. “Energy follows attention” means that we need to shift our
attention from what we are trying to avoid to what we want to bring into reality.
(2) Follow the three movements of the U. We refer to this as the U process because of
the “shape” of the journey. In order to get to the deep point of transformation (at the
bottom of the U) it is necessary first to “go down the U” (the left-hand side) by opening
our minds, hearts, and will, and then, after “passing through the eye of the needle” at the
bottom, “go up the U” (the right-hand side) to bring the new into reality (see figure 5). In
the words of our colleague, economist Brian Arthur, the three main movements of the U
process are:



Going down the U: “Observe, observe, observe.” Stop downloading and totally
immerse yourself in the places of most potential, in the places that matter most to
the situation you are dealing with.
At the bottom of the U: “Retreat and reflect, allow the inner knowing to
emerge.” Go to the places of stillness where knowing comes to the surface. Here
you share and reflect on everything that you have learned from a deep place of
listening, asking, ”What wants to emerge here?” and ”How does that relate to the
journey forward?” So the key question is: how can we become part of the story of
the future rather than holding on to the story of the past?
Going up the U: “Act in an instant.” Explore the future by doing. Develop a
prototype. A prototype explores the future by doing something small, speedy, and
spontaneous; it quickly generates feedback from all the key stakeholders and
allows you to evolve and iterate your idea.
Figure 5. The U Process of Co-sensing and Co-creating — Presencing11
11
Ibid.
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(3) Go to the edges of the self. To apply this process in the context of institutions, we
have to power it with a new leadership technology. The core of this new leadership
technology focuses on tuning three instruments: the open mind, the open heart, and the
open will. With an open mind we can suspend old habits of thought. With an open heart
we can empathize, see a situation through the eyes of someone else. With an open will we
can let go and let [the new] come.
(4) Pass through the eye of the needle. At the deepest point of each U journey is a
threshold. Crossing that threshold, passing through the eye of the needle, can feel like
dying and being reborn. The phrase “eye of the needle” refers to a gate in ancient
Jerusalem, where, according to the Bible, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of
a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” For a man to fit his camel
through Jerusalem’s gate, he has to remove all the bags from the camel’s back. Likewise,
if we want to go through the eye of the needle at the bottom of the U, we have to let go of
everything and offload all the baggage that isn’t essential. Going through that gate means
encountering the two root questions of our journey: Who is my Self? and What is my
Work? The capital “S” Self is my highest future possibility. The capital “W” Work is my
sense of purpose or calling. It’s what I am here on this earth to do.
5) Transform the three enemies. Why is the U journey the road less traveled? Why is it
that most people are aware of this deeper process of knowing and yet it rarely happens in
the context of our larger systems? Because the moment we commit ourselves to going on
this journey we start to encounter our three principal enemies: the voice of judgment
(VoJ: shutting down the open mind), the voice of cynicism (VoC: shutting down the open
heart), and the voice of fear (VoF: shutting down the open will).
(6) Always start by “attending to the crack.” Where do we meet the future first? “Seek it
with your hands, don't think about it, feel it” is the essential instruction that Bagger
Vance gives to Junah in the Robert Redford movie Bagger Vance. The future shows up
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first in our feelings and through our hands, not in our abstract analysis. “Attend to the
crack” means attend to the openings, the challenges, and the disruptions where you feel
the past ending, and the future wanting to begin.
(7) Transform the fields of conversation from downloading and debate to dialogue and
collective creativity. Each social field needs a container. Higher-level conversation like
dialogue and collective creativity require higher-quality containers and holding spaces.
“Transforming the quality of conversation” in a system means to transform the quality of
relationship and thought—that is, the quality of tomorrow’s results.
(8) Strengthen the sources of presencing in order to avoid the destructive dynamics of
absencing. Modern society emerges from the interplay of two powerful social fields:
presencing and absencing. The field of presencing works through the opening of the
mind, the heart, and the will. We know that there are many empirical examples of this
process. But everyone who works in institutions and systems also knows that there is
another field out there. That field is characterized by getting stuck with the idea that there
is only One Truth rather than operating with an open mind, by getting stuck in One Us vs.
Them rather than operating from an open heart, and by being frozen inside one rigid
identity rather than operating from an open will.
Figure 6. The social spaces of collective creation (presencing) and destruction (absencing)12
Social systems that have these three characteristics can be called fundamentalist.
Fundamentalism is the result of closing down and freezing your mind, heart, and will —
as opposed to opening, warming, and illuminating them.
12
Ibid.
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We live in the tension of these two fields. We are not one, but two. Sometimes we
operate from our highest future possibility (presencing). But every now and then we lose
it and get stuck in old patterns of downloading (absencing). We experience this fragile
nature of current reality not only in personal relationships, but also on the field of global
development and change. We are torn between these two fields, and we need to learn
how to strengthen our grounding in the field of presencing.
Integrating love and forgiveness
Love always shows up in all of these programs. Usually, forgiveness manifests more in
the idea of acceptance, self-acceptance, and the acceptance of others. Participants of the
programs must have done inner work, meditation practice and introduced this inner
change into their settings and work places. It is very important for all the participants that
they have some sort of community where they can share their experiences and deepen
their understanding of their own role and situation. We call those case-cleaning groups or
true north groups. Those kinds of groups are important for the exchanges among
participants who are undergoing a lot of challenges and difficulties.
One also needs to have a balance between work, family, and oneself. One really needs to
take some time for oneself as well; it can be running, it can be meditation or something
else. Meditation helps us realize our own inner state. You can know if boundaries are
crossed so that you don’t give too much and receive too little. The moral confrontation
with oneself is always challenging.
What always works well in connecting with and accepting the others, is that people
actually have a challenge that they need to address together. For example, they may work
together on a project that they feel really involved in. So they start to learn about each
other. And one can introduce certain practices, such as having them share their personal
life events with each other, so that they start to learn and connect in deeper ways and they
will share more than they usually do with their friends or colleagues.
References
Cristian, Flaviu, and Christof Fetzer. 1999. “The Timed Asynchronous Distributed
System Model.” Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on 10 (6): 642–57.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=774912.
Dijksterhuis, Hein. 2014. Coming into Presence. Utrecht, Netherlands: UNOO.
Hedges, Kristi. 2011. The Power of Presence: Unlock Your Potential to Influence and
Engage Others. 1 edition. AMACOM.
Hewlett, Sylvia Ann. 2014. Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and
Success. HarperBusiness.
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Jaworski, Joseph, and Betty Sue Flowers. 2005. Presence: An Exploration of Profound
Change in People, Organizations, and Society. 1 edition. Crown Business.
Kaeufer, Katrin, and Judith Flick. 2007. “Cross-Sectoral Leadership for Collective Action
on HIV and AIDS in Zambia: Applying the U-Process to Complex Societal Challenges.”
Reflections: The SoL Journal 8 (2): 12–16.
Presencing Institute. 2014. Accessed September 29. https://www.presencing.com/.
Scharmer, C. Otto. 2008. “Uncovering the Blind Spot of Leadership.” Leader to Leader
2008 (47): 52. http://www.rqgenesis.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Otto-ScharmerTheory-U.pdf.
———. 2009. Theory U: Learning from the Future as It Emerges. Berrett-Koehler
Publishers.
Scharmer, Otto, and Katrin Kaufer. 2013. Leading from the Emerging Future: From EgoSystem to Eco-System Economies. 1 edition. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Senge, Peter M., C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. 2008.
Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. Reprint edition. New York,:
Crown Business.
Siegel, Daniel J. 2010. Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. Reprint
edition. New York: Bantam.
UNOO. 2014. Accessed September 29. http://www.unoo.eu/nl/start.html.
Coming into Presence, by Hein Dijksterhuis | Facebook. 2014. Accessed September 29.
https://www.facebook.com/comingintopresence.
6) Adaptive Leadership13
Program description
Adaptive leadership is the practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and
thrive. Adaptive leadership is specifically about change that enables the capacity to
thrive. New environments and new dreams demand new strategies and abilities, as well
as the leadership to mobilize them. As in evolution, these new combinations and
variations help organizations thrive under challenging circumstances rather than perish,
regress, or contract. Leadership, then, must wrestle with normative questions of value,
purpose, and process.
13
A significant amount of data included in this section is based on the interview with Ignacio Maruri, La
Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile that took place via Skype on 20 October 2014.
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Since1994, adaptive leadership has been advanced and explored in a series of other books
in addition to Leadership Without Easy Answers and Leadership on the Line.14 The
literature in this emerging field includes the work of Sharon Daloz Parks, in Leadership
Can Be Taught, and Dean Williams, in Real Leadership.15 Other books that have applied
the adaptive leadership framework to the challenges in specific professional contexts
include Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan’s Creative Destruction and Donald L. Laurie’s
The Real Work of Leaders on applications to big businesses; Gary De Carolis’s A View
from the Balcony on systems of care; and Kevin Ford’s Transforming Church: Bringing
Out the Good to Get to Great on the challenges facing American churches.16
All of this work has grown from efforts to understand in practical ways the relationship
among leadership, adaptation, systems, and change, but also has deep roots in scientific
efforts to explain the evolution of human life, and before us, the evolution of all life
going back to the beginning of the earth. Adaptive Leadership is a practical leadership
framework that helps individuals and organizations adapt and thrive in challenging
environments. It is about being able, both individually and collectively, to take on the
gradual but meaningful process of adaptation. It is about diagnosing the essential from
the expendable and bringing about a real challenge to the status quo. For example, the
adaptive leadership model has been applied in Chile for 8 years as part of the masters
programs at the university, especially in the MBA in Business. The people who attend
these courses are business leaders. The program on leadership at La Universidad Adolfo
Ibáñez is one of the leading programs and the oldest program of the adoptive leadership
in Chile.
Distinguishing technical problems from adaptive challenges
The most common cause of failure in leadership is produced by treating adaptive
challenges as if they were technical problems. While technical problems may be very
complex and critically important (like replacing a faulty heart valve during cardiac
surgery), they have known solutions that can be implemented by current know how.
Adaptive challenges can only be addressed through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs,
habits, and loyalties. Making progress requires going beyond any authoritative expertise
to mobilize discovery, shedding certain entrenched ways, tolerating losses, and
generating the new capacity to thrive anew.
Resisting change or loss
14
Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1994); and Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive
Through the Dangers of Leading (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).
15
Sharon Daloz Parks, Leadership CanBe Taught (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005); and Dean
Williams, Real Leadership (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005).
16
Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last
Underperform the Market—and How to Successfully Transform Them (New York: Doubleday Business,
2001); Donald L. Laurie, The Real Work of Leaders (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2000); Gary De Carolis, A
View from the Balcony (Dallas: Brown Books, 2005); and Kevin G. Ford, Transforming Church: Bringing Out
the Good to Get to Great (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2008).
