Volume 12, Number 4

Reflections

SoL
15+ Years

The SoL Journal

on Knowledge, Learning, and ChangePart One
Foundational Documents
From Fragmentation to
Integration: Building Learning
Communities
Peter Senge and Daniel H. Kim

Organizational
Transformation from theInside Out: Reinventing
the MIT Center for
Organizational Learning
Jeff Clanon

Scenarios 2000: Four Futures
for Organizing and Leadingin the New Economy
Art Kleiner

The Marblehead Letter
Global SoL Network Stewards

Part Two
Lessons, Failures, Frontiers
30 Years of Building Learning
Communities
A Dialogue with Peter Senge,
Otto Scharmer, and Darcy Winslow

Part Three
Listening to the Field
Voices from the Community

Published by The Society for Organizational Learning
www.solonline.org
ISSN 1524-1734

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Welcome to this special
issue of Reflections. In
2012, the Society for
Organizational Learning celebrated its 15th anniversary. 		
In honor of that milestone, 		
we look at SoL’s journey, fromits roots in a program called
Frank Schneider“Systems Thinking and the
New Management Style” to the formation of the MIT
Organizational Learning Center in the early 1990s to
the foundation of the Society for Organizational Learning in 1997. It is a story told by many of those involvedin the on-the-ground efforts undertaken to establish
and sustain this truly unique organization. The voices
you will hear are just a sampling of the many people who
not only have been and continue to be central to SoL’s
development and evolution but also demonstrate theircommitment to its values and principles in how they
live their lives.

The voices you will hear are just 		a sampling of the many people who
not only have been and continue 		
to be central to SoL’s development
and evolution but also demonstrate
their commitment to its values
and principles in how they live
their lives.
Part One, Foundational Documents, comprises seminal
articles and correspondence from SoL’s early years.
With contributions from academics, consultants, andbusiness leaders, these documents provide a historical,
social, and philosophical context for SoL’s growth as a
global learning network.
In “From Fragmentation to Integration: Building Learning Communities,” Peter Senge and Daniel H. Kim discuss

the widespread failure of organizations to adequately
integrate research, capacity building, and practice. They
make the case that, without this integration or a way
to diffuse knowledge, organizations and communities
can achieve only incremental improvement.
Jeff Clanon’s article, “Organizational Transformationfrom the Inside Out: Reinventing the MIT Center for
Organizational Learning,” recounts the birth of SoL,
when its founders decided to create a freestanding
entity separate from MIT. Jeff’s clarity of thought andinsight into this process are key to understanding SoL
as we know it today. In providing a summary of the lessons learned from the arduous process of self-identity,
this piece also has profound implications for achieving
fundamental change in any modern organization.
The third foundational document that we have chosen
to include, “Scenarios 2000: Four Futures for Organizing
and Leading in the New Economy,” was created by agroup of 20 SoL members and invited guests, which
included religious leaders, Fortune 500 executives,
academics, environmentalists, and community activists.
The intent of the conveners was to introduce new perspectives by creating bold scenarios that could lead to“unexpected insights” for SoL members. The participants
hoped that these insights would have positive impact
on the work that SoL would do in the future. The
scenarios, reprinted in condensed form here, also
raise fundamental issues of human identity.
The “Marblehead Letter, October 2001,” written by agroup of representatives from corporations sponsoring
the development of the Global SoL Network, was anopen invitation to all members of the SoL community
to reflect on major issues shaping the strategic context
for businesses around the world. We have included it
because it was one of SoL’s first efforts to establish avision for the organization in terms of what it could focus
on and the challenges it might be able to address. The
meeting that led to the letter was also a strong exampleof the opportunity to “think together,” an activity thatp u b lish e r ’ s not e

this forward-thinking group believed was essential 		for developing new capacities in an environment 		
of “perpetual doing.”
In Part Two, Lessons, Failures, and Frontiers, Peter Senge,
Otto Scharmer, and Darcy Winslow, representing SoL,
the Presencing Institute, and the Academy for Systemic
Change, reflect on “30 Years of Building Learning Communities.” The purpose of this dialogue was to provide
these thought leaders an opportunity to reflect deeply
about the essential role of networks and communities
of collaboration in addressing systemic global issues.
Taken in its entirety, the dialogue focuses on the importance of shifting from “ego-system” – or individual– awareness to “eco-system” – or collective – awarenessin effecting sustainable change. It is interesting to note
that, throughout the conversation, Peter, Otto, andDarcy refer to SoL’s own capacity to adapt and sustain
as a microcosm of every system’s struggle to do
the same.
SoL would not exist without you, its members. In asmall way, Part Three, Voices from the Community, pays
tribute to your contributions and to your collective andindividual commitment to SoL’s vision and purpose.
Although we would like to have published contributions
from all members, we believe that the pieces we haveincluded represent a broad swath of the diverse communities that make up SoL. We were delighted by
the diversity of perspective and insight we received in
response to the questions provided to help frame thecontributors’ reflections. At the same time, we werestruck by the commonality of purpose and depth ofcommitment to SoL’s vision and principles that these
prompts elicited. As you read this section, it shouldcome as no surprise that members of SoL want nothing less than for the SoL community to be the global
presence that stewards a sustainable and healthy
future for all of humankind.
As you read through this issue, we invite you to reflect
on your own journey over the last years as a leader,

We invite you to reflect on yourown journey over the last years
as a leader, community member,and human being. What’s thestory of your life, what has been
important to you, what have you
aspired to, what roads have you
taken (and which ones haveyou not followed)?
community member, and human being. What’s thestory of your life, what has been important to you, what
have you aspired to, what roads have you taken (andwhich ones have you not followed), and what hasbrought you to Reflections and to the SoL community?
After all, it is the people who engage with one anotherwho make SoL the community it is today: a reflective
global learning community that we all see as a spaceand breeding ground to bring about bright, sustainable, and inspiring futures for ourselves and for theworld. This issue of Reflections invites you to join us 		in writing the next 15 years.
Photographs
Unlike other issues of Reflections, the photographs
here are not necessarily intended to represent or reflect
the content; rather, they are meant to inspire anddelight. For this special issue, Michael Goodman, 		
a founding member of SoL and a charter member 		of the System Dynamics Society, generously granted
us permission to publish selected images from his
expansive collection. We think they are spectacular 		and beautifully complementary, in tone and in spirit,to this special issue. We hope that you will, too. n		Frank Schneider, Publisher

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Part One: Foundational Documents
We have chosen to begin this special issue of Reflections
by reprinting selected foundational documents thatcollectively provide a retrospective on the origins of
the Society for Organizational Learning and on the 		
key phases of its evolutionary journey. Written byacademics, consultants, and business leaders centrally
involved in establishing SoL, these artifacts provide a
historical, social, and philosophical context for appreciating and understanding what it takes to initiate,
invent, commit to, and collaborate in sustaining anorganization of SoL’s breadth of vision and depth ofcommitment to organizational learning and global
systemic change.

From Fragmentation to Integration:
Building Learning Communities
Peter Senge and Daniel H. Kim
At the time that this article appeared in The Systems
Thinker in 1997, a small group of researchers, consultants, and corporate executives was working to create
the Society for Organizational Learning as an independent
entity. We have included this piece because it addresses
one of the key issues that prompted that original group
to initiate the undertaking: the fragmentation that waspreventing MIT’s Center for Organizational Learningfrom achieving its core purpose of advancing organizational learning. The OLC’s struggle to overcome thatfragmentation represents a microcosm of the widespread
institutional failure that Senge and Kim address in thisarticle. For them, organizational learning requires acommitment to integrating research, capacity building,and practice. It also relies on a community dedicatedto diffusion rather than isolation of knowledge. Absent
these elements, they argue, the most an organization
can achieve is incremental improvement in whichlearning cannot be maximized or sustained.

Organizational Transformation fromthe Inside Out: Reinventing the MIT Center
for Organizational Learning
Jeff Clanon
This 1999 article traces the two-year change process(from 1995 to 1997) undertaken at the MIT Center for
Organizational Learning, the result of which was a
newly formed, self-governed, non-profit membershiporganization known today as the Society for Organizational Learning. Jeff Clanon, former director of Partnership Development for SoL, describes the context andreasons for the process, the conceptual models thatguided it, and the results. For Jeff, working on theredesign and eventual reinvention of the Center was
an opportunity to experience first-hand the inherent
challenges of a transformative change effort. We
have included this piece as a foundational document
because not only does it tell the story of the birth of
SoL and lessons learned from the arduous process, but
it also has implications for any modern organization
seeking to achieve fundamental change.

Scenarios 2000: Four Futures for 		
Organizing and Leading in the New Economy
Art Kleiner
In 2000, a group of 20 individuals – members of SoL aswell as non-members including religious leaders, Fortune
500 executives, academics, environmentalists, community activists, and others – convened for the purpose ofbringing to SoL members new perspectives that could
lead to “unexpected insights” which in turn could influenceboth individual and collective thinking and ultimately
the future of SoL’s work around the globe. The resulting
scenarios describe four distinct future worlds in which
technology, corporations, multi-cultural reformation,
and world decay prevail. We have included a condensed
version of the original scenarios. Although some of the
projections haven’t come to pass, when reflected uponcollectively, these scenarios raise fundamental issues
about human identity and the role of community in oure x e c u tiv e dig e ste x e c u tiv e dig e st 1 2 . 4

collective future. We have also included a retrospective
Commentary by Adam Kahane, who helped to facilitate
the original process.

The Marblehead Letter
Global SoL Network Stewards
This letter, written in 2001 by representatives from
corporations who sponsored the development of the
Global SoL Network, served as an invitation to the SoL
community to participate in reflecting on the major
issues shaping the strategic context for all companies.
By organizing an international conversation, known as
the SoL Leadership Dialogues, these stewards of the
Global SoL Network provided a kind of holding environment in which leaders from around the world had therare opportunity to genuinely “think together.” They
believed that sustaining the opportunity for reflection
in an environment of perpetual doing was essential todeveloping new capacities for shared understanding
and coordinated action in the face of increasingly
complex issues that challenged them individually 		and collectively.

Part Two: Lessons, Failures, Frontiers
30 Years of Building Learning Communities
A Dialogue with Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer,
and Darcy Winslow
Although the Society for Organizational Learning 		was founded 15+ years ago, its roots go back almost
30 years. In this conversation, Peter Senge, Otto
Scharmer, and Darcy Winslow look back at SoL’s earliest
form as a single program (“Systems Thinking and the
New Management Style”) and its evolution to its current
state. In addition, they reflect on the role of individuals
in systemic change, the ways in which we can leverage
our impact as individuals and communities, and theessential role of cooperation and collaboration insustainable organizational and global change. They
consider what it takes to shift from “ego-systemawareness” to “eco-system awareness,” a shift theyagree is fundamental to effecting sustainable change.
Throughout the conversation, references to SoL’s own
capacity for development, and the evolution of related
networks like the Presencing Institute, serve as a 		microcosm of every system’s struggle to adapt and 		
sustain itself.

Part Three: Listening to the Field
Voices from the Community
In October 2012, we sent a set of questions to members
representing SoL’s diverse constituencies. The intent
was to give respondents the opportunity not only toshare but also to celebrate the benefits and achievements they have enjoyed as members of this extraordinary organization. Our hope was that their responses
would provide a rich array of stories and experiences
demonstrating SoL’s value. They did not disappoint. We
were delighted, but not surprised, to learn first-hand of
the commonality of purpose and depth of commitment
to SoL’s vision and principles that characterized each
response. Perhaps most heartening and uplifting werepeople’s responses to the question, “What are yourhighest aspirations for SoL?” SoL members, it seems,
want nothing less than for its organization to be theglobal presence that stewards a sustainable andhealthy future for all of humankind.

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Chronology of Growth
1978	Robert Fritz, Charles Kiefer, and Peter Senge create “Leadership and Mastery,” 		
a three-day executive education seminar that integrates the concepts and disciplinesof vision, purpose, alignment, and systems thinking.
1984 Peter Senge convenes a semi-annual forum at MIT for CEO-level dialogue entitled“Systems Thinking and the New Management Style.”
1987 “Systems Thinking and Organizational Learning” project is founded at MIT.
1988	Early experiments with learning laboratories are begun.
1989 A two-day meeting of the CEO group from the semi-annual forum meets with Bill Isaacs,
Daniel Kim, and Peter Senge to discuss the creation of a larger learning alliance. Seeds
for the MIT Organizational Learning Center (OLC) are planted.
1990 The Fifth Discipline is published. Corporate members decide to launch OLC as aninterdisciplinary research center to be housed at MIT’s Sloan School.
1991 Interest in The Fifth Discipline grows. Companies join OLC as corporate partners andenlarge the collaborative consortium. Projects called “learning labs” are developed atHarley-Davidson, Ford, and Federal Express. OLC Core Competency Courses begin.
The OLC grows and has 19 sponsoring corporate partners.
1994 A review of OLC is commissioned by the MIT Sloan School.
1995 OLC commits itself to a redesign as a networked alliance.
1997 The Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) incorporated as a not-for-profit andrelocates. SoL is to be governed by a council representing its three primary member
constituencies: organizations, consultants, researchers. The first SoL annual meetingis held and first governing council is elected.
From the learning history of the Society for Organizational Learning by Hilary Bradbury

Pa r t O n eFoundational Documents
We have chosen to begin this special issue of Reflections byreprinting selected foundational documents that collectively provide
a retrospective on the origins of the Society for Organizational Learningand on the key phases of its evolutionary journey. Written by academics,
consultants, and business leaders centrally involved in establishing SoL,
these artifacts provide a historical, social, and philosophical context
for appreciating and understanding what it takes to initiate, invent,commit to, and collaborate in sustaining an organization of SoL’s
breadth of vision and depth of commitment to organizational
learning and global systemic change.

f e at u r e | S e ng e and K i m

f e at u r e 1 2 . 4

From Fragmentation to Integration:
Building Learning Communities
P e t e r S e ng e and D ani e l H . K i m

At the time that this article appeared in The Systems Thinker in 1997, a small group of researchers,
consultants, and corporate executives was working to create the Society for Organizational Learning as anindependent entity. We have included this piece because it addresses one of the key issues that promptedthat original group to initiate the undertaking: the fragmentation that was preventing MIT’s Center for
Organizational Learning from achieving its core purpose of advancing organizational learning. The OLC’s
struggle to overcome that fragmentation represents a microcosm of the widespread institutional failurethat Senge and Kim address in this article. For them, organizational learning requires a commitment tointegrating research, capacity building, and practice. It also relies on a community dedicated to diffusion
rather than isolation of knowledge. Absent these elements, they argue, the most an organization canachieve is incremental improvement in which learning cannot be maximized or sustained.

Peter Senge

Daniel H. Kim“We live in an era of massive institutional failure,” says Dee Hock, founderand CEO emeritus of Visa International. We need only look around us to see
evidence to support Dee’s statement. Corporations, for example, are spending
millions of dollars to teach high-school graduates in their workforces to read,
write, and perform basic arithmetic. Our healthcare system is in a state of acutecrisis. The U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other industrialized country,
and yet the health of our citizens is the worst among those same nations. Our
educational system is increasingly coming under fire for not preparing ourchildren adequately to meet the demands of the future. Our universities arelosing credibility. Our religious institutions are struggling to maintain relevancein people’s lives. Our government is increasingly dysfunctional, caught in a
vicious cycle of growing special interest groups, distrust, and corruption. The
corporation may be the healthiest institution in the U.S. today, which isn’t
saying much.
One of the reasons for this widespread institutional failure is that the knowledgecreating system, the method by which human beings collectively learn andby which society’s institutions improve and revitalize themselves, is deeply
fragmented. This fragmentation has developed so gradually that few of us havenoticed it; we take the disconnections between the branches of knowledge
and between knowledge and practice as a given.

This article was originally published in The Systems Thinker® Volume 8, Number 4, May 1997.

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One of the reasons forwidespread institutional failureis that the knowledge-creating
system, the method by whichhuman beings collectively
learn and by which society’s
institutions improve andrevitalize themselves, isdeeply fragmented.

