There is a growing recognition that balancing the common good with healthy self interest is good for business. The Barrett Values Centre, Vancouver Board of Trade and Rix Centre, and the Institute for Values-Based Leadership at Royal Roads University have come together to offer two related events to support leaders who understand that our troubled times call for some new ways of thinking.

Leadership for a new economy in an uncertain world, is a morning breakfast forum featuring keynote speaker Dr. James Orbinski, award-winning author, humanitarian, and president of Doctors Without Borders in 1999 when the organization won the Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. Obrinski will share his vision on how we in business, government and the civil sector can collaborate to become more resilient, and adapt to global challenges in a way that supports our long-term social and economic vitality.  Tor Eneroth, culture advisor to Volvo and network director for Barrett Values Centre will share his first-hand experience in how building a better corporate culture benefits the company and the world around it. Together Orbinski and Eneroth will then lead an interactive panel discussion with Bob Elton, corporate director and past CEO of BC Hydro, Dr. Marilyn M. Taylor, director, Institute of Values-based Leadership, Royal Roads University, Ashley Munday, leader, collaborative strategies, the Barrett Values Centre, and Emanuel F. Arruda, founding partner League Assets Corporation, to further explore how to cultivate cultures that foster our collective resilience and prosperity.

In the afternoon, join us for a second learning opportunity also at the Pan Pacific, designed to dig deeper into ideas discussed in the morning forum. The Organization culture change session led by Tor Eneroth, will challenge participants to explore personal and organizational values, and how they can enable positive culture change in their own teams, organizations and communities. Click here for details and separate registration.

Morning forum information and registration is here at www.boardoftrade.com.

Read more about featured speaker Tor Eneroth’s view on values-based leadership here.
Learn how two Royal Roads University alumni are living their values, and making it work for their business and their community here.

We hope you can join us for both events! We look forward to staying connected and will offer future opportunities to keep learning and growing together.

To update your subscription information, please reply with ‘change subscription’ in the subject line and include your preferences. Thank you.

The morning forum is presented by:

Peter and Rita Thomas, Thomas Foundation

TD Bank Group

In cooperation with:

Vancouver Board of Trade and Rix Centre, Barrett Values Centre, and the Institute for Values-Based Leadership, at Royal Roads University

With special appreciation to Pravin Pillay, Emergent Performance Consulting, for his wonderful support and assistance.

This post was written by Film Maker Ian Mackenzie and was originally published on
Matador.net
To access the original post:

The iconic ‘Guy Fawkes’ mask adopted by Occupy Wall St.

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO PINPOINT when the shift occurs – when you go from being an “observer” of the various occupations around the world, to becoming a participant.

Perhaps it was when you realized the thriving vitality that emerged when you walked onto the grounds of an occupation: the drum circles, the creative signs, and the passionate dialogue enticing your ears. Or perhaps it was the way your heart broke when you watched hundreds of people, occupiers and anyone else, enjoy a plate of food served up by dedicated volunteers. Perhaps it was when you realized these were more than just lazy hippies, hoping to leech off the hard work of “the rest of us” to feed their own addictions and vice.

Or perhaps you’re still convinced the Occupy Movement is a waste of time. No matter, the hacking of your consciousness has begun.

Pravin Pillay, media theorist, artist, and organizational designer, has studied the phenomenon of “cognitive shifts” since he experienced his own visit to the desert of Black Rock City. The annual Burning Man festival has been expanding the realm of the possible for over 25 years, galvanizing consciousness with mind-bending art, radical self-expression, and a demonstrated gift economy.

“When people recognize a different way of being, they realize they can choose their experience in life,” says Pravin. The implications for the Occupy movement, as the next phase of humanity’s emergent paradigm shift, are profound.

Listen to the full interview – 30 mins
How the Occupy Movement is Hacking your Consciousness

Finding your true place in Life

A Deep Nature Connection
Rite of Passage for Men

Are you longing to be fully activated
in living your gift and walking your vision
with fierce clarity and deep awareness?