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The common factor generating adaptive failure is resistance to loss and not to change. A
key to leadership, then, is the diagnostic capacity to find out the kinds of losses at stake in
a changing situation, from life and loved ones to jobs, wealth, status, relevance,
community, loyalty, identity, and competence. Adaptive leadership almost always puts
you in the business of assessing, managing, distributing, and providing contexts for losses
that move people through those losses to a new place. At the same time, adaptation is a
process of conservation as well as loss.
Difference between leadership and authority
People have long confused the notion of leadership with authority, power, and influence.
It is useful to see leadership as a practice, an activity that some people do some of the
time. Leadership should be seen as a verb, not a job. Authority, power, and influence are
critical tools, but they do not define leadership. Authority is granted by one or more
people on the assumption that you will do what they want you to do: centrally in
organizational life to promptly provide solutions to problems. People will confer
authority or volunteer to follow you because they are looking to you to provide a service,
to be a champion, a representative, an expert, a doer who can provide solutions within the
terms that they understand the situation. In any of your roles, whether parent or CEO or
doctor or consultant, you have a specific scope of authority that derives from your
authorizers’ expectations and that defines the limits of what you are expected to do. An
authorizer is anyone who gives you attention and support to do your job of providing
solutions to problems. As long as you do what is expected of you, your authorizers are
happy. On the other hand, adaptive leadership is not about meeting or exceeding your
authorizers’ expectations; it is about challenging some of those expectations, finding a
way to disappoint people without pushing them completely over the edge. And it requires
managing the resistance you will inevitably trigger.
Key approaches and concepts
The adaptive leadership model was created by professor Heifetz from the Harvard
Business School. It is a model that mainly considers change as a common effort of people
that are confronted the situation unknown to them and that they have to contribute in
order to progress. When organization’s aspirations—the innovations and progress—
demand responses outside the current capacities, Adaptive Leadership is the framework
needed to effectively close the gap and make one’s aspirations reality.
17
Figure 7. Introduction to Organizational Adaptation
17
Source: http://www.cambridge-leadership.com/index.php/adaptive_leadership/
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Principles of adaptive leadership18
Successful adaptive changes build on the past rather than jettison it. A challenge for
adaptive leadership, then, is to engage people in distinguishing what is essential to
preserve from their organization’s heritage from what is expendable. Successful
adaptations are thus both conservative and progressive. They make the best possible use
of previous wisdom and know-how. The most effective leadership anchors change in the
values, competencies, and strategic orientations that should endure in the organization
Organizational adaptation occurs through experimentation. Those seeking to lead
adaptive change need an experimental mind-set. They must learn to improvise as they go,
buying time and resources along the way for the next set of experiments.
Adaptation relies on diversity. The secret of evolution is variation, which in
organizational terms could be called distributed or collective intelligence. Likewise,
adaptive leadership on economic policy would want to diversify an economy so that
people are less dependent on one company or industry for sustenance. For an
organization, adaptive leadership would build a culture that values diverse views and
relies less on central planning and the genius of the few at the top, where the odds of
adaptive success go down. This is especially true for global businesses operating in many
local microenvironments.
New adaptations significantly displace, reregulate, and rearrange some old structures.
Learning is often painful. One person’s innovation can cause another person to feel
incompetent, betrayed, or irrelevant. Not many people like to be “rearranged.”
Leadership therefore requires the diagnostic ability to recognize those losses and the
predictable defensive patterns of response that operate at the individual and systemic
level. It also requires knowing how to counteract these patterns.
18
The principles of adaptive leadership are adopted from Heifetz, Ronald A., Marty Linsky, and Alexander
Grashow. 2009. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization
and the World. 1 edition. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Press.
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Adaptation takes time. Progress is radical over time yet incremental in time. It seems to
work this way: a variant in the current population has the adaptive capacity in its time to
venture a bit beyond the normal ecological niche for its kind, stressing itself near the
margins of the range that it and its offspring can tolerate.
Integrating love and forgiveness
People usually resist change, even if it is for the better. Without the purpose in facing a
new situation, people will not adapt to change. It is something that has to be coconstructed with everyone. So, in that sense, love is the need to unite the separateness, it
is the common accepted purpose that moves people to plunge into the uncertain world, in
order to develop new skills that would allow them to progress.
People from business milieus are used to the power language. So, one needs to
understand this perspective and start from it, if one wants to enable the space for
forgiveness and empathy to emerge. On the other hand, if one works with communal
organizations, one has to start with love. The aspect of power as something oppressing,
something hard to change, is part of the NGOs discourse since they often see power
closely aligned to oppression. For civil society community, personal and communal
fulfillment is power that keeps everything together and moves the system forward.
Martin Luther King said: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without
power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of
justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” In
adaptive leadership, we need both power and love – they are the two sides of the same
coin.
References
“Adaptive Leadership : Cambridge Leadership Associates.” 2014. Accessed November
30. http://www.cambridge-leadership.com/index.php/adaptive_leadership/.
Carolis, Gary de, Ronald Heifetz, and Marty Linsky. 2005. A View from the Balcony:
Leadership Challenges in Systems of Care. Dallas, TX: Brown Books.
Ford, Kevin G. 2008. Transforming Church: Bringing Out the Good to Get to Great.
New edition. Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook.
Foster, Richard, and Sarah Kaplan. 2001. Creative Destruction: Why Companies That
Are Built to Last Underperform the Market--And How to Successfully Transform Them.
Reprint edition. New York: Crown Business.
Heifetz, Ronald. 1998. Leadership Without Easy Answers. 1 edition. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press.
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Heifetz, Ronald A., Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow. 2009a. “Connect to
Purpose.” In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your
Organization and the World, 1 edition, 38–40. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Press.
———. 2009b. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing
Your Organization and the World. 1 edition. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Press.
Heifetz, Ronald, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky. 2009. “The Practice of Adaptive
Leadership.” Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing. http://www.mcgrawhill.com.au/professional/booksellers/resources/2009/05_May/May%2009%20Harvard%2
0Master.pdf.
Laurie, Donald L. 2001. The Real Work Of Leaders: A Report From The Front Lines Of
Management. Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.
Lichtenstein, Benyamin B., Mary Uhl-Bien, Russ Marion, Anson Seers, James Douglas
Orton, and Craig Schreiber. 2006. “Complexity Leadership Theory: An Interactive
Perspective on Leading in Complex Adaptive Systems.”
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/managementfacpub/8/.
Linsky, Martin, and Ronald A. Heifetz. 2002. Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive
through the Dangers of Leading. 1 edition. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review
Press.
Parks, Sharon Daloz. 2005. Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex
World. 1 edition. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press.
Williams, Dean. 2005. Real Leadership: Helping People and Organizations Face Their
Toughest Challenges. Annotated edition. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Yukl, Gary, and Rubina Mahsud. 2010. “Why Flexible and Adaptive Leadership Is
Essential.” Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research 62 (2): 81.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/cpb/62/2/81/.
7) Trans4m Center for Integral Development19
Program description
Trans4m is a Center for Integral Development, based in Geneva, working with
communities and enterprises in different parts of the world (e.g. UK, Germany, US,
A significant amount of data included in this section is based on the interview with Alexander
Schieffer, TRANS4M, that took place via Skype on 20 October 2014, referenced articles and the
website: http://www.trans-4-m.com
19
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South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Middle East, Sri Lanka) through Catalysing societal
development, promoting community Activation, engaging in innovation driven Research,
and enhancing lifelong Education. Through such CARE-ing processes, Trans4m supports
these organizations and communities to integrate further into society, enabling them to
contribute to society’s most burning issues. At the heart of Trans4m is its Integral Worlds
approach. Trans4m operates by designing and executing long-term processes (e.g. as
accredited educational or research programs, or as client based processes) that lead to
integral development on the ground. Trans4m’s long-term vision is to develop a localglobal Integral Development CARE-movement to promote healthy communities,
peaceful co-evolution, open societies and sustainable livelihoods.
The Integral Worlds approach to research and development, enterprise and economics,
has been evolved, in theory and practice, by Trans4m Center for Integral Development
over the course of the last decade. It has emerged as one of the most innovative (and
globally tested) approaches to individual, organisational, community and societal
transformation in the field. Through Trans4m and its growing international community of
transformation agents, the Integral Worlds approach has been employed in a large variety
of contexts across the world: from rural communities in Nigeria (Pax Herbals) and
Zimbabwe (Chinyika), to corporate entities in the UK (Virgin Money) and Germany
(Deutsche Telecom), to universities in Egypt (Heliopolis University for Sustainable
Development) and Switzerland (University of St. Gallen) and to a whole economy in
Slovenia (Integral Green Slovenian Economy). In addition there are countless further
applications, all of them articulated in two book series, both edited by Lessem &
Schieffer, and published by UK/US publisher Gower Ashgate: the Transformation and
Innovation Series and (more recently) the Integral Green Society and Economy Series.
Key approaches and concepts
Introduction of the Integral Worlds Model
The Integral Worlds (IW) approach is the ontological and epistemological perspective to
understanding and consciously evolving human systems. Trans4m has applied it to
address imbalances, within a particular individual, organisation, community and/or
society and also within specific fields such as economics, management and human
development. The circular design symbolizes the wholeness and the cycle of life of each
living system (Schieffer & Lessem 2014).
Figure 7. The Meta-Model: Integral Worlds20
20
Source: Schieffer, A. & Lessem, R. (2014). The Integral University: Holistic development of individuals,
communities, organisations and societies. PROSPECTS, 44 (4): 607-626.
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According to Schieffer and Lessem (2014), the outer globe represents a worldly
perspective, with the local context embedded within it and at the very centre of this
globally embedded context, the impulse for development is initiated, at the personal
level, through a perceived imbalance. This inner personal core and the outer, global circle
are then connected through the 4Rs of IW: realities, realms, rhythms and rounds. Linking
these terms with more commonly used ones, we see realities aligned with ontology and
realms with epistemology, while rhythms represent our own integral research trajectory,
from origination (research method) to transformation (action research) (Lessem and
Schieffer 2010b). Rounds (self to society) serve to co-evolve them all (Schieffer &
Lessem 2014). It is important to note that there is no hierarchy in the model but the whole
systems are simultaneously engaged in development.
Four integral realities
There are diverse perspectives on reality and different interpretations of the world that
developed through time. Throughout history all cultures, according to Schieffer &
Lessem (2014) used fourfold patterns to indicate diversity in wholeness. The four poles
represent differentiated human consciousness, which can self-reflectively understand the
diverse individual and collective positions, each sharing a part of the totality. This
diversity is also reflected within ourselves as different aspects of our individual