A Knowledge-Creating System
Before we can address the issue of fragmentation, we need to establish what has been fragmented. In other words, what do we mean bya knowledge-creating system, and what doesit mean to say it is fragmented?
We believe that human communities havealways attempted to organize themselves tomaximize the production, transmittal, andapplication of knowledge. In these activities,
different individuals fulfill different roles, withvarying degrees of success. For example, in

Fig u r e 1 The Cycle of Knowledge Creation

Methods and Tools

Practical Knowledge

TheoryLike theories, the tree’s roots are invisible, and yet the health of the root system determines
the health of the tree. The branches are the methods and tools, which enable translation 		of theories into new capabilities and practical results. The fruit is that practical knowledge.
The tree as a whole is a system.

f e at u r e | S e ng e and K i m

indigenous cultures, elders articulate timelessprinciples grounded in their experience to guidetheir tribes’ future actions. “Doers,” whether warriors, growers, hunters, or nannies, try to learn
how to do things better than before and continually improve their craft. And coaches and teachers
help people develop their capacities to both
perform their roles and grow as human beings.
These three activities – which we can term theorybuilding, practice, and capacity-building – areintertwined and woven into the fabric of the community in a seamless process that restores andadvances the knowledge of the tribe. One could
argue that this interdependent knowledgecreating system is the only way that human beings collectively learn, generate new knowledge,
and change their world.
We can view this system for producing knowledge
as a cycle. People apply available knowledge toaccomplish their goals. This practical applicationin turn provides experiential data from which newtheories can be formulated to guide future action.
New theories and principles then lead to new
methods and tools that translate theory into
practical know-how, the pursuit of new goals,
and new experience – and the cycle continues.
Imagine that this cycle of knowledge creation isa tree (Figure 1). The tree’s roots are the theories.
Like theories, the roots are invisible to most of theworld, and yet the health of the root system to alarge extent determines the health of the tree. The
branches are the methods and tools, which enabletranslation of theories into new capabilities andpractical results. The fruit is that practical knowledge. In a way, the whole system seems designed
to produce the fruit. But, if you harvest and eat all
the fruit from the tree, eventually there will be no
more trees. So, some of the fruit must be used toprovide the seeds for more trees. The tree as awhole is a system.
The tree is a wonderful metaphor, because it
functions through a profound, amazing transformational process called photosynthesis. The roots
absorb nutrients from the soil. Eventually, thenutrients flow through the trunk and into thebranches and leaves. In the leaves, the nutrients
interact with sunlight to create complex carbohydrates, which serve as the basis for development of the fruit.
So, what are the metaphorical equivalents thatallow us to create fruits of practical knowledge inour organizations? We can view research activities
as expanding the root system to build better andricher theories. Capacity-building activities extend
the branches by translating the theories into usable
methods and tools. The use of these methods andtools enhances people’s capabilities. The art ofpractice in a particular line of work transforms thetheories, methods, and tools into usable knowledge as people apply their capabilities to practicaltasks, much as the process of photosynthesis converts the nutrients into leaves, flowers, and fruit.
In our society,• Research represents any disciplined approachto discovery and understanding with a commitment to share what’s being learned. We’re notreferring to white-coated scientists performing
laboratory experiments; we mean research inthe same way that a child asks, “What’s goingon here?” By pursuing such questions, research– whether performed by academics or5

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Fig u r e 2

The Stocks and Flows of Knowledge Creation
Methods& Toolss
CapacityBuilding

Practical
Knowledges

R

Practice

TheoriessResearchResearch activities build better and richer theories.
Capacity-building functions translate the theories
into usable methods and tools. The use of thesemethods and tools enhances people’s capabilities.
The art of practice transforms the theories,
methods, and tools into practical knowledge.

thoughtful managers or consultants reflecting
on their experiences – continually generates
new theories about how our world works.
• Practice is anything that a group of people
does to produce a result. It’s the application ofenergy, tools, and effort to achieve somethingpractical. An example is a product development
team that wants to build a better product more
quickly at a lower cost. By directly applying theavailable theory, tools, and methods in ourwork, we generate practical knowledge.
• Capacity-building links research and practice.
It is equally committed to discovery and understanding and to practical know-how and results.
Every learning community includes coaches,
mentors, and teachers – people who help
others build skills and capabilities throughdeveloping new methods and tools that
help make theories practical.
“The Stocks and Flows of Knowledge Creation”(Figure 2) shows how the various elements arelinked together in a knowledge-creating system.

Fig u r e 3

The Fragmentation of Institutions

Institutionalized Fragmentation
Consulting

Services

Graduates$

Corporation

University$
Graduates

Because research, practice, and capacity-building
each operate within the walls of separate institutions,the people within these institutions feel cut off fromeach other, leading to suspicion, stereotyping, andan “us” versus “them” mindset.

If knowledge is best created by this type of integrated system, how did our current systems andinstitutions become so fragmented? To answer
that question, we need to look at how research,
practice, and capacity-building are institutionalized in our culture. (See “The Fragmentationof Institutions,” Figure 3.)
For example, what institution do we most associate with research? Universities. What does
the world of practice encompass? Corporations,schools, hospitals, and nonprofits. And what
institution do we most associate with capacitybuilding – people helping people in the practicalworld? Consulting, or the HR function within an
organization. Each of these institutions has madethat particular activity its defining core. And,because research, practice, and capacity-building
each operate within the walls of separate institutions, it is easy for the people within these institutions to feel cut off from each other, leading
to suspicion, stereotyping, and an “us” versus“them” mindset.

f e at u r e | S e ng e and K i m

This isolation leads to severe communication
breakdown. For example, many people haveargued that the academic community has evolved
into a private club. Nobody understands what’s
going on but the club members. They talk in waysthat only members can understand. And themembers only let in others like themselves.
Consulting institutions have also undermined theknowledge-creating process, by making knowledge proprietary, and by not sharing what they’ve
learned. Many senior consultants have an incredible amount of knowledge about organizationalchange, yet they have almost no incentive toshare it, except at market prices.
Finally, corporations have contributed to the fragmentation by their bottom-line orientation, whichplaces the greatest value on those things that
produce immediate, practical results. They havelittle patience for investing in research that may
have payoffs over the long term or where payoffs
cannot be specifically quantified.

Technical Rationality:
One Root of Fragmentation
How did we reach this state of fragmentation?
Over hundreds of years, we have developed a

Because research, practice, andcapacity-building each operate
within the walls of separate
institutions, it is easy for thepeople within these institutions
to feel cut off from each other.
notion that knowledge is the province of theexpert, the researcher, the academic. Often, thevery term science is used to connote this kind ofknowledge, as if the words that come out of themouths of scientists are somehow inherently
more truthful than everyone else’s words.
Donald Schön has called this concept of knowledge “technical rationality.” First you develop thetheory, then you apply it. Or, first the experts comein and figure out what’s wrong, and then you use
their advice to fix the problem. Of course, although
the advice may be brilliant, sometimes we just
can’t figure out how to implement it.
But maybe the problem isn’t in the advice. Maybe
it’s in the basic assumption that this method is
how learning or knowledge creation actually7

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The Center for Organizational Learning (OLC)
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
has gone through a transformational process
to enhance knowledge-creation that may
serve as a model for other organizations.

from the organization’s growth. But throughout the whole redesign process, what struck
us most was that the OLC’s most significant
accomplishment was actually the creation 		of the OLC community itself.

The OLC was founded in 1991 with a missionof fostering collaboration among a group of
corporations committed to leading fundamental organizational change and advancing
the state-of-the-art in building learning organizations. By 1995, the consortium included
19 corporate partners. Many of these partners
teamed with researchers at MIT to undertake experiments within their organizations.
Numerous learning initiatives were also “selfgenerating” within the member corporations.

In April 1997, the OLC became the Society
for Organizational Learning (SoL), a nonprofit,
member-governed organization. SoL is designed to bring together corporate members,
research members, and consultant members
in an effort to invigorate and integrate theknowledge-creating process. The organization is self-governing, led by a council electedby the members – a radical form of governance for a nonprofit organization. In addition, SoL is a “fractal organization”; that is,
the original SoL will eventually be part of 		a global network of “SoL-like” consortia.

Over time, we came to understand that thegoals and activities of such a diverse learning
community do not fit into any existing organizational structure, including a traditional
academic research center. We also recognized
the need to develop a body of theory andmodels for organizing for learning, to complement the existing theories and methods
for developing new learning capabilities.
So, over the past two years, a design teamdrawn from the OLC corporate partners andMIT, and including several senior consultants,
engaged in a process of rethinking our purpose and structure. Dee Hock has served
as our guide in this process. Many of these
new thoughts about building a knowledgecreating community emerged from this rethinking. At one level, this process was driven
by the same kind of practical, pressing
problems that drive corporations to makechanges; many of these challenges stemmed

SoL will undertake four major sets ofactivities:• Community-building activities to develop and integrate the organization’s
three membership groups and facilitatecross-community learning;• Capacity-building functions to develop
new individual and collective skills;• Research initiatives to serve the wholecommunity by setting and coordinating 		
a focused research agenda; and• Governance processes to support thecommunity in all its efforts.
SoL is a grand experiment to put into practice the concept of learning communities
outlined in this article. We all hope to learn 		
a great deal from this process and to sharethose learnings as widely as possible.

f e at u r e | S e ng e and K i mworks. Maybe the problem is really in this very wayof thinking: that first you must get “the answer,”then you must apply it.

• How do they sustain themselves and grow?
• What forces can destroy them, undermine
them, or cause them to wither?

The implicit notion of technical rationality often
leads to conflict between executives and the frontline people in organizations. Executives often
operate by the notion of technical rationality: In
Western culture, being a boss means having all
the answers. However, front-line people knowmuch more than they can ever say about theirjobs and about the organization. They actually
have the capability to do something, not just talkabout something. Technical rationality is great
if all you ever have to do is talk.

Clearly, we need a theory, method, and set oftools for organizing the learning efforts of groupsof people.

Organizing for Learning
If we let go of this notion of technical rationality,
we can then start asking more valuable questions,such as:• How does real learning occur?
• How do new capabilities develop?
• How do learning communities that interconnect theory and practice, concept andcapability come into being?

Real learning is often far more complex – andmore interesting – than the theory of technicalrationality suggests. We often develop significant
new capabilities with only an incomplete ideaof how we do what we do. As in skiing or learning
to ride a bicycle, we “do it” before we really understand the actual concept. Similarly, practical knowhow often precedes new principles and general
methods in organizational learning. Yet, thispattern of learning can also be problematic.
For example, teams within a large institution
can produce significant innovations, but this new
knowledge often fails to spread. Modest improvements may spread quickly, but real breakthroughs
are difficult to diffuse. Brilliant innovations won’t
spread if there is no way for them to spread; in

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We believe that the absence ofeffective learning communities
limits our ability to learn from eachother, from what goes on within
the organization, and from ourmost clearly demonstrated
breakthroughs.
other words, if there is no way for an organization
to extract the general lessons from such innovations and develop new methods and tools forsharing those lessons. The problem is that wide
diffusion of learning requires the same commitment to research and capacity-building as it does
to practical results. Yet few businesses foster suchcommitment. Put differently, organizational learning requires a community that enhances research,capacity-building, and practice. (See “Society for
Organizational Learning” box, page 8.)

Learning Communities
We believe that the absence of effective learning
communities limits our ability to learn from eachother, from what goes on within the organization,and from our most clearly demonstrated breakthroughs. Imagine a learning community as agroup of people that bridges the worlds of research, practice, and capacity-building to produce
the kind of knowledge that has the power totransform the way we operate, not merely makeincremental improvements. If we are interested ininnovation and in the vitality of large institutions,then we are interested in creating learning 		communities that integrate knowledge insteadof fragment it.
In a learning community, people view each of thethree functions – research, capacity-building,practice – as vital to the whole. (See “A Learning
Community,” Figure 4.) Practice is crucial because
it produces tangible results that show that thecommunity has learned something. Capacity-

f e at u r e | S e ng e and K i m

ing changes. Traditionally, such a team would
be primarily interested in improving the resultson their own projects. Team members probably
wouldn’t pay as much attention to deepening
their understanding of why a new approach works
better, or to creating new methods and tools forothers to use. Nor would they necessarily attempt
to share their learnings as widely as possible –they might well see disseminating the information as someone else’s responsibility.

Fig u r e 4

A Learning Community
CapacityBuilding

Research

Practice

In a learning community, people view each of
the three functions – research, capacity-building,practice – as vital to the whole.

building is important because it makes improvement possible. Research is also key because it provides a way to share learning with people in otherparts of the organization and with future generations within the organization. In a learning community, people assume responsibility for theknowledge-creating process.

Learning Communities in Action
To commit to this knowledge-creating process, wemust first understand what a learning community
looks like in action in our organizations. Imagine
a typical change initiative in an organization; forexample, a product development team trying a
new approach to the way they handle engineer-

In a learning community, however, from the outset, the team conceives of the initiative as a way
to maximize learning for itself as well as for otherteams in the organization. Those involved in the
research process are integral members of theteam, not outsiders who poke at the system froma disconnected and fragmented perspective. The
knowledge-creating process functions in real timewithin the organization, in a seamless cycle ofpractice, research, and capacity-building.
Imagine if this were the way in which we approached learning and change in all of our major
institutions. What impact might this approach
have on the health of any of our institutions, andon society as a whole? Given the problems we facewithin our organizations and within the larger culture, do we have any choice but to seek new ways
to work together to face the challenges of the
future? We believe the time has come for us tobegin the journey back from fragmentation towholeness and integration. The time has comefor true learning communities to emerge. n

a b o u t th e a u tho r sPeter M. Senge is the author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization,
co-author of The Necessary Revolution and Presence, and founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning.
Daniel H. Kim is co-founder of Pegasus Communications, founding publisher of The Systems Thinker
newsletter, and a consultant, facilitator, teacher, and public speaker committed to helping problemsolving organizations transform into learning organizations.
Editorial support for this article was provided by Janice Molloy and Lauren Johnson.

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f e at u r e 1 2 . 4

Organizational Transformationfrom the Inside Out:
Reinventing the MIT Center for
Organizational Learning
J e f f C lanon
This 1999 article traces the two-year change process (from 1995 to 1997) undertaken at the MIT Center
for Organizational Learning, the result of which was a newly formed, self-governed, non-profit membership organization known today as the Society for Organizational Learning. Jeff Clanon, former director ofPartnership Development for SoL, describes the context and reasons for the process, the conceptual models
that guided it, and the results. For Jeff, working on the redesign and eventual reinvention of the Center was
an opportunity to experience first-hand the inherent challenges of a transformative change effort. We haveincluded this piece as a foundational document because not only does it tell the story of the birth of SoL
and lessons learned from the arduous process, but it also has implications for any modern organization
seeking to achieve fundamental change.

No management issue has generated more attention and experimentation
over the past two decades than how organizations can successfully initiate andsustain change. Yet the process of actually transforming an organization – thatis, changing not only the organization’s structure and practices, but also thethinking and the quality of interaction among the people who comprise it –is still not widely understood, and, in fact, remains a relatively rare occurrence.
Many organizations are engaged in efforts to improve performance by some
Jeff Clanon
combination of accelerating innovation, operating more efficiently, containing
costs, becoming more agile, focusing on the customer, and improving employee morale. Despite all thiseffort, as VISA co-founder Dee Hock points out, we
still have an epidemic of institutions that are unableNot unlike many otherto achieve their purpose: schools that cannot teach,organizations, the MIT Center
unhealthy healthcare systems, welfare systems inwhich few fare well, communities that can’t commufor Organizational Learning
nicate, corporations that cannot cooperate or comwas ill prepared for its success.
pete, and governments that cannot govern.1

Originally published in The Learning Organization, Volume 6, Number 4. 1999, pp. 147–156.
© Emerald Group Publishing. Reprinted with permission.

f e at u r e | C lanon

My own early experience with organizationalchange is perhaps not atypical. Working for alarge, high-tech corporation, I participated in adozen or so change efforts over a 15-year period.
My sense was that all that really changed was theorganization’s formal structure and the span ofcontrol of a few managers. More fundamental issues, such as the desired increase in business performance, the quality of daily interactions, andhow people felt about working for the company,
remained remarkably unchanged. In fact, employee morale usually decreased following eacheffort. The joke became, “If you don’t know what
to do – reorganize!”
As a result of these experiences, I became increasingly skeptical about whether “transformation” inan organizational context was even possible. Paradoxically, they also generated in me a deep desire
to understand how meaningful and sustainablechange can occur in organizational settings, andwhy it is so difficult to achieve.
Work conducted over the past eight years at the
MIT Center for Organizational Learning (now theSociety for Organizational Learning), where organizational learning and change are the focus ofresearch, has shed new light on these questions.
Beginning in 1991,16 projects have been launched
to understand the impact of organizational learn-

ing concepts, methods, and tools on change initiatives in business settings. Most have resulted insignificant – and in some instances, fundamental– change. They have proved that change is indeed
possible! However, it has been the work on theredesign and eventual reinvention of the Center
itself that provided for me both the inherent challenges and an experiential understanding of aprocess that produced transformative results.
What follows is the story of the change process
at the MIT Center for Organizational Learning,
including the context for the process, why it wasundertaken, the key conceptual models thatguided it, the results, the lessons learned, and theimplications for achieving fundamental change inother organizations.2 I focus on this particular example in the hope that it will serve to illuminate
some of the key issues that must be addressedand capabilities we will need to develop if we areto succeed in building organizations that are truly
worthy of our commitment.

The Context for the Process
In 1991, the Center for Organizational Learning
was founded as a sponsored research center at
the MIT Sloan School of Management by a groupof colleagues including Peter Senge, Daniel Kim,
Janet Gould, and Bill Isaacs. The Center wasorganized as a collaboration of corporations,

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working in partnership with MIT researchers, toundertake serious experiments in the area of organizational learning and to advance the state of theart of building learning organizations. The 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, and applying these skills
in practical business settings.
With the publication of Peter Senge’s book The
Fifth Discipline in 1990 and the increasing interestin organizational learning, the Center’s consortiumgrew rapidly. By 1995, it included 19 corporate
partners.3 These companies undertook a variety ofsignificant organizational experiments, including:building learning capabilities in intact teams, developing new organizational learning infrastructures,transforming the assumptions and practice ofexecutive leadership, and developing internallearning communities. For example, in 1992, Ford’s
Electrical and Fuel Handling Division (EFHD), a
7,000-person profit center, was losing money andwas in danger of being sold off. By 1996, it had
more than doubled its revenue and was meetingits profit objectives. According to vice president
Bob Womac, “we found that taking dialogue,systems thinking and personal vision from the
management team to the front line workers

transformed the way the organization worked”(Senge, 1997, p. 3).
Similarly, at Harley Davidson, a group focusedon transforming their new product development
process had significant impact. According to Rich
Teerlink, who was CEO at the time, “the company
was saved from the brink of bankruptcy in the
mid-1980s by the heroic effort of more than two
thousand people, but it also created a legacy ofreactive crisis management that threatened thefuture. Our organizational learning work has
established a new language of basic concepts andis gradually building a base of new skills leading
to a second ‘turn around’ – from crisis managers
to continual learners” (Senge, 1997, p. 3).
By the mid-1990s, companies such as Ford andHarley had been involved in learning initiatives
long enough to assess the business results anddocument longer-term effects. Articles were being
published about the work of the Center, withthe result that the Center was gaining increasing
attention. The Fifth Discipline was still sellingover 100,000 copies a year, and it, along with The
Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, published in 1994, wasgenerating and renewing interest in the field
all over the world.