Are you craving the nourishment and shelter
of Nature and community
to find and deliver your best?

Do you want be part of an emerging movement
towards a new culture
patterned on the natural world?

This experiential 4 weekend series provides
a clear map
and the inspiration
to establish and reinforce
connections to self, community and nature.

Together, we will:

• Learn a set of core routines that offer life-long impact
• Practice expansion of sensory awareness
• Identify and activate your most meaningful gifts
• Read signs and learn the 5 Arts of Tracking
• Explore primitive skills to establish resilience, confidence and competence
• Navigate the 8 Directions to discover our place in the wheel of life
• Reflect upon our core values and the role they play in our emergent masculine wisdom
• Practice deep listening and sacred silence to deepen inner guidance
• Share and grow in community
  

Discover a passion for play, deep curiosity,
an expansive sense of self
and a new vitality!

This workshop is a preparatory pre-requisite for an actual initiation journey to an uninhabited island in September with ceremony of coming back in the community.

4 weekends:
February 25-26, 2012
March 31/April 1, 2012
April 28/29, 2012
May 25/26, 2012

Cost: $725 for 8 full days
Location: Salt Spring Island, BC

Are you intrigued? We want to hear from you!

Registration for this course is limited to ensure a high quality experience for participants.

For more information:

http://www.wisdomoftheearth.ca

Call or e-mail today.

Contact:
Jean-Claude Catry 250-653-9122 jean-claude@wisdomoftheearth.ca
or
Pravin Pillay 250-538-8898 pravin@wisdomoftheearth.ca

Both workshop leaders are seasoned mentors in supporting people moving through life stages by drawing on the wisdom of nature.

Jean-Claude Catry is the founder of Wisdom of the Earth and has been studying, practicing and teaching wilderness connection skills for over 30 years.

Pravin Pillay (MFA/MBA) is an artist, writer, householder-yogin and leadership mentor. He is also the former Executive Director of the Rediscovery International Foundation – an organization dedicated to engaging indigenous wisdom to inspire deeper connection within oneself, between cultures and with the natural world.

		Joel Solomon Mark Donovan Photography

Humanity is in an unprecedented era. Collectively we sit on the verge of creation and destruction. Challenges to planetary well-being have
never been more evident and creating opportunities for positive,
actionable change have never been more vital.

Join us for a one day workshop intended for activists, leaders, educators
changemakers and individuals interested in equipping themselves with
the right tools, understanding and community necessary to walk through
this challenging time in a good way.

In this one-day workshop we will create the space for participants
to answer some of the toughest questions of the age:

How does one find balance in an imbalanced world?
How do we find authentic meaning amidst the paradoxes of this time?
How do we ground ourselves in our deepest ecological ways of being and from that place influence society in a positive way?

Four leading changemakers have joined together to facilitate this extraordinary one-day event. Through collaboration and group process, experiential activities and culturally-appropriate use of indigenous tradition and knowledge, we will forge a vessel in which we can all explore our fullest and widest visions of our selves and our world. Each participant leave with a clearer sense of purpose, capacity and connection to his or her vision of change.

Saturday November 19, 9-5 pm

Cost: $45

Location: Salmonberry Room, Stanley Park Ecology Centre, Vancouver, BC.

For more info :
http://www.backtothegarden.ca

Contact us at:
info@emergentdesignsolutions.com

The international political and economic climate is changing and non profit organizations are feeling the repercussions at the local level. Around the world non profit organizations  are learning new ways to meet human and environmental needs during a time of deep change. In this interactive workshop, develop a critical analysis of the emerging role of your organization and explore adaptive strategies.