personality. Among the core cultural symbols that mirror this fourfold reality within a
circular design are representations of the Tibetan mandala, the Christian cross, Native
American medicine wheels, the (double-fourfolded) Buddhist wheel of life, some Arab
calligraphy and some African cosmologies like the cosmograms of the Yorubas in
Nigeria (Schieffer & Lessem 2014). This integrated fourfoldness is also represented in
the four directions, four seasons, four temperaments and four elements (ibid).
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In the model, the four directions (south, east, north and west) illustrate the diversity of
cultural realities:
• ‘‘Southern’’ reality is engaged with the world primarily through relationships to nature
(including our inner nature) and to other humans and the community we build with
them.
• ‘‘Eastern’’ reality interacts with the world primarily from an inner, interpretive, cultural
and spiritual perspective, seeking to understand the deeper meaning of human existence
and our holistic participation with the world and the cosmos.
• ‘‘Northern’’ reality views the world primarily through a scientific, rational perspective,
seeking to distinguish patterns and structures within reality and to translate them into
viable concepts and systems.
• ‘‘Western’’ reality acts upon the world primarily through active experimentation and
practical treatment of things and applying ideas through action.
These realities are in quotation marks to avoid an overly simplistic, geographic
association. Each of them suggests a particular world outlook, which was translated into
knowledge fields and disciplines that deepened people’s understanding of the world.
These knowledge fields and disciplines then became the major structural criteria for
organizing universities into departments and faculties. However, this has led to a
dramatic compartmentalizing of knowledge, with knowledge fields or disciplines
fragmented and disconnected from each other.
IW model is designed to help us better see the rich diversity of knowledge and
disciplines, through the four different realms and to generate interaction between them.
The four realms of relationship and their major knowledge perspectives are:
• ‘‘Southern’’: nature and community
• ‘‘Eastern’’: culture and spirituality
• ‘‘Northern’’: science, systems and technology
• ‘‘Western’’: enterprise and economics
The four realms are closely aligned with the four realities (south, east, north, west). Each
realm has a core perspective, illustrating its main tenor. Further, these four perspectives
represent a vast number of knowledge fields and disciplines. It is important to deal
interactively with all four realms and engage in interdisciplinary pursuits when trying to
address any transformational issue.
The transformational journey is rooted in the four worlds: the South, the East, the North
and the West. Each world has a contribution to make to the process of transformation.
So while the South stands for a more community based humanistic approach, the East has
contributed much to our understanding of Holism. The strength of the North is its
Rational Power, while the West has developed a strong sense for Pragmatism. The West
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and North have dominated global development over the past centuries. This is one of the
core reasons why the world is so out of balance. We have simply left out the Southern
and Eastern perspective. The educational process purposefully reintegrates the South and
the East in the transformation of the Self, Organization and Society. Wherever the
journey starts, local wisdom takes the lead, and global knowledge follows and is
integrated when needed. Of course, one can find all four worlds in every society, in every
organisation, in every individual. The pragmatic West needs not only the rational
northern dimension, but also the holistic eastern dimension and the humanistic (nature,
people and community orientated dimension) of the South. Each dimension needs the
other in order to be truly meaningful and effective. In fact when one dimension is isolated
from the others it becomes distorted. So, for example, pragmatism degenerates into
materialism, and humanism into nepotism. Hence, it is the integration of these four
worlds within individuals, organisations and society, which the program is ultimately
about.
Fourfold integral rhythms
The IW approach is dynamic and it incorporates an inbuilt transformational rhythm,
which is also part of both natural and cultural systems. This rhythm is called the GENE
(grounding, emerging, navigating, effecting) and it represents a fourfold spiralling force,
activating the entire IW model. This rhythm is embedded in the diverse realities and
realms and serves to stimulate the dynamic interaction of and between each of them. The
GENE cycle is not the end of the process; it moves on continuously. The fourfold GENE
rhythm flows as follows:
• ‘‘Southern’’ grounding: The issue at hand and the people involved are grounded in a
particular nature and community, which must be understood.
• ‘‘Eastern’’ emergence: With the move to ‘‘eastern’’ emergence, the issue and the
people involved find deeper insights into its unfolding nature.
• ‘‘Northern’’ navigation: The move to ‘‘northern’’ navigation requires that people
translate their new insights into new concepts, new knowledge, new institutions,
knowing and making explicit what hitherto had been rather implicit, and activating the
mind level, the conceptualising prowess of the human system.
• ‘‘Western’’ effect: Moving to ‘‘western’’ effect requires us to put all prior levels into
integrated action and pragmatically apply the new knowledge, actualising the innovation
it contains.
Within IW, the GENE represents the dynamic part of the model, affecting all other core
aspects. It links the inner and outer circles; through it we move dynamically, through the
diverse reality perspectives, realms and rounds.
Four integral rounds
The IW approach distinguishes between four interconnecting levels, which we call
rounds, which can be individual, organizational, societal and global. Each level is fully
rounded, integral, moving and interconnected.
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Core program21
The PhD program with its CARE component will be examined in more details as an
example of Trans4m’s work. This three-year part time PhD program for prospective
integral developers is a joint offering of South Africa based Da Vinci Institute and
Geneva based Trans4m Center for Integral Development. It builds upon a pioneering
approach to integral development, interlinking all realms of a living human system:
nature & community; culture & spirituality; science, systems & technology; as well as
enterprise and economics; altogether underpinned by an integral polity.
The PhD program engages its participants to follow a “4C”-trajectory – including Call,
Context, Co-Creation and Contribution – geared to bring about individual Integral
Development. It also amplifies participants’ particular impulse with an institutionalized
one, thereby sustaining and evolving participants’ original contribution. Participants are
institutionally involved in Catalysing societal development; community Activation;
innovation driven Research, transformative Education – “CARE-ing 4 YOUR
SOCIETY“. The program-process follows an “alternating rhythm”, comprised of the
“4C’s” (Call, Context, Co-Creation, Contribution), “4C”-ing individual development, and
the four “CARE” functions (following the sequence of Activation, Catalysation,
Research-to-Innovation and Education) underlying institutional development. Together
they co-engage in a constant upwards-downwards-and-sideways, spiralling and cyclical
movement. Thereby, these intertwined rhythms gradually “rise” towards full-fledged
Integral Development.
4C’s MODEL
Call suggests discovering one’s inner calling with real-life outer challenges
Contexts refers to understanding self-to-society context
Co-Creation suggests transforming one’s reality by interweaving research paths and
knowledge fields and coming up with an integral theory and practice
Contribution suggests distilling and sharing one’s integral development with community
and society
CARE – ING 4 SOCIETY MODEL
Activation refers to activating one’s community by forming an inner circle and start
building an outer community
21
See: http://www.trans-4-m.com//PDFs/PHDProgramTrans4mDaVinci.pdf
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Catalysation suggest building a catalyzing innovation interdependent ecosystem to
support one’s integral development and address challenges
Research-to-Innovation implies institutionalization of integral development by newly
evolving or linking up with existing center to institutionalize, sustain and further leverage
one’s research and innovation
Educational transformation suggests developing a transformative educational program
delivered by the center one created or have become affiliated with
This program seeks to attract dedicated individuals from the private, public, civic and
environmental sectors who have already illustrated their commitment to caring for their
society. Current participants include organizations/communities of local and/or global
standing in terms of their developmental achievements. The program fosters a maximum
of crosspollination and co-evolution between all participants, their particular
communities, organizations and societies. Through modular courses and distinctive processes
of co-evolution, participants have been both hosted in diverse cultural contexts and existing
Integral Development Centers (from Africa to the Middle East, to Europe).
Integrating love and forgiveness
The PhD program described above is an expression of love. The models that inform the
program represent the new consciousness, which enable participants to engage with their
communities, organizations and societies in order to address some burning issue
constructively and caringly. There is a different dynamic in terms of institutionalizing
love and forgiveness at various levels. However, in order to generate change at any level,
it is fundamental to be exposed to various outlooks and perspectives and draw from the
local culture. The said PhD program exposes its participants to different cultures from
Africa to Europe and Middle East. There is a need for educational programs than enable
participants to embrace the full range of culture, that encourage the human capacity to
bring love in the particular context, to breach the enormous divides that are created
around the world. If one is forced into one way of generating knowledge, it deprives one
of the new methods, and it limits one in finding new solutions. There is a need to develop
the local institutions, change relationships and deal with conflicts constructively. This is
only possible through integral university, which should be the main agent of
transformation. Ultimately the major goal of the program is to apply its work in practice
and in the community, bringing it into conflict areas.
References
Lessem, R. & Schieffer, A. (2010). Integral Economics: Releasing the Economic Genius
of your Society. Farnham: Gower.
Lessem, R. & Schieffer, A. (2010). Integral Research and Innovation: Transforming
Enterprise and Society. Farnham: Gower.
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Lessem, R. & Schieffer, A. (2009). Transformation Management: Towards the Integral
Enterprise. Farnham: Gower.
Schieffer, A. & Lessem, R. (2014). Integral Development: Realising the Transformative
Potential in Individuals, Organisations and Societies. Gower Ashgate: Farnham.
Schieffer, A. & Lessem, R. (2014). The Integral University: Holistic development of
individuals, communities, organisations and societies. PROSPECTS, 44 (4): 607-626.
8) The Center for Partnership Studies’ Leadership and Learning Program22
Program description
The Center for Partnership Studies (CPS) is a public service organization dedicated to
research and education for cultural transformation from domination to partnership
systems, which was founded by Dr. Riane Eisler and Dr. David Loye in 1987. CPS has
worked with thousands of individuals and organizations to change consciousness,
promote positive personal action, encourage social advocacy, and influence policy. The
mission of the Center for Partnership Studies is to accelerate movement to partnership
systems of human rights and nonviolence, gender and racial equity, economic prosperity,
and a sustainable environment through research, education, grassroots empowerment, and
policy initiatives.23
This section focuses specifically on the Center for Partnership Studies’ Leadership and
Learning Program, whose purpose is to articulate and teach how to put love into practice
personally and institutionally as intrinsic to leadership education, partnership, and human
development. The program is online and its primary audience consists of change
practitioners working on both inner and outer transformation from all world regions and
diverse areas, including civil society, government, and business.
There are thee tracks:
1. Caring Economy Leadership Program (CELP)
2. Cultural Transformation Course for Leaders
3. Transforming Health Care Culture (first of more specialized offerings developed
by a Caring Economy Leadership alum)
The main modules/components of the program
22
Data that informed this section are based on the written responses to the questionnaire by Riane Eisler
as well as the following website: http://www.partnershipway.org/
23
http://www.partnershipway.org/about-cps/mission-history/mission
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Caring Economy Starter
Course
Caring Economy
Leadership Program
Riane Eisler’s Cultural
Transformation Course
Transforming Healthcare
Culture
Alumni in Action Series
1 hour
One-hour introduction to a Caring
Economy
5 Weeks OR Certification as a Caring Economy
3 Session
Conversation Leader. Toolkit including a
Weekend
set of scripted slides to guide community
Intensive
conversations on caring economics.
Access to an Alumni partnership online
community, with members from across the
globe.