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Not unlike many other organizations, the MIT
Center for Organizational Learning was ill prepared for its success. We were under increasingpressure to respond to demands from sponsor
companies as well as individuals around theworld who were interested in becoming involvedin the work.
At the same time, there was, in effect, a hiring
freeze at MIT that constrained our capacity. The
stage was set for what we were to describe lateras simply “the mess.”

Why the Redesign Was Undertaken
By early 1995, having experimented unsuccessfully with several different leadership structuresand low-impact attempts to reorganize the administrative configuration of the Center, it seemed
clear that the organizational structure was bothinadequate and ill suited to supporting thetheories and methods it was espousing.
In addition, the goals and activities of what was
becoming an ever expanding, diverse learning
community no longer seemed to fit neatly within
the expectations and constraints of an MIT-		
sponsored research center. Although the “official”
structure of the Learning Center was essentiallythe same as other sponsored research centers
at MIT, the Learning Center had, in operation,
become a network of individuals: representatives
from 19 companies, research and administrative
staff, several MIT faculty, a few doctoral students,
and a handful of independent consultants involved
in research projects and educational offerings. We
had, in fact, outgrown the bounds of a traditional
MIT research center.
There was also a sense that the gap between
what we were espousing at the Center and what
we were actually practicing was widening. Morale
was on a downward spiral. This complex set ofcircumstances led us to the conclusion that theCenter was not sustainable, at least in its current
organizational form, and that if we didn’t makesome fundamental changes it would probablycease to exist.

15

Fig u r e 1 Idealized Design Process

My
MOST desired state
currently

Idealized Design
What am I going to do?
The future I would
like to be in now

Realization

The
undesirable stateof my current future

Formulationof the Mess

• Objectives• Goals• Implementation
Plans

The future I am in now

As a result, the major stakeholders of the Center,
including representatives from the research andadministrative staff, several faculty from MIT,senior managers from companies that had been
central to the Center’s development, and several
consultants who had been involved in project
initiatives, decided to embark on an extended
process of reflection and inquiry into the Center’s
purpose, design, structure, and operation.

The Process: Guiding Conceptual Models
Idealized Design
At our first two-day redesign meeting, held in
June of 1995, we gathered together representatives
from all of the major stakeholders of the Learning
Center – a significant accomplishment in itself –and gained a commitment to move forward. We
also agreed that it would be helpful to have aconceptual model that would help focus, clarify,
and guide our efforts.
The first phase of our redesign was influenced
by the work of Russell Ackoff, a noted researcher
and consultant in the area of systems theory andapplication. Vic Leo, a long-time Center representative from Ford’s Executive Development Center,suggested we use Ackoff’s Idealized Design Process
as a way to frame our thinking and focus our efforts.

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Even as we were teaching learning
disciplines that inherently involve
distributing power among participants in organizations, we werepart of a very stratified organizational culture that rewarded
individual achievement.
Ackoff’s model involves creating an “idealized design” concurrently with a formulation of the “mess,”or current situation (Figure 1). This was consistent
with the Learning Center’s work in the area of
shared vision and the principle of creative tension,
which involves determining what you care mostdeeply about creating and at the same time looking truthfully at the reality of where you currently
are. The gap between the two generates tension
and the energy for moving toward the new reality.
One of the decisions made at the end of the first
redesign meeting was to have a small group of
volunteers begin to synthesize and summarize
the thinking regarding the Center’s current reality.
Based on Ackoff’s terminology, a “mess” team wasmobilized, consisting of both research and administrative staff, a former company CEO, and two

company representatives. They focused theirwork on four basic questions:
1. What exactly was the mess?
2. How did it develop?
3. What were the underlying causes andhow were they interrelated?
4. What would happen if no significant
changes were made to the system?
In September, the mess team reported back to
the larger design team on their progress. They had
grouped the current problems at the Center into
13 areas, containing both quantitative and qualitative aspects. These included issues of unmet
demands, bureaucratic constraints, unclear
boundaries, operational and financial concerns,
a confused sense of identity, no widely held
shared sense of purpose, and a lack of alignment
around the values held at the Center. One aspectof the discrepancy between the espoused andpracticed values at the Center was reflected in
how the Center operated and the centralizationof power and decision making. Even as we wereteaching learning disciplines that inherently
involve distributing power among participantsin organizations, we were part of a very stratified
organizational culture that rewarded individual
achievement.

f e at u r e | C lanon

In addition, the director of the organization was
not only its hierarchical head, but also the person
who literally wrote the book on the subject matter.
Because of his central role in both the theoreticalunderpinnings of the field and operational aspectsof the Center, he was the only person who had
direct interface with all the constituency groups
and was involved in all major decisions. Thissituation was dysfunctional for him as well as
the Center.
Based on a systems analysis of the situation,
the team developed three recommendations
for dealing with the “mess” at the Center:
1. Develop a clear, consistent, common senseof purpose and identity to guide us.
2. Align our espoused and practiced values.
3. Create infrastructures that support andreflect our operating principles.
A number of us had a sense that in order to addressthese issues, and create a Center that would actually facilitate learning (rather than control), we
needed a new way of organizing, some new formor model. Yet we were aware of few options, andmost of us had no experience working in anythingother than traditional, hierarchical organizations.
To help in this process, we were privileged to haveas our guide Dee Hock, founder and CEO Emeritus
of VISA International.

Chaordic Design
In retrospect, it isn’t surprising that Dee has had
such a profound effect on our thinking and process at the Learning Center. At the time, however,it seemed more like a lucky accident. Peter Senge
had recently met Dee at a leadership conference
and was intrigued by his thinking on new waysof organizing, based on chaordic principles.4 Deebrought to the design process his experience as
co-creator and CEO Emeritus of VISA International.
VISA is a highly decentralized, collaborative organization that was developed through the sameconsensus-building process he was suggesting for
us. Over the span of two decades, VISA grew froma few hundred members to the largest enterprisein the world in terms of market capitalization. It is

Fig u r e 2 Cycles of the Chaordic Design Process

PurposePractice

Principles

PeopleConcept
Structurea structured blend of competition and cooperation, linking together 20,000 financial institutions,
14 million merchants, and 600 million consumers
in 220 countries and territories producing $1.25
trillion in volume annually.
Given our struggle with how to clarify the Center’s
identity, align our values and practices, and structure our organization in a way that could promote
the globalization of the community, Dee’s focus
and process seemed intuitively to fit. Also, Dee’s
ideas for implementing and disseminating newconcepts of organization that more equitably distribute power and wealth, release human ingenuity, and are more compatible with the biosphere
were in themselves very compelling. After a small
subset of the design team met with Dee to discuss
his ideas, the design team asked him to join us at
the next redesign meeting.5
At that meeting, Dee shared with us what hecalled the cycles of a Chaordic Design Process(Figure 2). He described the six stages as follows:
1. Define with absolute clarity, common understanding, and deep conviction the purposeof the community.
2. Define, with the same clarity, a body of principles against which all structure, decisions,and conduct will be judged; the fundamental constraints that will guide people intheir pursuit of purpose.
3. Create a concept of organization that is inaccordance with the principles, and is just,equitable, and effective with respect to all
discussion, decisions, and acts in pursuitof the community’s purpose.

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4. Operationalize the purpose, principles, andconcept of organization (steps 1 to 3) bydeveloping a new charter, constitution, or
bylaws in which all three aspects are embedded as a fundamental obligation of
governance.
5. Identify and draw together the people andinstitutions necessary to achieve the community’s purpose in accordance with its
principle. (This was subsequently moved
to step three in the process.)
6. Identify and engage in the initial practices
required to realize the purpose.

Coming to consensus aroundthe most fundamental issues of
purpose (why the Center exists)and principles (how we intended
to work together to accomplish
our purpose) required long hours
of deeply reflective conversation.
Beginning in September of 1995, we began theformal redesign of the Learning Center, following
Dee’s six-step process as described above. At theoutset, Dee made two predictions. The first wasthat it would take us between one and two years
to complete the process. The second was that it
would entail some of the most difficult and yet
gratifying work we would ever undertake.
True to his prediction, one year and ten months
later we completed the redesign and formally established the Society for Organizational Learning(SoL), a non-profit, self-governing membershiporganization. Part of the reason it took that amountof time was the fact that members of the designteam were from all over the country and it was
impossible to convene for face-to-face meetings
more than every three or four months. In addition,much of the work and conversation that began in
the design team meetings extended beyond themeetings to the larger community and circled
back to the design team. The process functioned

via concentric circles with the design team at thecore, having the responsibility for making decisions and articulating the results of the meetings,
as well as getting feedback and input from eachof the constituency groups. All of what was goingon was communicated and made available to thelarger community, both in writing and electronically. This aspect of the process was in itself formidable but essential in making sure the redesign
work was informed by the perspectives of as
many stakeholders as possible.
However, another reason it took so long was that,as Dee had forewarned, it was simply very hard
work. His process forced us to focus on fundamental questions of purpose and values, challenging
us to go beyond our current thinking and reconceive the very notion of organization. Coming toconsensus around the most fundamental issuesof purpose (why the Center exists) and principles(how we intended to work together to accomplish
our purpose) required long hours of deeply reflective conversation. It was very much an emergent
process, one in which we shared our deepest hopes
and assumptions as well as our most troubling
doubts and concerns.
We also wrestled with some very difficult, andat times personal, dilemmas. For example, when
it became clear that what we were attempting toestablish involved integrating the work of threecommunities – research, consultant, and corporate– it also became apparent that the organization
itself then did not fit into any one of them. The
implication was that the new organization should
not be an administrative part of MIT and those of
us who were MIT employees would need to leave
MIT if we wanted to be a part of the new organization. For a number of us, these were difficultand emotional decisions.
At the same time, due to the generative nature of
the process, there was already a belief in the purpose and the integrity of what was emerging even
before SoL was officially launched. Dee was absolutely right – it was at once very difficult and at
the same time exciting and gratifying.

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Results
The results from the nearly two-year processincluded a clearly articulated purpose, a set ofbeliefs and principles to guide our work, andstructural changes as SoL was established as a
new organizational entity in a new location (seeFigure 3). In addition to the structural changes
brought about by the creation of SoL, the redesign
process also resulted in a number of less tangible– but no less important – changes. There was a
new sense of excitement and energy as a resultof not only an organizational renewal but a kindof organizational rebirth. There was also a senseof accomplishment in having emerged with abroader, deeper, more inclusive mission andclarity about our fundamental purpose.
There was also a heightened sense of responsibility. This was our organization, there was no longer“anyone behind the curtain.” On a pragmatic level
we could and did accomplish things more quickly– developing a communication strategy, gaining
new members, and starting new projects. There is
now a perception among staff and members that
there is a clearer alignment between our values andour actions. Not only are we espousing learning andchange, but we are also practicing it ourselves.

We also succeeded in preserving some coreelements of the Learning Center that we felt were
important and needed to continue, including:our fundamental beliefs regarding the primacyof learning, our focus on research and knowledge
generation, the effort to develop new learning
capacities, and the relationship with MIT (MIT isan Institutional Research Member of SoL).

Purpose and Principles
The purpose of the Society for Organizational
Learning (SoL) is “to discover, integrate and implement theories and practices for the interdependent
development of people and their institutions.” It isa global learning community dedicated to building knowledge about fundamental change byintegrating:• Research (disciplined pursuit of discovery
and understanding),• Capacity building (developing new individualand collective capabilities), and• Practice (the application of concepts andtools in pursuit of specific ends).
It is designed around a core set of beliefs andprinciples that organize and guide our work(see box, page 22).

Fig u r e 3 Results: Society for Organizational Learning (SoL)• Relationships• Distribution of work
• Membership processes• Research agenda
Practices

Discover and implement
theories and practices for theinterdependant developmentof people and their institutions
PurposePrinciples

Concept

People• Roles• Skills• Experience• Drive to Learn• Learning is social• Learning communities• Aligning with nature• Cross organizational
collaboration• Subsidiary• Inclusiveness• Shared responsibility

Structure• Identity• Council• Events• Constitution• Liaison Group• Membership organization• Self-governing• Enabling organization• Financially self-reliant• Research venture capitalist• Fractal organization

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Following the inception of SoL in April 1997 as an
new organizational entity, we proceeded to transition from an MIT-sponsored research center to anindependent, non-profit, membership organization.
This included securing formal recognition as a
non-profit organization, getting 501(C)3 tax status,
securing new office space, and moving the base ofoperations from MIT to a new location just northof the MIT campus.

Fig u r e 4 Society for Organizational
Learning (SoL)

Practitioners

The SoL Structure
SoL is designed as a membership organizationthat includes corporate members, research members, and consultant members all linked together
as a network of colleagues. The intent is to bringthese three communities together in an effort toinvigorate and integrate the knowledge-creatingprocess in the area of fundamental institutionalchange (Figure 4). A constitution and set of bylaws
articulates SoL’s purpose, principles, and how it
operates. It defines the membership categories,
governing bodies, responsibilities of the governing council, responsibilities of membership, andthe process by which council members are elected.

SoL is designed as a membershiporganization that includes corporate members, research members,
and consultant members all
linked together as a network ofcolleagues.

Researchers

Capacity
Builders

electing council members. However, both large
and small events are also held to enable members
to share research and project work, and to network
as a community. Members of the SoL community
have the opportunity to participate in communitybuilding activities which are aimed primarily atdeveloping and integrating the three membershipgroups and facilitating cross-community learning.
Members also have the opportunity to participate
in an expanding array of capacity-building activities aimed at developing new individual andcollective skills. They also participate in learning
initiatives designed to generate new knowledge
in the area of fundamental organizational change.

The SoL governing council is elected by all of themembers, with balanced representation from all
three membership groups. There is also a managing director, who is a member of, and accountable
to, the council. In addition to the council, there isalso a group of liaison officers who include twoor three designates from each corporate member.
They meet quarterly to ensure alignment between
the companies’ needs and the overall direction
and activities of the SoL community.

SoL is designed to be financially self-reliant, taking
in funds through membership fees, meetings,
educational offerings, services, products, andresearch contributions. It also allocates funds forthe development of innovative research ideas inline with the overall research agenda of the SoL
community. The operational staff of SoL provides
a range of community-building, capacity-building,communication, and coordination services aimed
at integrating the diverse members of the community.

The annual meeting is the primary event for conducting the business of the SoL community and

Finally, SoL is designed as a “fractal organization”– a network of independent chapters, operating

F e at u r e | C lanon

in various locations, that are committed to SoL’s
purpose and principles. The intent is to develop
a global network of SoL chapters at the local,
national, and international level, all connected
through a global infrastructure.

Lessons Learned
New Ways of Conceiving Organization
It is ironic that in this age of ever-accelerating
technological innovation and continuing economic
globalization, we still operate our organizations
using 400-year-old, Newtonian-based models. Thismachine metaphor not only dominates how wethink about organizations, but it also limits how
we think about changing them. We need look nofurther than our corporate language for evidence:
we “reengineer,” “drive,” “re-tool,” “roll out,” and“restructure” in order to change. We accept it asa given that our organizations are designed andstructured for control rather than for learning,
even though we may intuitively sense that learning is essential for organizational success, perhaps
even survival. It should not be surprising that applying 17th-century thinking to our 20th-century
reality does not get us where we want to be.
We are desperate for new metaphors, models,
and ways of conceptualizing organizations, yetvery few exist. At SoL, we found that a key to our
success in generating transformational results
was that the chaordic design process forced us
to examine our most fundamental assumptions
and beliefs about organizations. We learned thatchanging organizations in fundamental ways firstrequires changing how we think about them.
However, this new approach was not easy toembrace or to implement. Dee Hock’s conceptof chaordic organizations was a conceptual leap
for most of us involved in the design process. I
still remember how my head ached when I firstsaw Dee’s chaordic organizational diagrams – theylooked like pictures of atoms from some physics
textbook. Even after two years, we are still eliminating or reinventing structures that act to centralize power and activities at SoL. Hierarchies are
the water we swim in, and it takes time to becomeaware of, let alone let go of, our deeply ingrained
patterns of thinking.
What differentiated Dee’s process from others I
had experienced was that it started with reflection
and conversation focused on our deepest aspirations. The simple and yet profound elegance of
this approach was that it rested full responsibility
from the outset right where it belonged – on us asindividuals and as a group – for creating what we
wanted. We collectively considered what we caremost about creating, and how we wanted to work
together to accomplish it. Then we discussed whatkind of design and structure would most help us
realize our aspirations.

We collectively considered what
we care most about creating, andhow we wanted to work together
to accomplish it.
It took about six months, perhaps seven or eightdays of face-to-face conversation, to get to thepoint where we felt that our purpose and operating
principles were clear and meaningful. We refinedthese further as we progressed through the remaining cycles of the process. It was very different fromwhat seems the norm in companies today, wheresenior managers develop a mission statement andthen “roll it out” to the rest of the organization.
Rather than a task to be accomplished or a mandate handed down from above, this was a processof discovering and generating a new organizational
reality from within ourselves.

Required Capabilities
On reflection, several key skills and capabilities
were, I believe, a prerequisite for the success of theprocess. The first was that the group was relatively
mature and had a capacity for both personal andshared reflection. There was a willingness on thepart of each participant to reflect on and share hisor her perspectives, thoughts, and feelings. People
were genuine and listened to one another.

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Another key factor was a tolerance for ambiguityon the part of the group. We did not know what
the outcome of the process was going to be, or if
there was even going to be a workable outcome.
Even a year into the process, a number of us were
unsure if we would still have jobs or, if so, where
they would be. This was emotionally difficult,but it did increase our capacity for patience.
We discovered that ambiguous – even messy –situations are not necessarily bad.