This workshop will help you to:

• Gain a clear understanding of strategic challenges and opportunities
• Learn about successful models and strategies that are thriving during this time
• Identify personal and organizational values for success in the emerging environment
• Map out an eco-system model of your organization and figure out what needs to change to improve resilience and vitality
• Explore Crowd funding and Social Media  to successfully engage stakeholders of all ages in co-creation

Workshop schedule

This workshop is offered at the following locations and dates:

Victoria Tuesday, November 15
University Club, West Campus Way
University of Victoria

Burnaby Thursday, November 17
Executive Hotel and Conference Centre
4201 Lougheed Highway, Burnaby

For more information or to register click here

In the world view taken which is the first step towards perceiving as an artist, thinking as an ecologist, and acting with clarity and wisdom, everything including individual human beings, our technology and  the organizational groups in which we cluster are considered to be within Nature. Indeed any eco-system provides the inspiration and insight needed to cultivate this state of awareness  and to understand oneself as an ecosystem that  exists in interdependent relationships with many ‘other’ entities and ecosystems.

Many believe that humans exist outside of Nature, hence the term natural resources. In this very different Cartesian-Industrial world view Nature is something to be exploited. Interestingly we also use the term “Human Resources.” which indicates how many traditional organizations and managers  view the complex and elegant creatures that create the relationships which ‘enliven’ the organizations themselves.

The Emergent way of seeing and being is ultimately a humanist approach that embraces Deep Ecology.

Here are some of the Emergent Design principles to keep in mind if you want to align with that which designs with emergence in mind.

• Design from top down and from bottom up simultaneously – appreciate a hierarchy of information but always be open to the design’s desire to emerge spontaneously
• Practice Surrender – Let the design incorporate you into it.
• Practice Patience and Careful Observation – Consider the design as an entity that is attempting to emerge into conceptual reality from a more complex biologic reality– listen and observe carefully to all participants, apparent set backs and spontaneous opportunities. Be patient and observant – let the design reveal itself according to its timeline. Only begin articulating the design when you see or experience the patterns of the system underlying the Emergent Design.
• Practice cultivating adaptive methods rather than prescriptive methods. Once the Emergent Design is engaged then it will exert force on the learning system and the constituent elements that brought the system and design into being. To ensure continued health vitality, resilience and deepening wisdom in the system by encouraging adaptation to changing conditions within the system, discourage reliance on highly prescriptive methods that typically introduces excess rigidity into the design. Safety and rigidity are useful only as a catalytic structure for emergence.
• Practice Continuous Improvement – No sacred cows – Be open to questioning the assumptions behind your conceptualization of the Emergent Design.
• Rely heavily on intuition to know when the design is good enough and when it calls for change.
• Engage rational thinking only to get to the next step but not to make critical decisions.
• Encourage nested wisdom feedback loops and cascades.
• Focus on people and their relationships rather than process – cultivate intelligence and wisdom in human ecosystem of the endeavour in order to act with clarity and decisiveness. Product=Process=Producer. Process is the guide. It is the wisdom and quality of relationships that determines the usefulness of what is produced.
• Cultivate mutualistic respectful relationships; however be aware that negative feedback loops and frictional forces are often critical to the health of a system.
• Seek to become aware of and engage wholes and nested networks of relationships rather than causal relationships and linear hierarchies.
• Seek to resolve or at least accept apparent paradoxes in the design. Paradox indicates the boundary of perception and the designer’s cognitive awareness. Paradox only exists as conflict between conceptual and biologic reality. The best conceptual designs will be close mimics of nature.
• Encourage rapid prototyping. Fail successfully and often.
• Seek slow small simple designs over fast, large, complex ones.
• Follow the basic law of emergence – simple principles can lead to the complex beautiful.
• Engage diversity.
• Seek insight and inspiration in the liminal and the perimeter.
• Enjoy the unexpected with out judgment.