5 Live, real-time online discussion
5 sessions;
sessions led by Riane Eisler
plus 4 videos

4 exclusive downloadable videos
to be watched
with accompanying study guides
before the
(Videos: 1. Where We Wre; 2. How
first 4
We Got Here; 3. Human
sessions each
Possibilities and Human Nature; 3.
Moving Forward)

30 years of groundbreaking
insights

Online discussion board
TBD
In development
Semi-annual
online
gatherings
Open to all graduates and facilitated by
Riane Eisler, this session brings together
alumni from all courses to share stories,
learnings, and how they are living out
learnings in their personal and
professional lives.
The cohorts are small (12 for CELP and 25 for others) to ensure maximum participation
and bonding. The participants include change practitioners, social entrepreneurs, intersector, business, government and/or civil society leaders.
In the CELP series, the participants came from 17 nations and 33 U.S. states. Participants
have been of all ages. More women than men have attended the program. The other
program participants range from very experienced leaders to people who want to become
leaders. Their experiences range from directors of non-profit organizations and even
CEOs of corporations to coaches, teachers, professionals from many areas, and parents
and other caregivers seeking to understand cultural transformation and/or bring
awareness to the value of care and wishing for a new language and the data to do so.
Some attend because they have heard of the Center’s work or read Riane Eisler’s
writings. Others come by referral from program alumnae. Some come out of particular
interest in the Caring Economy Campaign. Still others come from Facebook or Linked In
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or other social media.
The programs continue to have impact through their alumni who take the knowledge and
insights (as well as their own personal empowerment as leaders) out into the world.
CELP is a training of trainers program as well as a means of community building for
cultural impact and continued personal empowerment and leadership. There is an alumni
web page as well as periodic online meetings of alumni. Their impacts range from
incorporation of the materials into university courses and schools to speaking
and/organizing conferences, using it in their professional work, and changing hearts and
minds in communities, as well as proposing innovative policies for business and
government.
Key approaches and concepts
The programs are based on innovative research and a new conceptual framework that
enables change agents to think creatively and act effectively. In addition, the modeling of
partnership (instead of domination) principles in every element of the program is one of
its key innovations, and keys to our popularity and success. Facilitators of our online
programs guide conversations that build upon the unique combination of expertise and
background of participants, give participants a frame within which to interact, share, and
learn with each other, as well as give them the tools to facilitate conversations in their
own communities.
Moreover, by framing the participants of our programs as conversation leaders, the
learning doesn’t stop there. Individuals don’t just work on change within themselves, but
they are encouraged to start conversations (inherently partnership-based) as well as to
identify opportunities for positive interventions. Building on a training of trainers
infrastructure, our programming has a scope of impact far beyond the courses.
We reach out to many organizations through our Caring Economy Coalition, representing
memberships of over 16 million. The program can be adapted, and is being adapted by
alumni, to many fields.
A unique aspect of the program is that, with the understand that the program is based on a
training of trainers theory of change, our trainers go on to make the program more
robust, proposing, designing, and implementing new modules as they see opportunities.
The aim of the program is as follows:




Give participants the language and tools to articulate care in their personal and
professional lives
Connect grassroots with the experts
Individuals go through transformations, but institutions can also be transformed.
Institutions (public and private) can be caring.
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

Courses are a roadmap to articulate care (the ultimate ACTION embodiment of
love and forgiveness)
Care is an action verb. Care is articulated in various (and often unlikely) contexts.
One example of this is the new Transforming Healthcare Culture course, led by CELP
alum Julie Kennedy, a CELP graduate. Another example is the book on health care
education by Riane Eisler and Teddie Potter, professor at University of Minnesota and
CECLP and CT alum now being used in courses internationally.
Other exemplars include the following:



For her practicum experience, author and consultant Olivia Parr-Rud introduced
the Caring Economics material to a local Meetup group that gathers monthly in
the Philadelphia area. Bolstered by the positive reception to her presentation,
Olivia now plans to book a 350 seat auditorium to host a larger-scale conversation
involving people from the Occupy Philly movement and others. Her presentation
also led to an invitation to participate with other community leaders and members
of congress in an initiative to create a new constitutional congress in Philadelphia.
Tara Wersing, a Professor of Business and Leadership in Madrid, Spain
introduced Caring Economics principles to 120 MBA students as part of her
practicum work, and looks forward to further integrating Caring Economics
concepts into her teaching.
Andre Cardoso hosted a Caring Economics conversation for 25 college CELP
students, professors, and community members at his university’s Culture Club.
He is now heading to Sweden to further his studies of community-based
approaches to economic sustainability.
The program graduates create ongoing opportunities to share Caring Economics with
others through presentations, study groups, teaching and writing, and they find ways to
integrate the principles of Caring Economics into their work and their activism.
Graduates also gather online monthly in the "Alumni in Action" groups to share
resources and inspiration for creating change in specific fields, including Healthcare,
Education, Earth Advocacy, Media and the Arts, Organization Leadership and
Development, and Community-based change.
All Certified Caring Economy Conversation Leaders complete a practicum experience by
leading a conversation about Caring Economics in their community or organization. The
practicum gives students a supported opportunity to personalize their approach to the
material and get feedback so that they leave the program feeling confident and fully
prepared to continue their work as a Caring Economy Conversation Leader.
Innovation
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The modeling of partnership (instead of domination) principles in every element of the
program is one of its key innovations, and keys to the popularity and success of the
program. Facilitators of the online programs guide conversations that build upon the
unique combination of expertise and background of participants, give participants a frame
within which to interact, share, and learn with each other, as well as give them the tools
to facilitate conversations in their own communities.
In addition, by framing the participants of programs as conversation leaders, the learning
does not stop there. Individuals do not just work on change within themselves, but they
are encouraged to start conversations (inherently partnership-based). Building on a
training of trainers infrastructure, the programming has a scope of impact far beyond the
6-week course.
Integrating love and forgiveness
The Leadership and Learning Programs empower individuals to articulate and implement
love and forgiveness in their own lives, and through programs and policies of the public
and private organizations within which they work. They show that the ultimate
articulation of love and forgiveness is care. Care for people and for the natural
environment. In essence, these programs are practical: they empower participants to
define care in terms of policy and economics, and to work for better outcomes.
Institutions, organizations, corporations, and governments can also be caring, and the
programs outline how they can actualize care in assumptions, programs/policies, and
artifacts of culture. Through conversations, bringing care, policy and economics together
in new ways is possible and the participants are empowered as change agents in their
professional and personal lives.
In the field of transformational leadership, what is most needed is clearer and wider
understanding of common actions, organizational partners with allied and aligned
missions, and a wider view of the landscape of change agents that could be potential
partners. Current actions and actors in the field do not take full advantage of partnership
opportunities, mutual co-benefits, and collaboration for greater impact.
Along similar lines, greater integration of foundational cultural change theory (personal
and institutional) should be incorporated and mainstreamed in university curricula and
formal educational institutions – something that many of our CELP conversation leaders
and Cultural Transformation participants have been doing in their own professional lives.
There is a growing conversation around transforming organizational and business culture,
in particular towards sustainability broadly. When we hear about sustainability, we
typically think about natural resources and “being green.” CPS has a tremendous
opportunity to expand this sustainability conversation to include and highlight the
sustainability of people, care, and partnership, and to integrate personal and cultural
transformation.
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CPS has an opportunity to integrate transformational concepts (like love and forgiveness)
via unlikely vehicles (such as policy and economics). An integration of concepts such a
care, love, forgiveness, partnership into the way institutions operate is essential. We can
no longer keep these concepts separate, and it is more urgent than ever that we create
tools to blur the lines between institutions, policy, and economics and transformational
concepts like care, love, and forgiveness.
References
“Coalition.” 2014. Caring Economy. Accessed December 11.
http://caringeconomy.org/coalition/.
Eisler, Ph D. Riane. 2001. Tomorrow’s Children: A Blueprint For Partnership Education
In The 21st Century. Reprint edition. Boulder :; New York : Basic Books.
Eisler, Riane. 1988. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. First edition.
Cambridge Mass.: HarperOne.
———. 2010. The Power of Partnership. New World Library.
Eisler, Riane Tennenhaus. 2008. The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring
Economics. First Edition edition. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
“Publications | Riane Eisler.” 2014. Accessed October 11.
http://rianeeisler.com/publications/.
“Riane Eisler — Center for Partnership Studies.” 2014. Accessed December 10.
http://www.partnershipway.org/.
9) Society for Organizational Learning (SOL)/SENAC Brazil24
Program description
The Society for Organizational Learning (SOL) is a learning community oriented to
unveil, integrate, sow and implement theories and practices for the interdependent
development of people and organizations. Members of SoL community articulated the
three key processes that in coming together, make SoL unique: applied (action) learning,
an evolving social knowledge network, and profound questions that link many of their
endeavors. SoL's 50-year vision is as follows:
24
Data that informed this section are based on the written responses to the questionnaire by Tatiana
Pincerno Ribeiro, Senac (http://www.sp.senac.br/jsp/default.jsp?newsID=a13156.htm&testeira=1063) and
http://www.solonline.org/.
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We believe that the interdependent development of people and their institutions will be an
area of interest beyond our lifetimes and we are striving to make SoL relevant to our
most pressing needs for collective intelligence and wisdom.
The program started with the Center for Organizational Learning founded in 1991 at MIT
by Peter Senge with a mission of fostering collaboration among a group of corporations
committed to fundamental organizational change and advancing the state of the art in
building learning organizations. Its initial focus was on developing new learning
capabilities in the areas of systems thinking, collaborative inquiry into tacit mental
models, and nurturing personal and shared vision. By 1995, the center consisted of 19
organizational partners including Amoco, AT&T, Chrysler, EDS, Federal Express, Ford
Motor Company, Harley Davidson Motorcycle Company, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel
Corporation, Lucent Technologies, Merck & Company, National Semi-Conductor,
Pacific Bell, Philips, and the Quality Management Network (a consortium of healthcare
organizations), Shell Oil Company, Texas Instruments, and US West. Working in
partnership with researchers at MIT, a number of these companies undertook a variety of
significant organizational experiments. Through these experiments, the companies were
building learning capabilities in intact teams, developing new organizational learning
infrastructures, transforming the assumptions and practices of executive leadership, and
developing internal learning communities.
The desire to expand this learning community led to a process of extended reflection and
renewal in 1995, and the founding of SoL in 1997. This process was guided by Dee
Hock, the founder and former CEO or Visa International. Dee's belief in the power of
"chaordic organizations" had a strong influence on SoL's design. Over the years, SoL has
focused its attention on further refining its theories tools and methods, while also
expanding the arenas in which this work is applied. In June of 1999, SoL began
publication of its journal, Reflections. This publication continues today and is intended to
provide a way for the SoL community to share its work with each other and the world.
In June of 2003, coordinators of local communities organized the first SoL Global Forum
in Finland, a convening for over 300 participants from over 30 countries. In September of
2005, the second SoL Global Forum was held in Vienna with 450 members and over 50
parallel session featuring projects, theories, tools from around the world. The third Global
Forum, Bridging the Gulf, was held in Muscat, Oman in April 2008. In October of 2004,
the SoL Sustainabilty Consortium offered the first public Business Innovation for
Sustainability Forum: Leadership, Learning, and collaboration for People, Planet and
Profit, highlighting the work of our oldest and strongest consortium; a second Forum was
held in 2007. SoL published its first book in 2004 called Presence: An Exploration of
Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society, by Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski
and Flowers.
SoL and SENAC, Brazil
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SoL Brazil and its member organization SENAC are examined in more detail in this