However, virtually everyone on the design team“hit the wall” at one time or another. Dee himself
threatened to throw in the towel on several occasions. We all needed support at times. Coaching– the capacity to give and receive support – wasessential to the success of the process. Numerous
conversations took place both during and outside
the meetings that helped each of us deal withwhatever was causing our frustration anddiscouragement.

From the Society for Organizational Learning’s Consitution, 1997
The Members of SoL believe that:• Drive to learn – all human beings are bornwith innate, lifelong desire and ability tolearn, which should be enhanced by allorganizations.
• Learning is social – people learn bestfrom and with one another, and participation in learning communities is vital to theireffectiveness, well being and happiness.
• Learning communities – the capacity
and accomplishment of organizations are
inseparable from and dependent on thecapacities of the learning communitythat they foster.
• Aligning with nature – it is essentialthat organizations evolve to be in greater
harmony with human nature and with
the natural world.
• Core learning capabilities – organizations
must develop individual and collective
capabilities to understand complex,
interdependent issues.
• Cross-organizational collaboration –learning communities that connect
multiple organizations can significantly
enhance the capacity for profoundindividual and organizational change.
Therefore, SoL and its members intend
and will use their best effort to practice:• Subsidiarity – make no decision andperform no function at a higher level thancan be accomplished at a more local level.

• Inclusiveness – conduct all deliberations
and make all decisions by bodies andmethods that reasonably represent all
relevant and affected parties.
• Shared responsibility – advance thepurpose in accordance with these principles in ways that enhance the capacity 		of the community as a whole, as well asthat of each member.
• Openness – transcend institutional andintellectual boundaries and roles that limit
or diminish learning.
• Adaptive governance – continually conceive, implement and practice governanceconcepts and processes which encourage
adaptability, diversity, flexibility andinnovation.
• Intellectual output – use research
generated by the community in waysthat most benefit society.
• Acknowledgement – open and fairly
acknowledge intellectual contribution 		to concepts, theories and practices,
both from within and from outside thecommunity.
• Participation and quality – contribute 		to and/or participate in research, capacity
building and practice, striving for thehighest standards of quality.

F e at u r e | C lanon

The design team’s familiarity with the basic concepts of shared vision and systems thinking was
also very helpful. The use of systems diagrams by
the mess team, for example, helped identify andclarify why we were experiencing certain problems,and how they were interrelated. Plus, the ability toview the process holistically enabled us to thinkbroadly and imaginatively about what we wanted
to create.

Key Elements of the Design Process
In addition to the capabilities mentioned above,
there were also a number of characteristics of theprocess itself that enabled it to succeed. First, thedecision to involve representatives from all the
primary constituency groups on the design teamwas critical, both for attaining a desired outcome
and for ensuring the integrity of the process. In
order for the group to have clear decision-making
authority for changing the organization, it needed
to reflect the diversity of the community it wasrepresenting.
Another essential characteristic of the process wasthat it was grounded in the pragmatic businessrealities of the organization. We were all fundamentally committed to creating an organizationthat worked well and could succeed financially.
Although there was some resistance when we got
into the complexities of crafting a constitution
with specific bylaws, articulating how the organization works with precision and thoroughness
has, in retrospect, served us well.
Finally, there was a commitment to retaining
elements of the organization that were mostvalued. Perhaps an often-overlooked function ofa transformational process is that it provides anopportunity to consider what aspects of the organization are important, and how to ensure thatthey will endure.
What was not readily apparent to many of us at
the onset of the design process was the genericnature of the issues that we faced as an organization. The fundamental concerns that the messteam surfaced – such as the lack of a clear, 		

consistent shared vision, and the disconnection
between our espoused versus practiced values –were all problems we hear over and over frommember companies. We discovered that many
issues that appear unique to a particular organizational context are, at a fundamental level,
remarkably similar.

Future Challenges to SoL
It is still early to speculate on the long-term sustainability of SoL, since the organization is justtwo years old as I write this. However, we are far
enough along to begin to understand some of
the challenges we face as a community.
There are now a number of SoL fractals (chapters)that have been, or are about to be, established inEurope, South America, and Asia. In the USA, a Midwest SoL has been established, with others soon
to follow in Texas and Georgia. A new SoL International infrastructure is about to be incorporated.
With this expansion comes the obvious need toextend our infrastructure and processes for sharing what we are learning and for developing learning capabilities among our worldwide members.

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Perhaps the greatest challenge for the SoL community is not to lose sight of the fundamental
questions we started with: how do we as a community realize our deepest aspirations for change?
How can we continually adapt SoL as an organization so it serves us rather than the other way
around? Reinventing from the inside out is truly
an ongoing and worthy challenge.
Dee Hock eloquently sums up the struggle, andopportunity, that we face:

We are at that very point in time when a 400year-old age is dying and another is struggling
to be born – a shifting of culture, science,society, and institutions enormously greaterthan the world has ever experienced. Ahead[lies] the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics suchas the world has never known, and a harmony
with nature, with one another, and with divine
intelligence such as the world has never
dreamed. n

endnotes
1 Dee Hock’s ideas on new ways of organizing proved central to our work reinventing the MIT Center for 		
Organizational Learning, as shown in this article.
2 It is important to acknowledge that this is a story told largely from the perspective of someone inside theorganization, with all of its inherent biases. However, mine is not the only perspective reflected here. I am
particularly grateful for the contributions of Linda Pierce and Tom Ryan from the Shell Oil Company, whoparticipated in Shell’s transformational process as well as MIT’s. Also to B.C. Huselton and Vicki Tweiten who
served on the “mess team” with me as a part of the process, and to Steve Buckley and Jane Punchard, both
members of the SoL management team, who generously shared their “before” and “after” perspectives.
3 The 19 corporate partners included: Amoco, AT&T, Chrysler, EDS, Federal Express, Ford, Harley Davidson,
Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Lucent Technologies, Merck & Company, National Semiconductor, Pacific Bell,Philips Display, the Quality Management Network (a consortium of healthcare organizations), Shell Oil 		Company, Texas Instruments, and US West.
4 Chaordic [kay’ordic] (1) anything simultaneously chaotic and orderly, (2) patterned in a way dominatedneither by chaos not order, (3) existing in the phase between chaos and order (Half Moon Bay, CA:
Chaordic Center Alliance, 1998).
5 Dee and the design group also had excellent help from Prof. Larry Yee of the University of California
San Diego, who was on sabbatical and was working with Dee on several projects, including ours.

R eferences
Senge, P.M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline. Doubleday, New York, NY.
—— (1997). “Organizing for learning: building knowledge in the knowledge creating era.”

F urther R eading
Chaordic Alliance, “Chaordic Alliance brochure,” P.O. Box 907, Half Moon Bay, CA 94010-0907.
Hock, D. (1997). “The birth of the chaordic century: out of control and into order,” Presented at the Stateof the World Forum, San Francisco, CA, November.
a b o u t th e a u tho r
Jeff Clanon is a founding partner of Systems Perspectives, LLC, and a founding consultant member
and former director of Partnership Development for SoL.

F e at u r e | K l e in e r

f e at u r e 1 2 . 4

Scenarios 2000:

Four Futures for Organizing and Leadingin the New Economy
A r t K l e in e r *In 2000, a group of 20 individuals – members of SoL as well as non-members including religious leaders,Fortune 500 executives, academics, environmentalists, community activists, and others – convened for the
purpose of bringing to SoL members new perspectives that could lead to “unexpected insights” which in turn
could influence both individual and collective thinking and ultimately the future of SoL’s work around theglobe. The resulting scenarios describe four distinct future worlds in which technology, corporations, multicultural reformation, and world decay prevail. We have included a condensed version of the original scenarios.
Although some of the projections haven’t come to pass, when reflected upon collectively, these scenarios
raise fundamental issues about human identity and the role of community in our collective future. We havealso included a retrospective Commentary by Adam Kahane, who helped to facilitate the original process.

The four stories you are about to read should only be seen as starting points – an opening from whichto think carefully about our common future.
Given this complexity, how can we better know the potential impact of our decisions? How can wechoose whether to keep or change jobs, whether to give our time to one endeavor or another, whether
to settle in one place or another, what kinds of long-term organizational decisions to make, and whatsort of life to try to create for ourselves and our families?
The people who developed these four scenarios included consultants to internet startups, religious
leaders, business school academics, writers and artists, community activists, Fortune 500 executives,
venture capitalists, environmentalists, healthcare entrepreneurs, and so on. The organizers were looking
for people who might bring perspectives to the attention of SoL members that could lead to surprises
and unexpected insights. That presence of outsiders makes it easier to see the color of the water of theaquarium we swim within.
These four futures probably won’t come true in themselves, but they represent flavors of events andtrends that will almost certainly influence the future of SoL members. By giving names to these flavors,* Written by Art Kleiner; based on a scenario workshop conducted May 22–23, 2000; convened by J. Jean Horstman,
C.K. Prahalad, Peter Senge, and Otto Scharmer; designed and facilitated by Adam Kahane; recorded by Betty Alexander;
and including Erik Anderson, Jim Austin, Allan Baesak, Michael Burns, Damon Butler, Samantha Coerbell, Ting Ho,
Jon Kabat Zinn, Johannes Meier, Edgardo Pappacena, Nagah Ramadan, Roger Saillant, Sue Sacks, Sarah Severn,
Usula Versteegen, Pat Walls, Darren Way, and Debra Woog McGinty.

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Four Scenarios
Techno-Gods

The inexorable march of machine (and bio-machine) progress takes humanity across yet
another technological threshold into a significantly accelerated post-industrial environment.

Corporate
Gatekeepers

Spurred by globalizing, merging corporations and increasingly uncertain governments,
the world crosses a threshold of political organization, dominated by a few large corporategovernmental entities that seek control over uncertainties.

New
RenaissanceWestern and Eastern societies cross a threshold of values awareness, leading to a “newrenaissance” that includes new institutional practices and a reformation in ways of living.

Virus World

The industrialized and developing worlds both cross a kind of “boiled frog” thresholdof decline, in which every debilitating factor acts with the seeping decay of viral infection.

we pick up a handle with which to talk about our
future. Yet these are not just extrapolations of current trends. Each describes a kind of thresholdthat the world must cross, a boundary to a different way of life.

Scenario 1: Techno-Gods“We are as Gods,” wrote Stewart Brand when hecreated the Whole Earth Catalog, “and we might
as well get good at it.” In this scenario, humanity
takes this statement literally – but doesn’t necessarily get good at it. Technological advance continues at its most accelerated plausible speed, but
human values and governance structures muddle
along trying to catch up. The threshold that getscrossed is partly technological and partly spiritual.
But it is a threshold of power. The awareness that
we can be as Gods changes the human spirit ina tangible, qualitative (and not necessarily 		
benign) way.
It is 2010, and people are plugged in as neverbefore. Culture is global; indigenous people in,say, remote parts of the Amazon are as plugged
in as anyone else in the world. This means that
opportunity and economic growth are rampant
throughout the formerly “developing” world – witha resulting increase in anxiety among the former
industrialized nations. People are glutted withinformation and advertising, targeted at them,appearing everywhere from the street signs by
their homes (“Good morning, Betsy. The grocer
down the street has a special on the kind of cereal
you like”), to the inside rim of their eyeglasses. Thisis a high-touch future as well, at least for the affluent, with a fast-moving, fun-filled economy (butlots of nervous breakdowns and invisible, hidden
burnout cases). Companies devolve and re-form
continually; people “own” their jobs, a state that
often resembles indentured servitude.
In short, this is a future of winners and losers,
fueled with such manic, fast-paced change thatthe losers continually get another chance . . .
and another . . . without much thought for consequences. Few people question the values of thisworld, or the places it is going, in any meaningful
way, because there is simply no time to reflect
and take stock.

How we got to Techno-Gods
In the early years of the 20th century, the enormous wealth created by the “Internet surge” propelled a second technological boom. The speed,
reach, and low cost of the global electronic network accelerated until it engulfed all human activity. The speed of innovative cycles was so fast thatin many fields, it was impossible to govern (oreven be aware of ) the impacts of new machines.
The net, in effect, became not just an index to all
human life, but a medium through which businesses and individuals redefined themselves.
Even by 2000, it was clear that the Internet bubble
would burst, but the inevitable consolidation did
not mean a slowdown in technology. Instead, the“dot-com shakeout” of 2003 reframed the corporate environment, eliminating many old dinosaurs
and replacing them with new, more resilient corporate mammals. Surplus investment capital, theinfluence of the new techno-billionaires, andseemingly infinite varieties of new technologyF e at u r e | K l e in e rcontinually spurred each other to new levels.
This occurred at the same time as an increasing
individual search for release from boredom andfor spiritual meaning – in the workplace or elsewhere. By the standards of the 1990s, spirituality
seemed oddly detached from old concepts like“family” and “community,” but all the more compelling in that vacuum. The “winner-takes-all”
economy was flush enough that even the 		“losers” were included.
By 2009, the advance of technology had led tohigh levels of artificial intelligence embedded
in an increasingly electronic urban environment.
People were connected, through body implants
and day-to-day performance, in ways that eventhe artists of the 1990s had not quite imagined.

What happens to us in Techno-Gods• Urbanization increases.
• Everything, including human dignity, canbe reframed as a transaction.
• Artificial intelligence is unleashed, and many
objects come alive.
• Privacy is gone. “Everything you do is known,
but no one judges you. They only cash in.”• Wearable technology has moved almost to
the point of implants.
• Attention deficit disorder is a cultural overlay.

This is a world of emotional andspiritual vulnerability, precisely
because human capabilities forcommunity are less exercised.
• More people live in social isolation, never leaving their homes, but connected to the world.
• Wealth is the ocean, with islands of poverty,
even in the developing world.
• An unprecedented glut of organizations operate in a continually shifting web of alliances,with new ones springing up whenever anybody
needs to start one.
• People essentially go through their careersbuilding on the human relationships that they
have with each other. They stay in a team, eventhough that team may move from Ford to CocaCola to some other place during the courseof a lifetime.
• The net knows where you are. Wealthy people
occasionally pay for “privacy spas” where noone can get to them.
• Nanotechnological sensors have developed
instant monitoring of (for example) stress levels,
so human health has reached an unprecedented peak.

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r e f l e ctions | vol u m e 1 2 , N u m b e r 4• Materials and food technologies have also
expanded and increased. Energy efficiency isdramatically improved.

Some notable implications of Techno-Gods
The most interesting, perhaps, is the interrelationship between technological growth and spiritualneed. We are as Gods, and we need God morethan ever. This is a world of emotional and spiritualvulnerability, precisely because human capabilities
for community are less exercised.
This is also the future of greatest economic boom.
Omnipotence, as one participant noted, starts
with wealth.
There was almost no government mentioned inthis scenario. Presumably big governments still
exist, but they have devolved largely to the statusof entertainment, perhaps with electronic voting
beginning to replace many of the legislative
functions.
The notion of indentured service emerged in thisfuture. People indenture themselves to enter theplugged-in world. Because machines act as a force
for decentralization, this future belongs to thecustomers and employees, not to the bosses.
Finally, this future is (on some level) predetermined.
It will happen, in some form, unless something
specific is done to block or deflect it.

alities have reconstituted themselves as “gatednations,” in which a few companies dominate
employment and trade. These companies havemore power than countries. The barrier to entry
for new organizations is high.
Social stratification is high. People love the lack ofstress and the comfortable way that decisions are
made for them once they join a corporate lifestyle.
The world is a meritocracy. Institutionalized education is seen as the path to a controlled career.
The market is unfettered, but paradoxically theamount of control needed to survive and thrive
is perceived as greater than it has ever been.
Eccentrics and indigents retreat to enclaves
outside the mainstream.

How we got to Corporate Gatekeepers
In 2001, after Microsoft finally defeated theDepartment of Justice judgment and prevented
the breakup of the company, after cyberterrorism
scares became commonplace, and after the Internet bubble threatened to burst, groups of global
business and government leaders began to meet,
focused on the subject of organizational security.
Since these meetings rarely took place in the U.S.
or included more than one American competitor,
anti-trust was no longer an issue. The meetings
represented a prelude for a new kind of merger
mania: strategic mergers, focused not just on
maintaining shareholder value but on wrestingback control over the unruly market, in a waythat democracy could not.

Scenario 2: Corporate Gatekeepers
This scenario depicts a world in which corporations seek control not just over their private goals
but over the public sphere as well, becoming in
effect the “gatekeepers” of civic life. In this future,corporations override local tariffs and regulations.
Investment capital and corporate activity movefreely across national borders. A global representative government has in effect replaced the UN.
It is elected by boards of corporations, who inturn represent shareholders.
Only a dozen or so major companies divide theworld among themselves. Many regions or nation-

At the same time, in the aftermath of the 2000
Presidential election, people grew fully disenchanted with national leadership. “They’re justpre-bought corporate lackeys,” was the view ofthe person in the street. By 2004, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce was officially appointed by
the Business Roundtable.
Business leaders no longer pitted themselves
against government. Government existed to create wealth and thus to develop a better standardof living for people. Departments of Commerce
were soon run by pro-business appointees;F e at u r e | K l e in e r

industries like banking, that once had been closely
regulated, now became unregulated.
In 2004, atmospheric scientists confirmed that
increased presence of carbon in the atmosphere
had indeed led to more turbulent weather. In
2008, several earthquakes took place on the San
Andreas Fault in California, and California became
an island. Similar natural disasters were occurring
throughout the rest of the world.
Humanity looked for safety where it could findit – in the largest corporations. There were now“company regions,” where everyone involved
either worked for the same global enterprise, for
one of its suppliers, or for a business that catered
to its employees. Microsoft administered theregional government of Seattle-Vancouver,
beginning in 2010.
Some local communities seceded from the globalnet, building their own identities based on alternative products, local “sweat equity” currency, andcooperative investment. Some are led by survivalists who opt out of the corporate economy. Others

This scenario depicts a world inwhich corporations seek control
not just over their private goals
but over the public sphere as
well, becoming in effect the“gatekeepers” of civic life.
represent a subculture of makers who clusteraround artist colonies. Using the Internet, they
make “what the customer wants” when the 		
customer wants it. As a consumer, you can get
to know the person who’s making it for you.