Here are some practices to keep in consider if you want to incorporate emergent awareness into your cognitive toolkit:

• Spend time connecting with the growing living things.
• Treat your body and mind well – exercise, breathe with rhythm and deeply.
• Be committed to  your  practice – what ever gets you into the zone or flow – it can be in the art studio, running, meditating, whatever, but make it a priority to move into the place of timeless awareness on a daily basis.
• Be kind to others.
• Be kind to yourself.
• Work diligently.
• Play, Sing and Dance and don’t take yourself or your achievements too seriously.

An Emergent Manifesto of Emergent Design by Pravin Pillay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://emergentdesignsolutions.com/contact/.

If you want to develop a creative team that is going to adapt and really make things happen, then try Seed, Feed, Weed, Lead as an approach.  With Seed, Feed, Weed, Lead, the leader remains accountable for the effectiveness of the team and focuses on cultivating an environment and relationships that enable people to bring their full selves to their work.
The difference between Seed, Feed, Weed, and Lead and the more traditional Command and Control style is the palpable buzz that one feels when one is on a team or in an organization that is really engaging the mind and spirits of all those involved. When I worked with Doctors Without Borders, this is how it felt every day. There were lots of challenges and massive organizational issues, but because everyone was encouraged to bring their full selves to the endeavour, the organization and its teams were quick to adapt and learn. I am convinced that this approach was one of the keys to the organization’s global success.

Seed, Feed, Weed, and Lead is often combined with a Command and Control approach. Each has it merits and its application but Seed, Feed, Weed, Lead provides the connective tissue that can incorporate Command and Control into certain traditional functions, teams or roles while enhancing the organization’s overall ability to adapt and evolve. A design oriented culture encourages rapid prototyping and moves towards a project teams where groups collaborate to solve “wicked” problems.

Trust is key to collaboration.
So here are the basic principles of Seed, Feed, Weed, and Lead.
Seed – Initiate good and healthy relationships
1. Define a clear team mission and goals that flows that is aligned with the organizational mission, values, and goals.
2. Hire and recruit people that are aligned with the team values and mission.
3. Ensure each person on the team understands what enables them as well as other team members to bring their full selves to the job.
4. Define clear roles so that everyone understands how the specific contribution of each team member will affect the outcome of the team
5. Structure your team eco-system to move information effectively and in a timely manner.
6. Create hierarchy only when it is expedient – otherwise keep intelligence distributed.
Feed – Nurture all people and systems that bring vitality and resilience to your team eco-system
1. Cultivate respect and clarity for the team mission and between team members
2. Provide good critical and timely feedback to your team-mates (and actively seek it about yourself as well).
3. Ensure that everyone in the team is communicating well
4. Encourage team members to create agile feedback loops with appropriate stakeholders to ensure to that the team is enabled to adapt as new information becomes available.
Weed – Ensure that the right people are in the right place
1. Dynamically adapt roles and functions within the team to bring out the best outcome.
2. Compassionately exit those who are drawing away energy and focus from the mission or whose primary values do not enhance the drive towards deepening performance and group health
3. Actively balance between divergent and convergent thinking in the group. A healthy group requires enough divergence to bring in creativity into the team process and enough convergence to ensure great outcomes. Too much divergence and the is outcome generally does not meet expectations of team-members or external performance expectations. Too little divergence and the group does not remain vital and adaptive.
4. Be discerning about what you are weeding. Frictional forces in an eco-system can create resilience and deepen the ability of the team to fulfill its mission.
Lead – Focus on Cultivating a Healthy Team Eco-system
1. Define, collaboratively develop and continuously communicate a clear and compelling end result, performance measures and team values.
2. Know the external context and maintain good feedback loops so that the group can adapt as needed to the opportunities and challenges that come up.
3. Engage each team member on what they need in their everyday to draw in their full expertise, creativity, and willingness to the team.
4. Monitor the environment in which the team is operating and provide feedback to the team. The team needs to know how it is performing in relation to the individuals and groups to which it provides value and draws upon for input.
5. Model and encourage good decision making and team values – eg. mean what you say, do what you mean.
6. Invest in developing strong high trust relationships between team members and tune the tream culture towards helping each other toward achieving the team mission.
7. Be prepared to compost. Be open to what needs to be undone in order to bring in freshness or enhanced creativity.
8. Continuously Feed, Seed, Weed and Lead.
Give Seed, Feed, Weed, Lead a consideration if you want to enhance creativity and build a healthy workplace.

