A course on how to facilitate profound change and innovation in teams and organisations

“What prevents many organisations and individuals from being innovative and fail to bring about the change they desire is their inability to access new data and new reality through attending to the leadership blindspot. Change makers and innovators have learnt the art of accessing their blindspot by learning the art of suspending their usual ways of perceiving reality in order to ‘see’ the emerging future possibilities.”

“The success of an intervention depends on the interior conditions of the intervener.” – Bill O’Brien

Most of today’s most pressing challenges are characterised by enormous complexity. Relying on past experience to figure out what to do is no longer sufficient. If we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we always got. So, if we want to address our most complex social challenges, then we have to learn a different approach. This approach has to be not piecemeal, but systemic; not relying exclusively on authorities and experts, but including all key stakeholders; and not based on already-existing best practices, but creative. Furthermore, this approach has to be bilingual: it has to speak both the language of love – of connection, relatedness, and wholeness – and, at the same time and paradoxically, the language of power – of action, pragmatism, and force.

This course offers an opportunity to learn the Change Lab approach through a hands-on, experiential application to a global “problematic situation” that is being manifested locally – the issue of public healthcare. Using a combination of dialogue interviews among course participants, learning journeys, workshop exercises, classroom lectures, and artistic/physical expression, we will practice the Change Lab’s three core movements: co-sensing, co-presencing, and co-creating. We will build our capacities to address, successfully and peacefully, our own most complex social challenges.

The Change Lab as an approach has been applied to challenges as diverse as the sustainability of global food systems and malnutrition in India to cultivating national & community based responses to the challenge of orphans and vulnerable children in South Africa. Two recent books describe the practice and theory that underpins their work: Kahane’s Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (2004) and Otto Scharmer’s Theory U: Learning from the Future as it Emerges (2007).

Who should attend this course
• Managers in business, government, and civil society who want a fresh way to address the challenges facing them.
• Leaders at all levels in organizations who want to enhance their capacity to listen and observe, connect more deeply with others and themselves, and innovate in fresh ways.
• Facilitators and change agents who want to learn to facilitate more complex challenges with diverse groups.
• Anyone involved in innovation, policy, or engagement of stakeholders in complex environments.

Próxima turma de 22 a 24 de abril, ainda dá tempo!!!

Nane =)