What happens to us in Corporate Gatekeepers• No company is merely “national.” No job is local.
But localities are corporate. Every company
has its own “value spots” around the world.
• Big companies are taken over by bigger
companies. National governments are eroded,
acquired, or irrelevant.

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r e f l e ctions | vol u m e 1 2 , N u m b e r 4• The number of world-class currencies has
decreased to the dollar, yen, and Euro.
• A small circle of CEOs and presidents control
capital. We either fit in or we are indigent.
We accept this because we have become soanxious about our own individual survival.
• This is a good future in which to have an MBA.
• There is a commodified infrastructure for reflection: coaches and mentors help corporate
leaders communicate and develop wisdom.
(Coincidentally, it probably leads to a lucrativerole for SoL.)

paying positions to take better offers, without
any concern for loyalty.

Some notable implications of Corporate
Gatekeepers

Scenario 3: New Renaissance“Corporate Gatekeepers” will probably be mostplausible to you if you believe that human beings
will always run in packs and look for the dominanceof “alpha males.” The social responsibility of corporations takes on great significance in this future,
because with their new social role comes increased
responsibility. Nevertheless, this scenario assumes
that greed and self-interest will trump all otheremotions. This future evolves from a world inwhich young managers routinely leave high-The boundary between “art” and “commercial”
is inextricably blurred. Advertising writers arerevered as auteurs. In a paradoxical way, again,
corporate control allows room for this kind of“un-boxing” to take place.
Despite the Internet, despite the borderlessworld, geography is still relevant here. People
are marked by where they live.

Here is a scenario of a plausible awakening of conscience and consciousness, both global and local.
It takes place in a way that leads to a fundamental
realignment of corporate and civic structures, inthe service of a sustainable future. The idea thattechnology is a panacea loses currency (perhaps
because of a visible technological calamity). It becomes accepted that human beings are more thananalytical creatures; we are whole beings. Boundaries are blurred between business, government,
and civil organizations, but not in the service ofF e at u r e | K l e in e rcontrol. Instead, people accept a life of less control
because they realize how illusory their efforts at
control were all along.
In this future, people believe that the body is an
integrated part of the whole person and that medical care is an aspect of personal growth and transformation. Philanthropy becomes a part of thewell-lived life. Instead of working through large
foundations, people give money in ways thatallow for a sustainable relationship with the project that is funded. There is generally a reconnection with spirituality, a stress on quality insteadof quantity, and more efficiency and creativity inthe use of natural resources.

How we got to New RenaissanceAlready, the signs were evident in 1999 or 2000,
but few people were paying attention because somuch of the activity was local. It was hard to see
the full shift until it happened worldwide.
Material things no longer seemed to matter much.
With economic success available to so many people,
we were looking for a way to sustain civilization,
not just to grow it. Of course, we were also looking
for an antidote to our stress-filled, fast-paced lives.
The children made the difference. They started tohold conferences to transform moribund schools.
They organized themselves over the Internet on
behalf of environmental change. They started
pooling money to buy corporate shares to try to
influence the companies. They wanted a voice inthe world, and they wanted a better world.
Global advocacy groups, including environmentalists and labor groups, found an increasing constituency inside and outside corporate walls. In general, corruption diminished, because in an Internetdriven world, it was harder to make it pay.
Medical breakthroughs recognized the interdependence of mind, body, and spirit. Meditation
became common. School curriculums included
art, music, and even spirituality.

Around 2003, many healthcare systems collapsed.
Only those with an orientation toward preventative care survived, because the rest accomplishedlittle except diverting money from one set of
pockets to another.
An emphasis on sustainable transportation andpower was bolstered by energy sources like fuelcells and photovoltaics, as well as by a renewedemphasis on energy efficiency.
Ted Turner’s gift of $1 billion to the United 		
Nations set the stage for a series of individuals
and philanthropists to reinvent philanthropy
based on “emotional intelligence.” A group of
Silicon Valley executives modeled themselveson the Medicis and asked, “What could we dotogether to foster another renaissance?”

In this future, there is areconnection with spirituality, 		
a stress on quality instead ofquantity, and more efficiency
and creativity in the use of 		natural resources.

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But most of the action did not take place at the
global level. Small enterprises funded by microcredit, particularly those operated by women,reached critical mass throughout the formerly“developing” world. There was a lot of work todo, but also a spirit of optimism and joy.

What happens to us in New Renaissance· 	Environmental and labor groups make a caseagainst the runaway form of globalization
promoted by advocates of global laissez-faire.
· 	Education becomes a primary catalyst forchange.
• The medical industry is transformed into asystem designed to help people thrive insteadof simply repairing breakdowns.
• Cheap solar technology emerges. Transportation alternatives include more public transportation, bicycle pathways, and Internet use.
• Investors now routinely look for long-termsustainability.
• With the human lifespan increasing, many
people have not just multiple careers but
multiple life engagements.
• Technology is increasingly used for humanconnection and to enhance the quality of life.

Some notable implications of New
Renaissance
Nearly everyone who helped describe this future
said in effect, “I don’t believe it could really happen,”and yet they not only yearned for it, but were willing to invest in it. The “New Renaissance” scenario
would require a “virus of hope” (as corporate
manager Johannes Meier put it), enabling new
ideas to “infect” the mainstream. It would also
require some way of drawing in the people who
mistrust the surface but might actually appreciate
the depths.
Said someone at the workshop, “The original
Renaissance was created by not many more than
100 people. We already have 20 in this room.” Perhaps, people noted, some of the cultural signs of
disharmony and fragmentation (such as the greedof the dot-coms) is a flipped version of passion.
“They’re not passionate about making money, somuch as about creating things.” If that is true, thenthe scenario of “New Renaissance” has a betterchance of existing.

Scenario 4: Virus World
Society becomes a virus incubator in this future.
Nothing gets bad enough to trigger a curativeF e at u r e | K l e in e r

response, but it’s as if the world has a perpetual,
low-level case of the flu. AIDS is devastating insome regions – but not everywhere, and it drops
back before people get outraged enough to invest
more in a cure for it. Criminal activity and the
Mafia-ridden economy keep growing, but neverthreaten established governments or companies.
Sometimes outlaw investment and drug trafficking
wax; sometimes they wane. Natural catastrophes
increase in number, and global warming-related
crises proliferate, but it never gets bad enoughto overwhelm decision-makers’ mindsets.
Nationalism and new ideologies continue toemerge. Sea levels rise, genetic accidents occur.
Parts of the Philippines are submerged. Iraq blackmails its way onto the UN Security Council. Terrorist attacks proliferate without pattern.
This is a scenario of oscillating destabilization.
Things periodically seem to get better, and attention wavers. After all, there is always the crisis of
the moment to address, the current “spike” in theequilibrium to deal with. Things never get bad
enough to address in any systemic way.

How we got to Virus World
It’s 2010. Politically, we have been at peace –or at least at truce – since the Clinton era. But
then how did things get in such a mess?
In 2000, there were five high school mass murders– all at affluent, suburban high schools in Silicon
Valley. We paid for security systems and metal detectors, but most Silicon Valley teachers and cops
quit. Religious cults gained political power, especially after a software glitch took out eleven planes
during an eight-hour period in 2005. The Russian
crime mafia had pretty much finished off the
Italian mafia by 2005. They were suspected ofbeing behind the 2006 hacker attack on AT&T,
but that was later proven to be masterminded
by a pair of twelve-year-olds in Saigon, who are
now suspected to be living in Barcelona.
The crop failure of 2003 took Citicorp with it,
and we miss it now, because it wasn’t realized

How long would society actually
go down this road before there
was a concerted effort to turnaway from it?
at the time how much that company served asa linchpin for global financiers who moderated
economic speed bumps.
Information technology definitely played a role.
By facilitating easy mobilization around issues, itdrew people into atomized sub-groups, with little
contact among them. Environmental crises further
destabilized the situation, by occupying so muchof the attention of political and community leaders.
Economically, we saw the linking of buyers andsellers directly. Without the brokering institutions,
there was a further destabilization effect.

What happens to us in Virus World• Poverty and illiteracy exist, but they exist with“net connections.” Being connected does notmean that you are wealthy.

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r e f l e ctions | vol u m e 1 2 , N u m b e r 4• There are islands of wealth and happiness
amidst oceans of poverty and slow debilitation.
• Despite all the net access, people feel disconnected. They suffer, but they have no way to
speak about it, because whatever they say,someone has already said it before them,and no one is interested in listening.

Identity is inextricably linked with
community and, at heart, thesefour scenarios raise the questionof communities in the future.
• Inflation is also reappearing.
• Conflict over natural resources grows,
especially over water shortages.
• People are very concerned about spiritualstability in the face of continued low-levelcrisis. There are religious pockets and cults
everywhere.

Some noteworthy implications of Virus WorldThis is the scenario of the “boiled frog” – the pan ofwater is heating up so slowly that the frog receives
no warning to jump out and remains in the pan to
be boiled alive. The complexity of whole systems
is a driving force. So, clearly, is complacency in theface of complexity. The whole is unable to address
the problems of the whole. And anxiety makes
things worse. For instance, a global fear of technology leads to laboratory destructions, whichlead to world hunger, because the laboratories
possess all of the research on the grains, fertilizers,
and activities that are supporting the system.
How long would society actually go down thisroad before there was a concerted effort to turnaway from it? And would it be possible, at thatlate date?

A Final Theme: Issues of Identity
One key theme seemed to emerge again andagain in these scenarios. It concerned the unyielding nature of human identity – the ways in whichpeople continue to seek their own control over
the way they define themselves and to resist allother efforts to define them. Culture, diversity,
ethnic and racial identity, economic identity, corporate affiliation, the choice of where to live andhow to live – all of these qualities of an individual
may or may not be immutable, but in every oneof these futures, people conscientiously andstubbornly hold fast to their right to define themselves, against all other pressures, including thepressure of any “industrial machine.”
The amalgam of habits, predilections, and mental
models that we associate with the word “identity”
really represent a set of trends in human attitudes
about joining, belonging, and standing apart ortogether. These prevailing attitudes will, in turn,deeply influence the things people expect from
corporations, communities, and other groups, andthe things we are willing to give to them. Thus,
identity is inextricably linked with community and,at heart, these four scenarios raise the question ofcommunities in the future. What kinds of communities are easier to foster in each of them? Whatkinds of communities are more difficult? What isthe difference between organizations and communities, in each of these futures, and what covenants do people naturally enter into as they
established shared relationships?
Communities take time to create. The decisions
made today will influence the kinds of communities that exist in 2010, no matter what future
has come to pass. n

co m m e nta r y | K ahan e

C o m m e nta r y 1 2 . 4

Commentary
A da m K ahan eIhave a substantive observation and a methodological observation about these scenarios.
The substantive observation is that rereading them almost exactly 13 years later, I was
surprised and impressed by how much they still illuminate what is going on in theworld. The insights are still relevant today and allow me to see things that I wasn’t paying
attention to.

Often, scenarios become obsolete quickly – they talk about things that are important at
the time they are written, but a few years later, they aren’t important any more or interesting any more or they may be obvious. In that sense, I think these scenarios have reallystood the test of time; you could say all four of them were prescient. I guess that has to do with the fact that theparticipants in the workshop were seeing then the weak signals of trends that have continued and were pointing
out phenomena, challenges, and opportunities that remain with us.

Adam Kahane

The only major omission that strikes me is that the tone of these scenarios is very economically upbeat. Even
the title, “Scenarios for the New Economy,” reflected the heady optimism of that period. In that particular sense,
they don’t reflect the much more pessimistic economic climate that we experience now and the quite different
sets of challenges and opportunities that this climate presents.
My methodological comment is that, reading these scenarios, I can see that we were beginning to articulate
the distinction between what I have since labeled “adaptive scenario planning” and “transformative scenario
planning.” It’s alluded to in the original introduction I wrote to that text where what I now call “transformative
scenario planning” is referred to as “civic scenarios,” a term that I and those at SoL, including Katrin Käufer andBettye Pruitt, were using at the time.
Since then, this distinction has been really crystallized, that is to say, the distinction between using scenarios
to observe and adapt to what is happening in the world versus using scenarios to influence or transform what ishappening. And when you are conscious of this distinction, the methodology required changes in several very
important ways that are not at all reflected in the methodological note in the text. So for example, the wholequestion of who needs to be involved in the scenario process if we’re trying not to just adapt to the future but
to transform the whole. The question of convening a team that is interesting and insightful and influential 		
is not mentioned at all. Also not mentioned is the fact that scenarios can generate both adaptive and 		transformative actions. n

a b o u t th e a u tho r
Adam Kahane is a partner in Reos Partners. His most recent book is Transformative Scenario Planning:
Working Together to Change the Future (Berrett-Koehler, 2012).

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f e at u r e 1 2 . 4

The Marblehead Letter
G lo b al S o L N e two r k S t e wa r ds
This letter, written in 2001 by representatives from corporations who sponsored the development of the
Global SoL Network, served as an invitation to the SoL community to participate in reflecting on the major
issues shaping the strategic context for all companies. By organizing an international conversation, known
as the SoL Leadership Dialogues, these stewards of the Global SoL Network provided a kind of holding
environment in which leaders from around the world had the rare opportunity to genuinely “think together.”
They believed that sustaining the opportunity for reflection in an environment of perpetual doing wasessential to developing new capacities for shared understanding and coordinated action in the faceof increasingly complex issues that challenged them individually and collectively.

The Marblehead Letter
October 22, 2001
Cambridge, MA
To: Members of the SoL Community
Re: SoL Leadership Dialogues
When the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) began
ten years ago as the Center for Organizational Learning
at MIT, leaders from large corporations recognized that thechallenges and opportunities of the future would require
a new level of collaboration. Each organization made thecommitment to undertake change projects in some if
not all of its business, to engage in research and building
learning capacities in the process, and to share the resultsof this work with their peers.
In the ensuing years, the pace of change and the complexityof the business environment has done nothing to lessen ourconvictions about collaboration. Today, we feel it is essentialthat leaders at many levels in organizations

•
•
•
•

• engage all their sensing capacity to identify challenges
and opportunities,• reflect on their meaning and implications,clarify what results the organization wants to create,
generate a range of options to consider with appreciation for their unintended consequences,adopt an experimental posture to develop new skills and behaviors while testing assumptions
about the issues at hand, andbuild relationships within and between organizations that creates a resilient network of resources
and support.

F e at u r e | glo b al S o l N e two r k st e wa r ds

Yet, the opportunities for genuine reflection anddialogue among organizational leaders are meager
compared to the needs for such dialogue. Whenwe, representatives from companies who havesponsored the development of the SoL global network, met in late June, we decided that we wanted
to create a way to address this need. The purposeof this letter is to invite you to participate with us
in developing the SoL Leadership Dialogues.
Today, SoL communities are forming in over 30
countries on all six continents. A natural agenda
of issues shaping the future of organizations isemerging in this global network. We believe theseissues will be especially important for corporations
with global scope like ours. These issues include:
1. The social (and economic) divide
The ever-widening gap between those participating in
the increasingly interdependent global economy andthose not, both between and within different countries. The so-called “digital divide” is one dimensionof this. But framing the problem in this manner
tends to invoke technological responses, rather
than deeper inquiries into the forces behind andconsequences of globalization. The anti-globalization movement is growing not because people
lack access to the internet but because they feel a
profound sense of dislocation and threat. Moreover,the possibilities for collaborative inquiry appear to
be diminishing as fear and distrust grows. What areleading corporations doing today to address theseissues, and how are they making it part of theirbusiness? What are the range of innovations – inmarket growth, human resources, and ownershipand governance – that must be considered forthe future?
2. The system seeing itself
The challenges for coordination and coherence insocial systems, be they global corporations, industries,
or still larger systems. Organizations traditionallyoscillate between decentralization when businessis good and centralization when it is not. On the
one hand, autonomy by itself can produce unclarity, waste, unnecessary internal conflicts, confusionand frustration for customers, and inability towork productively for the common good, both thefirm’s and society’s. On the other hand, central control is inevitably limited in diverse, geographically
distributed enterprises. Are there alternatives tocentral control in achieving high levels of coordinated action? What sorts of capabilities, technologies, and infrastructures need to be developed tohelp people better see how local actions impact
extended, interdependent systems that are invisible locally, as well as the overall performance ofthe enterprise? How do we balance autonomy
with health of the whole?
3. Redefining growth
Economic growth based on ever increasing material
use and discard is inconsistent with a finite world
and finite capacity to dissipate waste. Yet, our business and financial models depend on growth:
if a company fails to grow in revenues and profits,
it is out of the game and others who embrace
growth will take its place. This dilemma may require rethinking how growth can be brought into
harmony with the natural environment. Is there
a way to reconceive “growth” in a different sense?
Is it possible to base healthy economies on continuing increase in value created rather than oncontinuing increase in material throughput? What
are the implications of such a shift, for business,financial markets, customers, and investors?
4. Variety and inclusiveness
Developing inclusion as a core competence inincreasingly multi-cultural and diverse organizations.
Issues of diversity have been mostly seen as problems to be solved rather than strategic opportunities. But those organizations that learn to learn
better across cultural, gender, and ethnic boundaries and learn to make differences in how people
think and learn an asset rather than a liability will
have unique advantages in today’s world. Moreover, if corporations are to be a force for good in
the world, they must reflect better the world’s
people in their composition. Yet genuinely embracing inclusiveness is challenging. How can wedevelop the capacity to confront difficult issues
that most corporations have not yet been willingto talk about?