It was Monday evening at the beautifully restored Vogue Theatre and Brian Eno, the Wizard – musician,  visual artist, writer, and evangelical atheist, was going to let us peek behind the curtain and perhaps open a door or two.  The audience was packed with artists, critics, musicians, fans and other curious publics who had gathered to experience what was being billed as an Illustrated Talk. Given that  Eno had just opened the installation exhibition of 77 Million Paintings in Calgary’s Glenbow, and that he had been brought to Vancouver by International Art Initiatives and The Vancouver Art Gallery,  the talk  in Vancouver was expected to be centered around the exhibition.  However Eno surprised us all and perhaps himself by deciding  to give another talk a half hour before his time to speak. The former Roxy Music Glam Rock star, clearly at ease with a large audience was about surf on the edge and surrender at least a bit to the creative moment.

What the audience experienced was ecology of the thought that flows through 400 years of western consciousness into Brian Eno’s creativity and interconnects his artistic process with so many contemporary artists, musicians, and political  activists now on the cultural frontier of social innovation. I suppose nothing less was to be expected from an acknowledged cultural icon and visionary. For nearly 40 years, the Wiz has been generating entertaining, engaging, complex, elegant, and compelling creative works across several disciplines that play between the conceptual boundaries and sensibilities of so-called high and pop art.

In a decisively non-technical and unpretentious presentation,  ideas were conveyed with an fittingly awkward flipping of transparencies, quickly drawn sketches and moments of humourous self-depreciation. The Illustrated Talk not only outlined the   pivotal moments in history and creative principles that have generated Eno’s impressive  achievements, it slipped the audience almost imperceptibly into an immersive experience of these same creative principles. At least that’s what my pattern seeking mind was saying to me as it wove together the 2 hours of ideas into a delightful, informative, and insightful experience. The Wiz had proved his point as only an artist-trickster could.

One of the principles that Eno “illustrated” through us and noted in his talk, was how generative art requires the mental patterning processes within our brains to actually complete it. The artist sets up the conditions but the process of pattern seeking within the mind of the viewer completes the work and consequently transforms a passive viewer into an active participant involved in creation of the work.  While the talk seemed simple and easy, given his abilities, somewhere in there I started to feel that The Wiz was contributing a certain vitality to a few simple principles that might have some unexpected and generative implications outside the 2 hours and beyond the walls of the Vogue.

During the journey through the territory of his mind, we touched on three revolutionary ideas or non-intuitive leaps in thinking that fundamentally changed the way we understand ourselves and provided insight into principles that have enabled the generation of much of his creative work including 77 Million Paintings. In doing so, the Wiz made visible that which is so taken for granted in our industrial- technological world view, that we may no longer recognize how our thought, perception, and how we live is shaped.

(Copernicus' vision of the universe in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium)

Revolutionary Idea 1: In the 1543 Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) a model of the solar system displaced the earth and humanity from being the centre of the universe. The implication was like the dawning upon the growing of the awareness of a two year old that our planet might not be the most important thing ever created. Click Here for an on-line artwork that can give you a more sensory experience of this idea and is a personal favorite of both myself and my 5 year old son.

Revolutionary Idea 2: In 1859 with Darwin published the book that became to be known as The Origin of Species. The ideas about evolution began the process of de-throning humanity from being the favorite of a divine creator even on the earth. Recently this process resulted in the the Phylogenetic Tree by Hillis. Eno stated that this image was something worth looking at in detail and downloading. You can get the PDF here and zoom in to truly see that we are one of many riffs on a theme. Simplicity made complex R-US.