section as representative of SoL’s work as a global agent of change. SoL Brazil was
founded in 2000, and since then, it is estimated that 1000 people have participated in
SoL. SoL Brazil engages a diverse audience including social entrepreneurs, educators,
directors and managers from different companies and sectors, students, civil society and
leaders. The age of SoL Brazil participants ranges from 20 to 60, and they have 60%
women and 40% men.
SENAC’s mission is to provide people development through education that stimulates the
exercising of citizenship and transforming and bold professional actions to contribute
towards society’s well-being. By 2015, SENAC aims to strengthen its name as an
institution of excellence in providing innovative educational services geared towards
social inclusion and the diversified training of citizen professionals.
Key approaches and concepts
SoL Brazil Guiding Principles
Drive to Learn - All human beings and communities are born with an innate, lifelong
desire and ability to learn, which should be enhanced by all organizations.
Learning is Social - People learn best from and with one another, and participation in
learning communities is vital to their effectiveness, well-being and happiness in any work
setting.
Learning Communities - The capacities and accomplishments of organizations are
inseparable from, and dependent on, the capacities of the learning communities which
they foster.
Aligning with Nature - It is essential that organizations evolve to be in greater harmony
with human nature and with the natural world.
Global Interdependence - It is important to reinforce the social web with gratitude,
valorization and mutual support.
Diversity – Diversity of concepts, experiences and talents represents the potential
richness of an organization; and as so, must be a source to enrich individual and
organizational learning.
Living Organizations – The alignment between purpose and vision, personal and
organizational values, with brand and strategies creates living organizations. These
Organizations are constantly evolving to nurture the true needs and desires of the
organization and its people by learning and un-learning.
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SENAC’s Educational Principles - Autonomy and innovation
With an educational methodology targeted to entrepreneurship, students learn how to
create and diversify the possibilities for their insertion in the marketplace, thus achieving
autonomy for conducting innovative projects. Social commitment is also part of Senac’s
principles and mission, with a scholarship policy that every year reaches thousands of
people who would not be able to enjoy our services in any other way, as well as an
extensive work targeted to environmental preservation, and development and
strengthening of base organizations and communities.
The Senac São Paulo brand follows thousands of professionals who graduate and stand
out in the marketplace every year. Acknowledgement of this work ensures the proximity
and partnership with companies and institutions in Brazil and other countries, offering
exchange actions to students and teachers, as well as differentiated, enriching
experiences.
Senac established in 2001 a Corporate Education Program (Educor) based on the
principles of Learning Organization (Personal Mastery, System Thinking, Mental Model,
Shared Vision, Team Learning). Among the courses that have been offered are the
following:
o Appreciative Inquiry
o Mediate Team Learning
o Personal Mastery
o Leader Coach
o Culture for peace – attitudes and values
o Entrepreneurship and Innovation
o Circle of questions and dialogue
Senac culture and environment is based in cooperation, collaboration, and participative
management. Managers and employees learned to use dialogue sessions; world café;
learning journeys; appreciative inquiry and other learning group tools to mediate
meetings, develop programs and events. The main role of a manager at Senac is to be an
educational leader (Líder Educador), and an example to students and employs, and to
foster collaboration, cooperation, and personal and community development.
Senac managers participate in Change Lab course and Scenario Planning from Reos
Parterns. Change Lab methodology was used for a project demanded by the Mayor of
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Jundiaí to co-create with the community the priorities for the four year municipal budget.
Senac also developed a Social Web Program in all schools to integrate the student
projects with the community needs, in a way that the student could work with real
projects and deliver to the society.
In 2011, Senac started a program with Team Academy (TA) to develop 15 TA coaches.
Educators use the TA principles and tools in their succession programs (trainees of
course coordinators, administrative coordinators, managers, etc.) An entrepreneurship
course for small business is under construction using TA inspiration.
Integrating love and forgiveness
Senac integrates love and forgiveness in the education principles and actions. The theory
of change that Senac believes in is based on the principles of learning organization such
as personal mastery, system thinking, mental model, shared vision, team learning. All of
these principles emphasize interconnectedness of individual and community. Positive
change within each individual spills over into the communities and the force behind such
transformation is love. The inner work is emphasized as way towards self-realization and
it has as a consequence a reality transformation. For example, Senac’s Program for
Cultural Peace taught in all Senac’s schools provides an impetus for the participants to
spread the message about the importance of peace and love in their communities. It does
this by creating learning community aware of its personal and team potentials and
qualities.
References
Senge, Peter M., C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. 2005.
Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society. 1
edition. Pacific Grove, CA: Crown Business.
http://www.sp.senac.br/jsp/default.jsp?newsID=a13156.htm&testeira=1063
“Várias vezes trabalhamos com o que não temos e esquecemos do que temos —– Força
da conversa ou da escuta;
Teilhard de Chardin (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teilhard_de_Chardin) —– Dom Elder
Câmara (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9lder_C%C3%A2mara);
Imagens e Vozes de Esperança (http://ivebrasil.wordpress.com/) —– Buxixo de Mães
(http://buxixodemaes.com.br/);
Casa do Zezinho (https://www.casadozezinho.org.br/) —– Brahma Kumaris
(http://www.brahmakumaris.org/brazil);
Família Sustentável (http://www.onehealthmag.com.br/index.php/familia-sustentavel/) —
– Hole in the Wall (http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/);
Green Washing (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing) —– Biomimicry Institute
(http://www.biomimicryinstitute.org/);
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Ask Nature (http://www.asknature.org/) —– Filme “O Jarro”
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO6c5xh1BA8);
Escola da Ponte (http://www.escoladaponte.pt/site/) —– Poesia Completa – Manoel de
Barros (http://www.revistabula.com/2680-os-10-melhores-poemas-de-manoel-debarros/);
Filme Primavera, verao, outono, inverno e… primavera
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7FsrS0lI04) —– Edutopia
(http://www.edutopia.org/);
Escuta Generativa (http://www.solbrasilonline.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Oponto-cego-da-lideran%C3%A7a.pdf)
A Vila (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Vila)
Centro de Estudo Hannah Arendt (http://www.hannaharendt.org.br/) —– Alegoria da
caverna (http://www.algosobre.com.br/filosofia/alegoria-da-caverna.html); - See more at:
http://www.solbrasilonline.org.br/blog#sthash.hjG4b5lv.dpuf
10) Effective and Sustainable Law Practices: A Mindfulness-Based Perspective25
Program description
The program Effective and Sustainable Law Practices: A Mindfulness-Based Perspective is
taught at Berkley Law School, the University of California. Its innovative practices
include the mindfulness meditation and the ways that meditation practice can help to
develop skills that are directly relevant to the work of law professionals. It explores, from
a meditative perspective and through the support of mindfulness-based practices, the
ethical responsibilities of the lawyer, the stresses and challenges of the lawyer's life, the
management of the complex of emotions that affect the lawyer (including, among others,
anger, self-righteousness, sadness, fear of mistake, compassion, indifference and love).26
This program is taught to lawyers and law students (and other teachers at various levels
in higher education) a variety of mindfulness and other practices to support their
development and capacity to work for transformative change on the personal,
interpersonal and intersystemic levels. Because of the opportunities that are available to
well-trained lawyers to participate in society at many levels and locations,
students/program participants are or often will be change leaders, social entrepreneurs, or
leaders in business, law, government and/or civil society. They are all either early to midcareer.
The classes bring together reflection on the role of lawyers and the practice of law across
all settings in society with the development and experience of awareness practices aimed
25 A significant amount of data included in this section are based on the questionnaire submitted by Professor
Rhonda Magee.
26 See: http://www.law.berkeley.edu/php-
programs/courses/coursePage.php?cID=15429&termCode=D&termYear=2014
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at giving participants a basis for changing their sense of the possibilities that exist for
them as lawyers and leaders. Although the original version of the class was co-developed
with two other teachers, the course has been taught solo, and has been revised to include
more evidence-based mindfulness teaching and practices. Hundreds of students and
participants have taken the classes or participated in mindfulness sessions over the years.
The program increases participants’ capacity for focus and wellbeing, helps clarify
values, and increases their sense of compassion and empathy for others. What’s most
needed is research proving the efficacy of these practices, to assist in making the case for