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5. Attracting talented people and realizing
their potential
Developing commitment in a world of “free agents”
and “volunteer” talent. Increasingly, talented andeducated people have many options in their employment choices. Indeed, the very concept of“employee” may be an Industrial Age notion thatis becoming increasingly irrelevant and evencounter-productive. Moreover, organizationalboundaries have become more ambiguous, as
mergers, acquisitions, strategic alliances, anddiverse forms of partnership continually reconfigure businesses. This makes people’s organizational
affiliations also more ambiguous. Against thisbackdrop of flux and uncertainty rest unchanging
personal desires for friendship and identity withmeaningful work. How can we rethink the 		equation for loyal and generative partnership
between individual and organization?
6. The role of the corporation
Extending the traditional role of the corporation,
especially the global corporation, to be more commensurate with its impact. (Is there also the needto create a shared understanding of the realityof the role of the corporation now?) If national
governments are weakening in an era of growing
globalization, will global corporations become
more exposed? How do global corporations act
responsibly in situations where the rule of law isdeteriorating and economic power effectively
supersedes political power? What can be learned
from efforts such as The Global Compact about
the feasibility and impact of initial moves in thisdirection? How can global corporations better
understand what determines their “license tooperate” and their “license to grow”? How canthey use their visibility to be a more positive
force in a complex world?

Complex, interdependent issues such as these
are increasingly shaping the context for strategy.
Yet the pressures created by these issues tend
to keep leaders in a continual doing rather thanreflecting mode. We believe that the tools andmethods, and as important the quality of relationships and common concerns within the SoL
community, can create unique opportunities
for leaders to meet and genuinely “think together,”
the real meaning of dialogue. Sustaining thisopportunity may be vital in developing new
capacities for shared understanding and coordinated action.
We, the sponsors and stewards of the SoL globalorganizing process, want to continue to develop
SoL as a global, enabling network where dialogue,
research, collaborative action, and learning aroundsuch issues takes place at many levels, and continues to include global corporations and global
not-for profit institutions; local enterprises, governments, and NGOs; and interested researchersand consultants. We believe that SoL’s diverse
membership and the commitment of members
to creating and maintaining a reflective andaction-oriented learning environment can beof enormous value as major global enterprises
are faced with decisions that not only affect ourown performance but have consequences felt
around the world.
We invite you to join your peers in conversation
to develop a new appreciation of the issues you
face and the new options that emerge from adiversity of perspective.
Sincerely,
Global SoL Network Stewards

Pa r t T W O

Lessons, Failures, Frontiers

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f e at u r e 1 2 . 4

30 Years of Building Learning
Communities

A Dialogue with Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer
and Darcy Winslow, Part I
Although the Society for Organizational Learning was founded 15+ years ago, its roots go back almost
30 years. In this conversation, Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, and Darcy Winslow look back at SoL’s earliest
form as a single program (“Systems Thinking and the New Management Style”) and its evolution to its
current state. In addition, they reflect on the role of individuals in systemic change, the ways in which we
can leverage our impact as individuals and communities, and the essential role of cooperation and 		collaboration in sustainable organizational and global change. They consider what it takes to shift from“ego-system awareness” to “eco-system awareness,” a shift they agree is fundamental to effecting sustainable change. Throughout the conversation, references to SoL’s own capacity for development, and theevolution of related networks like the Presencing Institute, serve as a microcosm of every system’s 		
struggle to adapt and sustain itself.

DARCY: The idea for this dialogue was to reflect a bit on SoL and the Presencing
Institute as learning communities, and on how those communities are going to
be helpful in tackling some of the issues that we are facing over the next years
or decades. What are the main trends you are seeing in the world, and what aresome of the leadership capacities that we will need going forward?

Peter Senge

OTTO: SoL was founded more than 15 years ago, in 1997. And before that
there was the MIT Organizational Learning Center [OLC]. When was the 		
OLC founded?
PETER: Well, before that was an MIT research program called “Systems Thinking
and the New Management Style,” which started in the early 1980s. Gradually,
more and more companies became involved. Then we had this idea to form aformal center at MIT around 1990, not just an individual program. Eventually,out of that, SoL evolved. So it has been almost a 30-year journey.

Otto Scharmer

OTTO: So a 30-year journey. And 20 or 22 years of that have been as an intentional action-research community. That’s an intriguing piece of data. I would beinterested, Peter, if you could name the two or three most important accomplishments over those 30 years. What came into the world in this period? What havebeen the most important accomplishments? Also, what are the failures? What
have we failed to bring into the world so far? What are the frontiers where ourefforts have not resulted in the accomplishments that we would like to see?
Darcy Winslow

f e at u r e | S e ng e , S cha r m e r , and winslow

Five Accomplishments
PETER: When you ask what’s been accomplished,
three things jump out at me right away. First is theclarification of ideas. You have to remember thatwhen all of this started, there was no five disciplines
framework. I’m sure you could trace a similar crystallization around the basic ideas of Theory U. You
have to work at something for a long time until
it gets simpler and clearer.
And then, to me, ideas without tools don’t meanmuch. So there are all the different methods. Last,
all of that work needs to be grounded in application projects. It would be easy for me to tell thestory of the last 15 years or longer just in terms of aseries of remarkable on-the-ground undertakingsthat involved many different people throughwhich we built that practical knowledge.
OTTO: Certainly these three accomplishments
resonate with me. Looking at this or that part of
the history that I participated in, what also comesto mind are capacity-building mechanisms. A big
focal point of our work – and also a real accomplishment – has been creating a shared knowledge
base and different environments for building

The combined, interwoven
networks of SoL and the
Presencing Institute have played
a positive role in helping thisfragmented body of practitioners
become a little bit more connected.
individual and collective leadership capacity. It is
one of the few things we know how to do well.
A fifth accomplishment is community. So, yes,
there is application, and yes, there are living examples. But then, more than that, SoL and the Presencing Institute have linked these ideas, methods,
and tools to many people who are building theirown things with them and who, in a more distributed way, are connecting with each other andforming their own communities.
As you know, community building is a lot of
trouble and presents many problems. But when
you step back, what you see today is that the SoL

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network and the Presencing Institute network –which to a large degree overlap – are actuallya part of something larger, almost like a global
movement or an awakening that has to do withbringing together science, consciousness, andprofound social and institutional change. The
combined, interwoven networks of SoL and the
Presencing Institute have played a positive rolein helping this fragmented body of practitioners
and ideas and conversations and so on become
a little bit more connected.

But the energy of community is much more selfgenerating. You fall into a mindset of trust of one
another and beyond: you know that you don’t
have to figure it all out. You just need to keep
working together with others. And out of thatworking together, you build relationships andconfidence that, through our understanding ofand our real concern for each other, things will
emerge.

We all know that a lot more is necessary. Butthat sense of community is another important
accomplishment.

OTTO: Also, what comes to my mind is that when
I arrived at the Organizational Learning Centerin 1994, you already had shifted. After The Fifth
Discipline was published, you became known as“Mr. Learning Organization.” The concept of learning organizations was kind of the primary header.
But whenever I look at what you really did, it wasnever that. It was always building learning communities, something that goes beyond the boundaries of organizations.

PETER: It’s easy for us to take it for granted,
because we all have been involved in this effort
for so long. But people often say that they can feela certain spirit as soon as they come to one of the
SoL meetings. It is not unique to us, of course,
but it really is the spirit of community. I always
remember a man from Europe saying at an early
SoL gathering, “I have never been around a groupthat is so enthusiastic and so self-critical.”

What allows a company to adapt
in the face of significant changes
in its environment is this capacityof community.
This spirit of community is absent in so manyefforts. I find it particularly ironic when people
are dealing with big, socially relevant issues
and don’t build community.
It’s a tragedy because often when people are
dealing with meaningful stuff, they get completely
caught in a sense of urgency that dominates. Thereis a subtle energy of reactiveness, which is understandable. When the problems are big, it’s easy
to feel like you are pushing this giant rock up ahuge hill.

From Learning Organizations to Learning
Communities

Maybe you could talk a little bit about that distinction, because it refers to an important learning:that you cannot build a learning organization
without that kind of community. How did theevolution happen, from your viewpoint?
PETER: There were a couple of threads to it.
One was a series of historic studies, starting with a
Shell study of long-lived companies. The headlineof that study was that, when all is said and done,
the businesses that last for many, many generations
do so because they are a “human community.”
What allows a company to adapt in the face ofsignificant changes in its environment is thiscapacity of community, which enables adaptation
through its relationships internally and with thelarger communities of which it is a part, whether
they are the communities where people live or
the networks of organizations that together
accomplish the work of the business, such as
suppliers.

f e at u r e | S e ng e , S cha r m e r , and winslow

So that was one part of it. And then there was thepractical part that came from working on many
projects, where you saw again that it was teams andlarger communities of people that accomplishedmiracles. This was critical because an importantcriterion for me regarding knowledge is outcomes.
How do you know you know something? You dosomething, right? How do you build confidence
that your tools work? You use the tools and see
what people are able to create. So this bias toward
the practical and suspicion of ideas for their own
sake has always made us . . . what’s the right wordfrom the church?

PETER: I am sure that often seems true. They
stay in the church, and yet they keep their radical
ideas. I think that is true for both you and me. And
one of the basics of our heresy is that we don’t justbelieve ideas. We only believe ideas that we haveseen have practical consequences.

OTTO: Heretics.

This was the second reason this idea of community became so powerful within SoL. You would
have these practical projects, let’s say on productdevelopment, as were some of the early projects.
But they didn’t involve the management teamor any one well-defined group. They engaged anamorphous network of people who ultimately

This bias toward the practical andsuspicion of ideas for their own
sake has always made us heretics
in the academic community.

PETER: Heretics. Exactly. We’re heretics in theacademic community. And, you know, a heretic
is not an atheist.
OTTO: It’s worse. [laughter]

irat
A sp

Working Collaboratively

y
lexit

Knowing  Learning

Systems ThinkingpComMental Models
Team Learning

with

Reacting  Creating

ling

Shared Vision
Personal Mastery

Dea

ion

The Core Competencies of Organizational Learning

Parts  Connection
Blaming  Understanding

Sample tools and methods of organizational learning
Vision & Sharing

Quality of Conversations

Coaching

Ladder of Inference

Exploring and testing
frames and assumptions

Iceberg – levels of perspective

Kantor's four-player modeland four dialogic practices

Reinforcing and Balancing Loops

Causal Loops

Visualization

Pathways to learning

CenteringLeft-hand column

Choosing

Check-in/Check-out•  Fixes that backfire

Creative Tension

Advocacy/Inquiry•  Shifting the burden

Container building•  Limits to growth

Systems Archetypes:

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got involved and became instrumental to what
was accomplished.
So you start to see again and again that the realgroups that matter are never the formal structures,the formal teams, the formal management. They
include those but are much broader. Practicallyspeaking, the best term for them is communities
or networks of collaboration.

Organizations are too small forthe big problems and too big forthe small ones, where you need 		a nimble, targeted approach.
That just kept showing up again and again andagain. When we were going through the long, almost two-year process of creating SoL separate
from MIT, the one idea that became an anchor was
helping people organize themselves in communities. For me and many of us, our core aspiration
concerned change at a scale that really matters,that could make a difference in the world. And
I remember one morning it just came to me: aglobal network of all kinds of different learning
communities could really have an impact at
scale, perhaps in a way that nothing else would.
So the importance of learning communities
came from many different places.

Ego-System Awareness vs. Eco-System
Awareness
OTTO: I remember what drew me here in the firstplace were some of the writings that came out of
the Organizational Learning Center. For example,
when you looked at the five disciplines, with theinclusion of personal mastery, you could feel anopenness and the possibility of a conversation orkind of inquiry into the consciousness dimensionof change. It was already there, but it was implicit.
It was not explicit. But you could already feel it.

The other thing that attracted me was the researchcommunity. Yes, Peter was directing it and it wasorganized to a large degree around the five disciplines framework. But then you had others working on dialogue. You had Ed Schein involved, Chris
Argyris, Bill Isaacs, Daniel Kim. You could feel thesedifferent frameworks coming together, all inservice of a larger intention – an action sciencein the service of the evolution of the social whole,rather than just revolving around itself withinsome kind of academic virtual walls.
When listening to you, Peter, it reminds me that
I once heard someone say, you know the problem
with the nation state: it’s too big for the small
problems and it’s too small for the big problems.
The same applies to companies and to any kindof organization. Organizations are too small forthe big problems and too big for the small ones,
where you need a nimble, targeted approach.
So that’s another dimension. You start with someof these bigger institutional entities, then you realize that to make headway you need to reach out.
When I arrived in the mid-1990s, there was no real
mention of cross-sector collaboration. It was all
corporate. And it was not even start-ups or small
businesses. It was all big Fortune 50 or Fortune
500 companies.
Look at the work and the community now. Thereis an awareness of the whole dimension of entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and crosssector partnerships. There is an acknowledgement
that, in order to move the economy from being
driven from ego-system awareness to eco-systemawareness, you necessarily have to collaborate
across sectors.
Darcy, the Nike story is one of the prime examples:
how in working with NGOs and in working onsocietal issues, you can transform these relationships, and how good leaders need to think 		
across the value chain rather than stopping at
the boundaries of your own organization. The
same story plays out in other industries as well.
Nike just happened to be a pioneer.

f e at u r e | S e ng e , S cha r m e r , and winslow

DARCY: Well, thanks for saying that, Otto. The
impetus for how that started came out of Nike’s
introduction to Peter and SoL and a lot of theframeworks back in the late 1990s. When I sharethe story with others, it all comes back to becoming
part of the SoL community and the thought leadership and vulnerability that we came together
with. I mean, we didn’t know what we were doing.
We didn’t know how big the issue was. There
was not a framework at that time, and we didn’tknow what the end goal was.
So helping to establish and create some of thelanguage and ideas around what it meant to bea sustainable organization or a company for the
21st century gave us a way to embrace the challenges that we faced. Without SoL, I don’t think
Nike would be where it is today. I know I certainly
wouldn’t have the wherewithal and ability to sit
with the questions I sit with today had it not been
for that learning community – and the extension
into the Presencing Institute and how it comes
together around the SoL Executive Champions’Workshop. These events are milestones in mylife every year.
OTTO: Darcy, what made the difference for you
and for Nike?
DARCY: It was the creation of the Sustainability
Consortium as a subset of the SoL community in
1998. There were just a handful of companies backthen, Nike being one of them. Peter, you may beable to list them.
PETER: It was initially Ford/Visteon, HP, Shell,
DTE, Harley Davidson, BP, and Nike.
DARCY: Right. And from the first meeting, coming
together and meeting these people, there was nocompetition among us. As leaders within thosecompanies – some with titles and some without– we were trying to make a difference. The Sustainability Consortium created a safe haven for us tocome together and show our vulnerability and ourlack of understanding of a clear path forward for

how we were going to institute this massivechange effort within our companies.
Through that process, through the years, throughmore companies coming on board, and throughbuilding deep relationships among the people
within the Consortium, we created a phenomenal
resource. When I would hit these brick walls, people within the SoL Sustainability Consortium were
the people I went to outside the company to build
up the courage to step over that next threshold.
It was the most critical resource I had to draw on
to be able to do some of the things that we did
within Nike.
The Consortium lasted up until about 2008 formally. Over that time, more and more companies
were coming to the Consortium to hear thesestories, to have that kind of a resource to draw
upon. But Nike had started to move into the next
phase of sophistication of our work, and we wereno longer able to draw from the Consortium.
That’s when the Consortium started to fade into
the background and something new began toemerge. That’s one of the reasons for the foundingof the Academy for Systemic Change. It’s one of
the next evolutions of elevating our game, elevating our conversation, elevating our ability to transform and affect some of these critical systems at
scale, at a level that is really going to make adifference in the short term.

Despite all of our accomplishments
and despite what we might feel
good about, the world goes along
its unsustainable course.
Failures and Frontiers
OTTO: Maybe that brings us to the second part ofthe opening question, which is about the failures
and the frontiers.
PETER: Despite all of our accomplishments anddespite what we might feel good about, the world

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goes along its unsustainable course. And, by andlarge, the vast majority of people have no clue, nor
do they see much evidence that these things that
we see changing are actually changing. Quite thecontrary – there is more fatalism and pessimism
today than ever.