(Phylogenetic Tree of Life, Source: David M. Hillis, Derrick Zwickl, and Robin Gutell, University of Texas.)

Revolutionary Idea 3: Cybernetics came into its own during the 1970s with thinkers like Stafford Beer. Cybernetics – or the study of self organizing systems speaks to the ideas of simple set of instructions that through feedback adapt, modify, and replicate themselves in a system. This applies to anything digital, mechanical or biological and for Eno this includes visual and auditory art and apparently Illustrative Talks.

With these three revolutionary ideas, we trace a historical influence to the generative art and ambient music composition of  Eno. However we also get a sense that in his awareness there is no need for a designer of the universe. As Eno put it “Complex things can come from simple things”

The Wiz went on to state “what matters is the picture that you have in your head”.  We act and create upon those pictures in our heads. “Science reveals” what might be and “Art is what it is like when we live as if it is true”. So art enables us to  experience an idea of what might be possible before it actually becomes ubiquitous and disappears into the background of the human social experience.  In our contemporary heads, we might have a picture of a pyramid with a few leaders or divinely inspired creators at the top and the masses at the bottom that follow.

During this talk, I found myself asking what if we lived with the beautiful Phylogenetic tree of David Hillis in our collective heads? I wondered what if we might better appreciate the delicate experiment in humanity that is taking place in this generative biosphere amongst so many millions of other species and on a planet that is very likely one of billions in the universe? I wondered how that  realization would manifest itself in how we organize and govern ourselves and how we would live with each other and the other organisms of this biosphere? What kind of art experiences would allow us to feel what it would be like if we were to live in accord with such a cosmological vision?

Eno in the course of his talk enigmatically spoke of New York as once being  the greatest  of medieval cities, with Rio now holding that space and Vancouver showing signs of emergent possibility. Medieval cities in western culture were hotbeds of cultural activity. Perhaps we denizens of Rain City are close to generating the vital intensity needed for real scenius – the form of distributed genius that arises when a community reaches a certain vital functioning and actually generates the potential for individual genius to occur. What you See is what you Get.  Imagine That.

Julian Assange Captured by World’s Dating Police

“We shall not wilt. Let a thousand flowers bloom.” – Abbey Hoffman

Indeed – the tongue in cheek nature of the of the HuffPo article pokes at what happens to those like Assange in a system that speaks to freedom but infact is a form of acceptable servitude to a dominant group’s way of thinking and being. This attempted simultaneous shut down of Wikileaks, its crowd funding channels, and the attempt to cut out  Assange – the vision keeper – indicates the extent to which the proto-fascist meme has spread and lays just beneath the veneer of the democracy-development myth.

These actions only add power and direction to sea-change that has been on going for a long time. Dec 8 is the anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination.  Coincidence yes. But the reminder that the WikiLeaks issue is an ongoing process that spirals through time repeating itself periodically  and is a way of deepening our cultural awareness and hopefully will result in a wiser way of living and being for  our species.

The spontaneous “flowering” of a thousand Wikileaks mirror sites is a surfacing of the will to freedom” and the resilience and vitality of systemic shift that will not be kept in a box. Wikileaks and the force that brought it into being challenges the democracy-development myth and the “will to power” or to dominate.” The limited Industrial-technological mind that requires the need to control the system seems to be confused and destabilizing as a global awareness that is more vital, resilient, and authentic to the needs of eco-system based on empathy, compassion, and collaboration asserts itself in our human world.

To quote Chomsky “Debate cannot be stifled, and indeed in a properly functioning system of propaganda, it should not be, because it has a system-reinforcing character if constrained within proper bounds. What is essential is to set the bound firmly. Controversy may rage as long as it adheres to the presupposition that define the consensus of elites, and it should furthermore be encouraged within these bounds, thus helping to establishes these doctrines as the very condition of thinkable thought while reinforcing the belief that freedom reigns. In short, what is essential is the power to set the agenda.”