expanding these practices within legal education, professional identity and leadership
development.
Key approaches and concepts
The program exposes participants to the contemplative practices of a variety of wisdom
traditions in order to encourage them to develop their own mindfulness-based awareness
practice and way of being in their professional life. Along the way, they strengthen and
hone critical lawyering skills, including the complex set of communication skills that are
central to effective lawyering (speaking, listening, writing thoughtfully and well);
focused reading and analysis; empathic counseling and effective negotiating; emotionally
and socially-aware advocacy, both in and out of the litigation context; and relationship
building and nurturance. These essential skills and capacities require underlying abilities
to focus without distraction; respect and empathize with clients, colleagues and others;
listen and explain with open-mindedness and patience; problem-solve creatively;
facilitate productive communication among adversaries; deal safely and constructively
with conflict; engage in honest and fearless self-awareness, self-regulation and selfcorrection; and pursue alignment of the practice of law with our values.
Participants develop a capacity to practice various forms of mindfulness-based awareness
practices. These practices will, in turn, enhance their skills at the range of traditional
lawyering tasks (e.g., reading and analysis, advocacy, client counseling, etc.) by
enhancing the range of underlying skills (self-awareness, the capacity for reflection) upon
which effective and sustainable application of traditional lawyering skills most depend.
They develop a capacity to apply mindfulness to their performance of traditional
lawyering skills, and to reflect, in both non-discursive and discursive ways, on these
experiments.
Participants develop a capacity to bring mindfulness to the examination of the values
embedded in any given context, and to explore, clarify, rediscover/recover and ground
themselves in ethics and values and to honor them in their legal practice. Participants are
supported in examining and making more meaningful the core values of legal
professionalism, including community engagement and service; empathy and
compassion; and civic-minded, ethical leadership.
Ultimately, the objective is to support the participants in accessing a sense of themselves
as whole and centered human beings, whose chosen career is a source of satisfying
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service to others, demonstrated effectiveness as a skilled human being, and meaningful,
felt interconnection with and within the whole web of life.
Integrating love and forgiveness
In the classes, several two-hour sessions are devoted to a focus on intellectual, social,
emotional, and spiritual examinations of such facets of experience as love, loving
kindness, compassion and forgiveness. The participants are invited to continue practicing
and reflecting over the week between each class. But perhaps most importantly, a space
in which caring and love is manifest in our every interaction is co-created with
participants, and they are invited to appreciate their relationships and potential to learn
from one another as central.
Consistent with the transformative education movement, the theory of change begins with
the self-in-relational context, but continues through fluidly to encompass changed
interactions with others, and ultimately, changed systems. Participants say that the class
leads to new ways of thinking about being a lawyer. For example, one participant said he
learned that there was a place for the appropriate experience of love in the practice of
law, and reconnected to a deeper sense of why he had come to law school: to help
systematically disadvantaged migrant laborers and immigrants. Another reported that, as
a result of the work she did in the class, she reconnected with a mother she'd written out
of her life, and that of her children for more than 8 years, and was better able to
experience compassion and empathy for a range others as a result. One student realized
her capacity to love across lines of ethnic and racial difference, and has since dedicated
her personal and professional life to caring across racial/ethnic community lines.
References:
Andreas, Steve. 2002. Transforming Your Self: Becoming Who You Want to Be. Real
People Press.
Blair, Madelyn. 2010. Riding the Current: How to Deal with the Daily Deluge of Data.
The Taos Institute Publications.
Bush, Mirabai, and Rob Lehman. 2011. Contemplation Nation: How Ancient Practices
Are Changing the Way We Live. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Goldstein, Elisha. 2010. A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook. Pap/MP3 Wk
edition. New Harbinger Publications.
Hanh, Thich Nhat, and H. H. the Dalai Lama. 1992. Peace Is Every Step: The Path of
Mindfulness in Everyday Life. Edited by Arnold Kotler. Bantam.
Kabat-Zinn, Jon. 2005. Guided Mindfulness Meditation Series 1. 1 edition. Sounds True.
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———. 2009. Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation In Everyday
Life. 1st edition. Hyperion.
———. 2013. Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your
Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. Rev Upd edition. Bantam.
———. Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment--and Your Life.
Kabat-Zinn, Jon, and Joan Z. Borysenko. 1996. Full Catastrophe Living: How to Cope
with Stress, Pain and Illness Using Mindfulness Meditation. Piatkus Books.
Keeva, Steven. 1999. Transforming Practices. 1 edition. McGraw-Hill.
———. 2011. Transforming Practices: Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life.
10th Edition edition. Chicago, Ill: American Bar Association.
Shar, Marcus Z. Transforming Practices: Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life.
(Review): An Article from: Trial.
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APPENDIX I
Questionnaire (based on the exploratory study done by GLN, reviewed with the help
of the Advisory Council)
1. What is the purpose and primary audience of your program:
a. Are they change practitioners, social entrepreneurs, inter-sector, business,
government and/or civil society leaders?
b. What is the typical age range, gender, nationality and ethnicity mix of the
participants?
c. What is their prior experience and seniority as leaders?
d. What selection process do you use to recruit/enroll them?
e. Why do they come to your program? What other programs might they have
considered?
2. When was your program (and your institution) established? How many people have
been through the program so far?
3. What has been the impact of the program? Has it been evaluated? If yes, what were the
main findings?
3. How long is the overall program and what are the main modules/components of the
program?
4. What is the cost of the program and who funds it?
5. What is the theory of change underlying the program? How do you evaluate the
performance of the participants, the faculty, the overall program and its components?
What do participants say about their experience?
6. How have these programs integrated love and forgiveness and were there any
transformational outcomes as a result of this integration?
7. What do you consider as the most innovative features of the program (e.g. use of
nature retreats, use of creative arts, role-playing, grounding in community issues,
emphasis on governance systems)?
8. What is the profile and experience of the developers and facilitators of the program?
9. What vision do you have for its next stage of development? If you had access to larger
resources, what might you want to do that you have not yet been able to?
10. Has the program been replicated or contributed to other similar initiatives? Are you
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connected to others in the field? Do you know of other programs that would meet our
criteria and that would you recommend we interview?
11. What do you feel is most needed in the field right now?
APPENDIX II
PROGRAMS SUGGESTED BY THE ADVISORY COUNCIL
 Consensus Building Institute
 Centre for creative Leadership
 “Coming into your own” program by Dialogos
 University of Pretoria / Richard Barret, ‘Value based Leadership’
 Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP);
www.wiscomp.org/
 The Do School; http://thedoschool.org/program/method/
 “Newfield | Escuela Internacional de Coaching Ontológico.” 2014. Accessed
November 25. http://www.newfield.cl/.
 “Caminos Al Alma: Sanación Energética.” 2014. Accessed September 23.
http://www.caminosalalma.info/p/sanacion-energetica.html.
 “Fundación Columbia | Nora Rousseaux.” 2014. Accessed September 23.
http://fundacioncolumbia.org/docentes/nora-rousseaux.
 “John Paul Lederach -- Compassionate Presence: Faith-Based Peacebuilding in
the Face of Violence.” 2014. Scribd. Accessed September 24.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/118981816/John-Paul-Lederach-CompassionatePresence-Faith-Based-Peacebuilding-in-the-Face-of-Violence.
 “Peace Builders Share Work and Wisdom with Apprentices Worldwide // News //
Notre Dame News // University of Notre Dame.” 2014. Accessed September 24.
http://news.nd.edu/news/10989-peace-builders-share-work-and-wisdom-withapprentices-worldwide/.
 “Public Speaking | Oonagh Harpur.” 2014. Accessed September 29.
http://www.oonaghharpur.com/public-speaker.html.
 “Aware Girls, Pakistan.” 2015. Peace Direct. Accessed January 5.
http://www.peacedirect.org/us/peacebuilders/pakistan/.
 “Caminos Al Alma: Sanación Energética.” 2014. Accessed September 23.
http://www.caminosalalma.info/p/sanacion-energetica.html.
 “Centre for Peacebuilding and Reconciliation, Sri Lanka.” 2015. Peace Direct.
Accessed January 5. http://www.peacedirect.org/us/peacebuilders/sri-lanka/.
 “Highlander Research and Education Center - Highlander Serves as a Catalyst for
Grassroots Organizing and Movement Building in Appalachia and the South. We
Work with People Fighting for Justice, Equality and Sustainability, Supporting
Their Efforts to Take Collective Action to Shape Their Own Destiny.” 2014.
Highlander Research and Education Center. Accessed November 25.
http://highlandercenter.org/.
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Strengthening Inner Perspectives in Leadership Development on Love and Forgiveness
WHITE PAPER