We have not yet found the way 		
to make sufficiently explicit thedevelopmental aspect of the work.
I always thought in doing this work that it would
take multiple generations. [System dynamics
pioneer] Jay Forrester had the same attitude, so
I inherited that from him, the idea that the reallybig changes unfold over many decades and generations. I never expected people to read a book,like any of The Fifth Discipline books, and go off andstart changing things. It is one of the reasons forbuilding communities, to help sustain a processof change.
And I have mixed feelings saying this because,
well, this is a great self-fulfilling prophecy. You
assume it is going to take a long time. Therefore,

Master Nan Huai-Chin
Nan Huai-Chin (1917–2012)
was a spiritual teacher and amajor force in the revival of
traditional Chinese culture in
China. He wrote more than 60
books, which have sold tensof millions of copies in China,
mostly on the black market
until the past decade. Onlya few of his books have beentranslated and made available
outside China. His death in
September 2012 was a major
national event in China.

when nothing much changes at scale that matters,
you can say, “Oh, well. See, it’s what I always knew
would happen.”Be that as it may, I do think that’s definitely ashortcoming, because we don’t have forever togo along at the pace we have today. It raises a
profound question – one of the hardest ones toreally embrace – which is, can you accelerate
things at all?
When I visited Master Nan, he often took me totask. He would said, “You just want to save theworld.” And I would go, “Yeah. Right.” He would
kind of shake his head. In one of the last exchanges we had, he said, “You cannot accelerate
things. Do not try to accelerate things.” He went
on to say, “There’s an old Chinese saying that thenight is darkest the last hour before the dawn.
It’s a good time to meditate.”
On the other hand, this is hardly a guy who did
nothing in his life. He was busy doing all thesethings to bring about change. So there is a realparadox here. The simplest way I can express theparadox is, it’s easy for our ego to get attached todoing something significant – and to think thatsomehow “I” must or “I” can or “I” will do something to be the difference at a scale.
I wrote down two things when you asked about
the failures. One is scale, and the second is that wehave not yet found the way to make sufficiently
explicit the developmental aspect of the work.
[Harvard developmental theorist] Bob Kegan uses
a great metaphor. He once said, “Well, I don’t really
write about spirituality. But it is sort of a dog whistle
in my work. You know, a dog whistle can only beheard by dogs.” He said, “There’s a message, but
only certain people hear it. And it doesn’t distract
everybody else.” To some degree, it is probably
true of all of us. We don’t use the words “spirituality” or “spiritual.” We do talk about human development. Even that gets tricky sometimes, because
people can react strongly – for example, those
who think this is the business of religion.

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Going forward, we have to learn how to be more
explicit. I believe that Theory U and all the subsequent work it has generated is a big step in explicitness. As you said yourself, Otto, you could
go back and find different things – whether it ispersonal mastery or talk about the implicate order– in the early writings in this territory. But that’s
all they were. They were like the dog whistle.
They were a little thing here, a little thing there.
If somebody was on that wavelength, they would
go, “Aha! I understand that relates to this andthis and this.”
Theory U is much more explicit. It leads me towonder if there is a next stage in explicitness ordirectness. Maybe another word to use is “demystify.” Because one of the things that keeps us frombeing as explicit as we need to be about deep
development is we tend to mystify it.
You now use the word “consciousness” a lot, Otto.
I don’t think you used to use it nearly so much, ormaybe you’ve used it for a long time and I hadn’t
noticed it. But a couple of years ago, I heard you
talk about Theory U as a particular theory andmethod that is all about “awareness-based” change.
That is a good example of being more direct.

Collective KarmaDARCY: Peter, can I just jump in here. You mentioned Master Nan. And you shared one otherstatement, maybe one of the last he made to you.
It was something to the effect that “Collective
karma cannot be changed by one heroic spirit orindividual.” That stuck with me. As we look to thefrontiers, I interpret that in some profound ways.
Can you share a little bit about what that means
to you in the context of frontiers?
PETER: Well, it is actually something that Otto andI have talked about as much as I’ve talked about itwith anybody. We have entered an era, somewherein this last generation or so, where deep, individual
developmental work or individual enlightenment

We have entered an era,somewhere in this last generation
or so, where deep, individual
developmental work is notenough. It really is aboutcollective cultivation.

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Theory U
Downloading
past patterns

Performing by
operating from the wholesuspending

embodying

Open
Mind

Seeingwith fresh eyes

Prototyping the new bylinking head, heart, handredirecting

enacting

Open
Heart

Sensingfrom the field

Crystallizing
vision and intention

Open
Will

letting goletting come

Presencing

connecting to Source

Who is my Self? What is my Work?
Presencing Institute - Otto Scharmer - www.presencing.com/permissions

Somehow, somewhere over thelast three to five thousand years,
we’ve decided human beings
were the most important species.
is not enough. It really is about collective
cultivation.
I have a little pad of paper from my last visit withMaster Nan in April [2012]. And I’ve gone back andreread a lot of what’s there. It is amazing. It’s soclear and so relevant. One of the statements wasjust what Darcy said: “Collective karma cannot betransformed by heroic individual action.” Collective
karma would be a good way of describing our
predicament, right? We’ve inherited a whole setof structures and assumptions and ways of operating. And we pass them along, embedded inour schools, businesses, governments, markets,and media.
The term “karma” is easily misunderstood in theWest. Again, it doesn’t have to be mystified. It justacknowledges that when a human being comes
into existence, there is something more than asperm and an egg. There is some inheritancethat comes with the human being. If you don’t
accept that, how the hell is every single person
so different? Two people could have the same
mother and father, it doesn’t matter – they canbe totally different people. You know, from 		
saints to the ultimate sinners.
So clearly, there is something beyond the effectsof our environment. In Eastern traditions, they callit “karma.” But you can also say it is deep seeds webring with us into life in some form or other.
The whole systems viewpoint in effect says thatthe same thing happens collectively, that whatf e at u r e | S e ng e , S cha r m e r , and winslow

we’ve built up goes beyond the lifetime of asingle leader or leaders and is transferred directly
through culture, language, and who knows how
many other ways. This could be collective at thelevel of an organization or a society. It can bevisible like how we talk or dress, or very subtle.
For example, somehow, somewhere over thelast three to five thousand years, we’ve decided
human beings were the most important species.
There is a hierarchy of importance, and humanbeings are at the top of the hierarchy. It is not justthat we have certain features that other species
don’t have. There is us and there is everybody else.
And this worldview comes with a deeper notionof profound separateness: We are separate. We aredifferent. We are apart from the rest of nature’s
creations. There are many cultural nuances, but
beyond the individual cultures is this idea thathuman beings are separate and somehow more
important.
That’s collective karma or collective inheritance.
And we are going to have to collectively cultivatea different view. I think that that’s partly why
Master Nan was always needling me about mykind of ego-based orientation to save the world.
But it’s a genuine paradox. Because the opposite
is not the point, you know, do nothing and let
everything just go the way it goes because there
is nothing you can do at all. We have always understood the importance of collective cultivation,
at least at the level of team, such as in team learning and building shared vision. But the way that
the Presencing tools get at this is more direct
and is a big step, because they explicitly address
collective sensing and co-creating at multiple
levels of aggregation.
Again, I wonder if they aren’t other steps coming.

A Change to Our Collective StoryDARCY: One way to express this is that, as asociety, we are living out a story. How do we start
to change our story? How do we start to change
our trajectory, our collective karma, personallyor in community with others? And what are yourthoughts on the impact the SoL community and
the Presencing community could have over the
next five, 10, 15 years?

Seeds start so small. And suddenly,
when we look over the field, we
see sprouts coming up. That’s
exactly where I feel we are as a
global movement.
OTTO: Coming back to Master Nan’s statement– yes, individuals cannot change collective karma,
but together we can. And the together starts,
interestingly, with individuals. The actual process
has a lot to do with paying attention, opening
up your awareness, going to the edges of thesystem and of yourself, and creating a space
where we can venture with each other in a 		safe, exploratory way.
What happens in the spring? You see nothing.
Seeds start so small. And suddenly, when we lookover the field, we see sprouts coming up. That’s
exactly where I feel we are as a global movement.
All of the depressing things that are going on, andeveryone who is not in denial can only be cynicaland depressed. Yes, that is all true.
At the same time, when we look at the opening of
the heart and the transformation of relationships,
we can create generative fields of connections. We
have developed methods, tools, frameworks, andexamples, through which, starting with very small
groups, we can attend to each other and to ourselves and to our environment in a way that gives
rise to a new connection between the part andthe whole.
[Philosopher of science] Henri Bortoft said, 		
“The whole is presencing itself in the parts.” Sothat means the key to the future is this extended
awareness of the connection to the whole. The
whole is living within me. What I’m doing is

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informed by the presencing of the whole throughme. At the same time, I’m holding the space forothers to move into that same space. There isan enormous power in this collective practicethat we can bring into reality in a much more
intentional way.

Our Critical Development Edge
DARCY: If we look at the future of learning communities – SoL and the Presencing Institute are

The idea of eliminating noiseand distraction is a transcendent
message. When you are serious
about any deep developmental
process, that will become adimension of it.

just one expression of those – what is the criticaldevelopment edge going forward? As a collective
community, as a collective learning community,
what are we? What do we need to pay attention
to with regard to our own development?
PETER: Well, that’s the question. We all have tolearn what to pay attention to. To me, in general,
it’s pretty simple: What enhances life and what
doesn’t? And become a student of what enhances
your sense of life and energy and purpose andwhat doesn’t, and be ruthless in following whatworks and eliminating what doesn’t work.
The significance of being a community is that it’s
hard work. We need to help each other. We’ve got
to stop screwing around. What if we imagined thatwhat we are doing really matters, not for us but
for our kids and our kids’ kids and for life and forthe future generations of all species.
Imagine it actually has significance. You would
start being much more diligent in paying attention
to our own thoughts and actions – all the time,
not just when we feel like it. Do what works. Don’t
do what doesn’t work. You don’t need to know
anything else.
DARCY: And, what do you love? What do you
want to conserve? Start there.
OTTO: First, there is a big need for noise reduction
mechanisms. That’s where community comes in.
How do we reduce the noise and connect withwhat’s most essential? What is noise? What remains
when all the noise is gone? So that’s certainly a
big need and has a lot of momentum already insmall ways.
The second part has to do with creativity andentrepreneurship. Does the technology that weare creating enhance life and creativity? The word
“technology” goes back to the Greek word “techne,”meaning “art.” So technology really goes back tocreation. If you look at how we use technology
today, it is to some degree creativity diminishingand to another degree creativity enhancing. To

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reconnect with the essence of technology andart means to cultivate those things that help us
tap into our individual and collective sourcesof creativity.
And the third part has to do with co-sensing.
Co-sensing is making meaning across boundaries
and silos. An image that comes up for me is society
as a collective brain. The way we organize society
today is that we have all these silos, and theneuronal connections aren’t there in this collective
brain. So that’s why, in the U-Process, the sensing
and paying attention are done in real time together.
But we haven’t built institutions or collective practices that do the same thing for society as whole.
You know, human awareness that doesn’t haveco-sensing cannot move from “ego” to “eco.” It is
as simple as that. And those are the institutions
that are missing.
Darcy’s story about Nike and what happened in
the SoL Sustainability Consortium is a foreshadowing of what’s possible. But we need to be much
more intentional in bringing the players together
and into experiences that allow the shift fromego to eco to happen in a more reliable way.
In my view, co-sensing is not picked up enough.
When it is picked up, it is not done well, because
people think they can move over it and get to thecool “connecting to source” and so on. They don’t
realize that the problem they have later on in the
prototyping actually starts with the quality of theirco-sensing. You can’t fix it by tinkering downstream. You have to start earlier.

How can you possibly be of any
real use as a leader on a larger
scale if you can’t lead yourself
through the thicket of your own
emotions and thoughts?

PETER: The idea of eliminating noise and distraction is a transcendent message. When you areserious about any deep developmental process,that will become a dimension of it. It doesn’t
matter what the tradition is or the method.
The irony, of course, is a lot of noise is pretty
powerful stuff. The image of noise makes it soundlike it’s a bunch of bad traffic noise in the background. But a lot of times, the noise is what is
dominating us emotionally. It’s the stuff that
totally occupies us, either because it is tapping
our fear or our greed or whatever. You wouldn’t
normally use the term “noise,” but it is noise
relative to the deeper state of pure awareness.
DARCY: And I think that is what it is. It is not thatthe noise goes away but rather becoming awareof what is noise and what is important.

DARCY: It goes back to your comment about
the noise in the system. I still have both of you to
thank for bringing that to the forefront through astory that you shared in the book Presence and forthe introduction to John Milton. The first sacredpassage I did was because of that book.

PETER: I believe we need regular practices ordisciplines to do this well. This morning, I got up
to do meditation, and it became evident as soon
as I started that I was pretty agitated. Quickly,
I realized certain areas in my body were tight.
Almost always, when I’m worried about something, it shows up in particular physical conditions.
And so then I could just look at the thoughts andbecome aware of them. I did a little tai chi, andI got clear that all I had to do was keep my awareness in my feet and everything would be fine.
It was amazing. The whole thing just was gone.

The biggest message and gift I got from that solo
was to let the noise go away. When I did, I immediately knew the direction I needed to take for essentially the rest of my life. We don’t give enoughspace and time to allow that noise to go away.

So we all have our own inner choreography, ourown ways of doing this. But there’s a progression
from not being aware of the emotion but seeing
it as a physical area of tension, to identifying thethought and the emotion that went with it, to

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Because I’m the sort of person who, whenever I’m
stuck, I’m stuck in my head in one way or another.
And the answer is, get into your feet. Stand. That’s
a noise reduction mechanism. That’s having someability to move into noise, particularly when it isreally loud, and letting it transform itself.
I don’t really care what the hell your disciplineis, but you need to have one. Find the spiritual
tradition that speaks to you right now, and maybe
a different one will speak to you in five years. It
doesn’t really matter.
But how can you possibly be of any real use asa leader on a larger scale if you can’t lead yourself
through the thicket of your own emotions andthoughts – and you get tied up in knots by anger,
fear, and tension? This is an old, universal idea.
And we have to be a little more direct about it.
DARCY: My last question is, what else do weneed to consider?
PETER: Stop screwing around. That’s it.

OTTO: What we need to consider is that thenoise reduction mechanisms are most importantly
missing on a collective level. We have plenty ofmechanisms on the individual level, as Peter mentioned, that have emerged from all the wisdom
traditions of the world. But what we don’t haveare the collective noise reduction mechanisms– infrastructures and practices that help us toco-sense and presence what matters to the futureof our community. What we have today are collective noise amplification mechanisms, for example,
commercials. When you go to Bhutan, you meeta society without advertising and commercials inpublic spaces. That’s a first example of collective
noise reduction. But much more is necessary.
I was just involved in the launch of the Global
Wellbeing and Gross National Happiness Lab
with the prime minister of Bhutan as one of ourpatrons. The Lab, co-convened by the Presencing
Institute and the German Ministry of Development
Cooperation, brings together change makers from
Bhutan, Brazil, India, China, the US, and Europe to“innovate beyond GDP” in order to reinvent our
economy from noise amplification to noise reduction. How can we transform the positive energyof the noise to a higher level of awareness?
In that spirit, let me shut up here… na b o u t th e a u tho r sPeter Senge is the founding chair of SoL, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and the author of The Fifth Discipline. He is also coauthor of Presence: Human Purpose and the Fieldof the Future, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together toCreate a Sustainable World, and the series of Fifth Discipline Fieldbooks, including the newly released
Schools That Learn.
Otto Scharmer is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founding
chair of the Presencing Institute. He is cofounder of the Global Wellbeing and Gross National
Happiness Lab, author of Theory U: Leading from the Future As It Emerges, and coauthor of Presence:
Human Purpose and the Field of the Future and Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System
to Eco-System Economies (July 2013).
Darcy Winslow is managing partner of the Academy for Systemic Change and founder of Designs fora Sustainable World Collective, LLC. She worked at Nike, Inc., for more than 20 years and held several
senior management positions within the business. Most recently, she served as general manager
for Nike’s Global Women’s Fitness Business and as senior advisor to the Nike Foundation.

Pa r t T h r e e

Listening to the Field

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f e at u r e 1 2 . 4

Voices from the Community
In October 2012, we sent a set of questions to members representing SoL’s diverse constituencies. The intent
was to give respondents the opportunity not only to share but also to celebrate the benefits and achievements
they have enjoyed as members of this extraordinary organization. Our hope was that their responses would
provide a rich array of stories and experiences demonstrating SoL’s value. They did not disappoint. We weredelighted, but not surprised, to learn first-hand of the commonality of purpose and depth of commitment
to SoL’s vision and principles that characterized each response. Perhaps most heartening and uplifting werepeople’s responses to the question, “What are your highest aspirations for SoL?” SoL members, it seems, wantnothing less than for its organization to be the global presence that stewards a sustainable and healthy
future for all of humankind.

Michael Sales
Principal, Art of the Future and Co-Chair, SoL North America
Association with SoL
SoL has been a critically important resource for me since I joined as a consultant
member in 1999. It was through SoL that I met my partner, Anika Savage. It was
through SoL that Anika and I first piloted our Structural Dynamics Process to an
appreciative audience of thoughtful colleagues, who helped us to improve ouroffering. It was through SoL that we refined that process into both our Environmental Seminar and our
Healthcare Seminar. SoL was instrumental in the birthing of Art of the Future, the strategy consulting
firm Anika and I have created, which has been one of the real highlights of my professional life.

Standout Moments and Insights
SoL has also been a tremendous source of inspirational colleagues who’ve become friends and teachers.
There are so many of them that it would be impossible to create a full inventory of the SoL-connected
people whom I am delighted to see and talk with. The kind of thoughtful discourse I have come to
expect from SoL colleagues got codified by seven of us into a monthly dinner group that has been
meeting to inquire into all sorts of matters for more than 10 years. This gathering has proven to bea fantastic by-product of my involvement with SoL.
The courseware that I’ve been exposed to through SoL, e.g., Foundations for Leadership and the introduction to systems thinking course, has been truly excellent! I would wholeheartedly recommend thesecourses to anyone, both in terms of their content and their processes, which take learners deep into
themselves and into a connection with the course community.
Finally, the importance of the raw information sources available through SoL, e.g., the articles in
Reflections and books like The Fifth Discipline and The Necessary Revolution, cannot be overstated. I think
on a planetary level, and I am always looking for pathways that enable me to apply and expand myidealism in a highly practical fashion. Looking at the thought and action of my colleagues throughpublications such as these has been a constant source of enlightenment and encouragement.