http://siyli.org/. Meg Levie a trainer of the Seach Inside Yourself program was
interviewed. The transcript of her interview is available in the database.
“Powers of Leadership 2014/15 | Summary | Powered by RegOnline.” 2014.
Accessed November 25.
https://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?EventID=1503612.
“Rockwood : Building Powerful, Interconnected, Collaborative Leadership.”
2014. Accessed November 25. http://www.rockwoodleadership.org/.
“Working Together.” 2014. Skills for Solidarity. Accessed November 25.
http://www.leadnow.ca/skills-for-solidarity/working-together/.
“Science Measures the Human Energy Field.” 2014. Accessed September 23.
http://www.reiki.org/reikinews/sciencemeasures.htm.
“Sobre Nosotros | Escuela de Sanación Energética.” 2014. Accessed September
23. http://www.sanacionenergetica.com.ar/sobre_nosotros.html.
APPENDIX III *
Member of the Advisory Council
Alain Gauthier, facilitator and coach (Core Leadership), http://
http://www.coreleadership.com/

Alexander Schieffer (Integral Development )
Center for Integral Development. http://www.trans-4-m.com/

Christina D'arce (Society for Organization Learning) http://solonline.org

Gachi Tapia (UNDP Conflict Resolution Training)

Hein Dijksterhuis (UNOO - Netherlands), http://unoo.nl
Presencing Institute/ ELIAS

Ignacio Martin Maruri (Adaptative Leadership Chile)
Adaptative Leadership - CLA ( Cambridge Leadership Associates) Chile.
http://www.claconsulting.com/

Kristiane Schaeffer (Collective Leadership Initiative), Program owner
Collective Leadership
Initiative. http://www.collectiveleadership.de (Germany)

Mark Gerzon - Mediators Foundation. http://mediatorsfoundation.org

Mille Boyer, Reos Partners ( Denmark/Brazil) http://reospartners.com

Rama Mani (Agents of Transformation), (India/Switzerland)
http://ramamani.org
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Strengthening Inner Perspectives in Leadership Development on Love and Forgiveness
WHITE PAPER

Scilla Elworthy, Rising Women - http://risingwomenrisingworld.org

Sue Cheshire (Global Leadership Academy),
Global Leaders Academy. www.globalleadersacademy.com
SUSAN ANDREWS
Biopsicology by Instituto Visão do Futuro. http://www.visaofuturo.org (
Brasil)

Vicki Robin, author/ social innovator. http://www.vickyrobin.org

Walter Link (Global Academy Foundation), http: http://global-
lead.org/category/global-leadership-tv/
APPENDIX IV DATA BASE ( SEE ATTACHED)
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