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Milestones
The Consultants’ Convergences that occurred fora number of years were a terrific innovation, and I
look forward to seeing those rebooted in the years
ahead. These have been a great testing ground for
new ideas and for capacity building. Similarly, the
SoL Global Coaching Community has made a realdifference to its participants, and I was pleased
to be engaged with that activity, which advanced
my own practice. Also, the annual meetings, suchas the one in Detroit several years ago, wereabsolutely terrific. Finally, I was fortunate enoughto attend a multi-month course offered by Rick
Karash, through which he demonstrated how hedelivered SoL’s systems thinking course. It was anincredible gift from a very talented teacher andcaring person.

I would like SoL to develop an inventory of people
it wants to know in the environmental movement
and the educational world. Clearly, we are alreadydoing that through the Sustainability Consortiumand the SoL Education Partnership and other efforts,
but I’m referring to a different type of scanning.
This sort of targeted outreach effort just won apresidential election. There ought to be some
way that any SoL member looking at a website
or reading an article could say, “Oooh-oooh! We
gotta get this person info about SoL! We gotta get
her on the mailing list! We need somebody to callher up and interview her for The Flash or put avideo clip of her on the Facebook page!”

Highest Aspirations
Ah, the pleasure of dealing with such a small
question!

Leverage Points
SoL should reach out to the media and to politically active people in an assertive and targeted
way and offer them training in systems thinking,with an emphasis on causal loops and stock andflow analysis. Many reporters and politicians
speak in terms of systemic dynamics and feedback
loops, but they don’t understand the value thatwould come from using simple graphics and thearchetypes to explain these matters to others.
I would love to see a strategy group in SoL identify
100-1,000 specific individuals we could contact
over the next three to 10 years to offer them new
ways of thinking about old matters.

Ágota Ruzsa
Director of the SoL
Institute, Hungary
Association with SoL
I took part in the OLC Core
Course in 1995, facilitatedby Peter Senge and Beth
Janderoa. Before that, I was an invited participant
in the OLC Dialogue Facilitators’ Project fromIn their 2011 article, “Communities of Commitment,”
Claudia Madrazo and Peter Senge quote the great
planetary thinker R. Buckminster Fuller in sayingthat humankind is facing its “final exam.” It is one
that we cannot flunk, and I happen to think it’scoming up sooner rather than later, probably
sometime in this century. My highest aspirationfor SoL is that (1) it be widely thought of as aresource that is going to help humanity pass thisexam, and (2) it become a repository of people,
ideas, and tools that are widely disseminated andused by people all over Earth to comprehend thecomplexity of the situation that we’re all in together
and to take foresight-informed actions that constitute “fixes that work” rather than short-sighted
ones that fail.

1992–1994, which is where my passion and commitment to dialogue and dialogic process bothin facilitation and coaching originated. As a resultof this program, I became a member of an international women’s dialogue, originally inspired andorganized by Juanita Brown. The dialogue took
place every year for a long time; the last one wasin Hungary in 2003. As an offspring of that program,
we initiated a Danube Dialogue. We have alreadyhad two and will have the next in 2013.

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I personally became involved with SoL in 1998,
and then was invited to be one of the stewards
in the process to form Global SoL that was coordinated by Göran Carstedt. Since then, in my regionof Hungary and central eastern Europe, I havebeen active in sharing the knowledge and capacities related to SoL and in developing learning
communities. Since 1998, my colleagues at SoL
Hungary and I have organized regular SoL events.
In 2004, we held a conference with Peter Senge
and Ervin Laszlo on Learning Organizations for
Sustainability. Since then, we have also held a SoL
European Sustainability Group gathering and theSustainability in Action course. With the assistanceof Guus Geisen in education and Christoph Mandlin business, we at the SoL Institute have placed
more emphasis than ever on developing collective understanding in how systems thinking canenhance our capacities in society, education,and business.

Standout Moments and Insights
The Core Course. It was the inspiration, commitment, and depth that I had never experienced
until then. The five disciplines echoed my understanding of and affiliation to the “mission“ I am
here to embody. Coming from the central European “intelligentia,” I also met people from thebusiness and corporate worlds whom I had
never come across before.
Our Global SoL Steward Meetings. In thesegatherings, I relished the unfolding of our differences, the potential of dialogic conversations,and the even higher potential of what we might
become able to generate together.
The First European SoL Event in France. Here,I experienced a “joie de vivre” as we as a groupexplored new, promising, trusting, and creative
energies and desires to bring the social impactof SoL to a larger scale.
For a long time, SoL has served as a “spirituality
in action homeland” for me, where I can return
when feeling dried out and thirsty, when losing

hope and inspiration. I know there have been
a lot of other great initiatives, yet what really held
me in SoL was the lack of wanting to jump on the
bandwagon of the latest trend or of moving into amoney-making initiative. SoL has kept the potentialof sustained learning alive through its core principles and disciplines. In addition, SoL has became
a generative, gracious, and life-sustaining motherto many new lines of thoughts and initiatives.

Milestones
The first milestone was the exciting process when
the OLC turned itself into SoL. What a generativeand creative energy it must have unleashed!
The second was the formation of Global SoL,
which opened a new vista for many, althoughmost participants were still from the so-called
developed countries.
The third milestone was the expansion of SoL into
a second level of global community. With this kindof formalization, the challenge will be to keep andenhance the loose, network-based, living systemaspect. I would like to see SoL move away from a
Caucasian-dominated and mostly business-based
network of corporate and OD people into aninterdisciplinary, intersectoral, and multinationalmultiracial global organization capable of nurturing a “New Beginning.” The space and potential
and vision are there – we just need to makeit happen.

Leverage Points
Some of the leverage points that SoL can offerand support:• Deep Dialogue as originally proposed byDavid Bohm and as enhanced by the Deep
Democracy movement, expanded beautifully
with The World Café, and further developedby the Art of Hosting communities.
• Systems thinking as a general and sharedpublic capacity growing from all school
curricula and made available to all.
• A view of the world and all her creatures asliving entities who have the full right to live
and share and develop their capacities.

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• A shift in perspective so that the so-called“western world” becomes interested in thematerially less privileged not only to help themor offer knowledge to them but to graciously
learn from and be inspired by them so that trueand mutually supportive partnerships may
arise.
• The desire to stay for a while where we are,look around, and see all that needs to be done
there. When we do so, we learn to appreciateand “pay for” the things that are currently
invisible to us.

Highest Aspirations
I would like to see a true global knowledge andinsight-sharing community arise in which stewards offer facilitation in all four corners of theworld. So, somebody from India or Hungary

Alfred Hanner
Internal Organization
Consultant, Saudi
AramcoAssociation with SoL
My association began
many years ago. As inmany large corporations, the company joined SoL,
and someone thought that it might somehow
relate to the work I was doing at the time, so heshared the information with me.
Over the years, my capacity and relationship with
SoL has varied. I’ve been a company liaison, helped
design two global forums, helped create GulfSoL,
served on and co-chaired the SoL Council, andmoderated and contributed to the Global SoL
Ning website for a couple of years. I’ve practiced
this work with 1,200 people in a corporate café,with a half dozen people who wanted to create
opportunities for disabled children, and with the
top echelon of regional business leaders and the
young leaders who are the future.

might travel to the US or UK to serve as a reflective
mirror and offer insights that might be obvious tothem but not so obvious to the local people. This
criss-crossing of our talents and experiences could
be a large potential contribution to member
organizations.
I would like to see SoL launch and get involved insome major large-system change projects, whileat the same time seeing and appreciating things
at a local level as well.
I would like to challenge SoL to reinvent itself
once again to generate innovation and knowledge and to become a soul-inspiring, soul-driven
source for people around the world – the Global
SoL Academy of Living Systems.

Standout Moments and Insights
A standout moment for me was sitting among
regional and corporate leaders in the red desert
sands shortly after sunset following a day of café
conversations about the direction of the country.
I was moved to hear individuals stand up andcommit to spending part of their personal fortunes
to provide opportunities for others and to doing
things differently because the old ways of doing
business were not sustainable. This moment
reminded me why I was involved in SoL. After
having helped design the café, seeing others carry
the torch forward into the unknown reminded methat each small contribution to the greater cause
makes a difference, and that all of us can make asmall contribution. Our aspirations, once shared,
become a powerful force for good.
The greatest impact for me has always been theenriching and rejuvenating gatherings, whether
large World Cafés, liaison meetings, global forums,
council meetings, or conferences. The energy andpassion in the room provided the aspiration tocontinue my journey and reinforced my commitment to better the world around me and within
my organization.

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Milestones
The Global Forums would be my milestones. 	
Although I did not participate in the first, I wasvery active in the creation of the second andthird. Bringing the greater community together at
one time creates a substantial amount of energy
and focus, during both the creation phase and theevent itself. The learning and sharing of learnings
during these events certainly expands the knowledge base from which the community grows.

Leverage Points
For me, the leverage point comes by providing
space for open conversations and sharing techniques and practices that allow people to listen
to other points of view. As a community, we havebeen ineffective in using global technology forour personal or organizational growth.

Irène DupouxCouturier
Vice President andGeneral Manager,
SoL France
Association with SoL
The first SoL event I organized was in Paris in March 1998. But before then,in my role as manager of CEFRI (Centre de Formation
aux Réalités Internationals) in France, I organizedhigh-level seminars for the Shell group in liaison
with Arie de Geus, and I followed the evolution of
his thought described in The Living Company. Then
I discovered Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline,
and since the mid-1990s, I have worked on andtaught about “the learning organization,” implementing the philosophy and process not only inFrance but also in Eastern European countries
making the transition to a free-market economy.

Standout Moments and Insights
The Launch of SoL France in March 1998. Arie
had asked me to launch SoL France, and I wasn’t
sure how to handle it. I started by contacting
Jacques Chaize at the Conseil National du Patronat

Going forward, the development of leadershipboth in SoL and in business is critical for a sustainable future. We must develop leadership that isenlightened to our perspective while at the sametime able to listen to and draw on other perspectives. Leadership that understands how to makea difference in the world while making money
to provide for the continuing existence of theorganization is necessary.
The original concept of researcher, consultant,and practitioner is very powerful, yet we appear
to be unable to sustain the model. How do were-energize the concept, thus providing thefield to practice?
If we can balance the stool, it gives us a step up to
understand how to develop those living systems
that we desire.

Français and discovered that several members
were interested in this approach. Next, the Institut
de l’Entreprise, a French think tank, joined us. At
the launch meeting in March 1998, attended by
Arie de Geus and Göran Carstedt, we received positive responses from business leaders. The CEO of
Solvay France and Italy decided to join, becoming
president of the French fractal. The interest by top
managers of important companies in this “newapproach to management” reinforced my intuition
that SoL’s work represented a deep-seated movement in our ways of living and managing. It wasa first step in my own process of seeing things
differently.
The “Joie de vivre” Event in Bordeaux, November
1999. On this occasion, I discovered the strengthof SoL’s international network, with Peter Senge,
representatives of the American network, andrepresentatives from northern and central Europe,in particular Sweden, Austria, and Hungary. Thatday, and again later at Nyenrode, I understood
what an international network meant and how
important it was to meet regularly. In response,
my friend Lucy Nusseibeh from Jerusalem andI launched the idea of international forums.

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Meeting with Alain de Vulpian. In 2003, international sociologist Alain de Vulpian came to see us.
Alain is the founder of Sociovision and a memberof networks of sociologists in Great Britain, Canada,
and the US. His visit was an important momentin the life of SoL. Referring to Norbert Elias, heconfirmed that our philosophy and our approachwere deeply attuned to current changes in 		
civilization.

Vienna was perhaps the most impressive forum,“a symphony of innovations.” On a suggestion
from Finland, the design team opened the forumwith “learning stories” (40 of them, from all over
the world). Afterward, the keynote speakers underlined what we learned though these stories.

Our Working Day with Peter Senge (May 2004)
and the Paris Coordinators’ Council Meeting(May 2009). These were special moments fordeveloping our understanding of Peter’s work,
for strengthening our global network, and forlearning how to work better together.

Other Ways of Disseminating the Work• Publications such as Reflections and Cahiers de
SoL France give storytellers a forum for diffusing
the principles of learning organizations andlearning from action-research case studies• Thematic labs
• The Liaison Officers’ meetings that have createda network of change agents in organizations
around the world

Progress within SoL France Companies. This work
has made a significant difference for a numberof SoL France member companies, including the
French-German aeronautical group EADS, which
through the five disciplines adopted a winningapproach and saved considerable sums of money;
the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, the scientificwing of the Sorbonne University group, which
navigated through a difficult period by building ashared vision and developing numerous new projects; and the Air Control Centre at Reims, responsible for air traffic over the eastern third of France,
which developed a shared vision that is still their“management method.” Perhaps the most moving
moment, though, was when the teams responsible for managing the “Mad Cow” drama in France
came to see us to ask how they could adopt systemic thinking to try to avoid such catastrophes
in the future.

Milestones
EventsIn addition to the standout moments listed above,
the Global Forums in Helsinki, Vienna, and Oman
represented true milestones.
In Helsinki, we learned from our Finnish friends
and from the dynamism of the young membersof Team Academy.

In Oman, we worked on the meeting of culturesand “how to bridge the Gulf.”

Leverage Points
Everything is changing in the world. SoL as aphilosophy, a process, and a space is at the heartof this movement. We must look for ways to help
set our society on the right course.
To address these issues, we have to:
1. Deepen our research and action research on
an international level, have globally diffused
publications and enlightening concrete examples, and make connections between theseexamples, perhaps through a global fieldbook.
2. Share the stories, continue regular meetings
and forums, and create dialogue in social networks. SoL is a network of networks of change
agents and catalysts of metamorphosis.
3. Create a global network of companies, theGlobal Circle of Companies, where they canshare learning experiences.

Highest Aspirations
To help our society to make the right bifurcations,relying on socioperceptive people and change
agents.
To catalyze the necessary metamorphosis of companies and organizations, enhancing human values.

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SoL Global
Coaching
Communityof PracticeJeff Clanon
Partner, Systems
Perspectives LLC

Rick Karash
Owner, Karash
Associates LLC

Association with SoL
Rick Karash and Jeff Clanon both were on thedesign team that created SoL in 1997 and bothhave been associated with SoL since that time as
consultant members. Jeff was on the SoL staff andwas the Director of Partnership Development for
11 years. Rick was a member of SoL’s first Board.
Heidi Sparkes Guber has been associated with
SoL since 2002 as a consultant member. She
has been a member of the SoL Board and more
recently served on the design team for Global SoL.
Miriam Hawley has been a consultant member.

Standout Moments and Insights
Rick, Heidi, Jeff, and many other consultant
members of SoL had the opportunity to work ona coaching contract with NSA, an organizational
member of SoL. Engaging consultant members of
SoL on the project was the result of the idea thatthree perspectives were crucial for maximizing
learning and enabling high performance. This goal
was in direct support of Sol’s purpose: to discover(research), integrate (capacity development), andimplement (practice) theories and practices oforganizational learning for the interdependent
development of people and their institutions.
This work at NSA led to the founding of a SoL
Coaching Community of Practice, which enabled
the development of SoL’s model of coaching, acourse entitled “Leader as Coach,” and coachingdelivery to more than 300 managers in several
SoL member organizations.

Heidi Sparkes
GuberFounding
Partner, Fourth
Quadrant

MiriamHawleyCEO,Englightenment,
Inc.

As this work continued, it provided the foundation
for further work in the area of coaching, including
the organization of the SoL Global Coaching
Community and the development of an advanced
course for professional coaches and leaders inorganizations entitled “Coaching from a Systems
Perspective,” which now has been delivered in SoL
communities in Hungary, Japan, the UK, and India.

Milestones
The initial purpose and design of SoL was certainly
a milestone. The idea of becoming a membershiporganization that supports learning communities
has been the foundation for the work stated above
as well as for lasting relationships that literally
span the world. Without the SoL community, thework described above would not have happened.
Second, the development of a community of practice in the area of coaching was for us a milestone.
Finally, we also see the recent design of a truly
global infrastructure as a pivotal point for SoL.

Leverage Points
We begin by knowing and bringing integrity to
our purposes in life, work, and our communities
and the larger world. In order to be effective, wemust first focus on our health and well-being – thephysical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspectsof our internal, family, and relational systems.
We have more positive and sustainable impact
on others if we lead our lives powerfully andf e at u r e | voic e s f r o m th e co m m u nity

consciously, loving ourselves and others. We
need businesses and organizational systems
where we can use and develop our best selves,and do work we love that serves our purposes
to make a difference.
We are active participants in community systems
that appreciate that there is no business on a deadplanet. To be sustainable, we must recognize that
we are one with the natural world. For example,
Ecuador has written the rights of trees and rivers
and all of nature into its new constitution alongside those of people. And as global citizens – evenif we don’t personally know one another – we are
all interconnected and care for the sustainabilityof our brothers and sisters everywhere.

Marisol Lopez
President, OCCI Global
and the Rizal Academy
for Innovation andLeadership

Association with SoL
After attending the 2008 Pegasus Conferencein Boston with four colleagues and meeting Peter
Senge for the first time, upon my return home,
I rounded up my network of consultants andbusiness clients to convene SoL Philippines. My
goal was to re-create the learning community
experience that I had benefited from.
In early 2009, I applied for community recognition
on behalf of 24 other men and women, and thatrecognition was approved in July. I was elected toa two-year term as the first executive director of
SoL Philippines.
Filipino OD practitioners are familiar with Peter’swork, because it is one of many other OD theories
taught in our management schools. With mybeginner’s mind, I posed the question, “Why don’t

Highest Aspirations
In this increasingly interdependent and interconnected world, one of our highest aspirations as a
SoL community might be to have fluid and flexible
partnerships that can be tapped into as needed
anywhere in the world. The deep experience,expertise, and collective learning practices that
we hold as a global community could be put touse and expanded for the good of humankind,especially in places where deep systemic issues
hold us back from having a world that works sustainably for everyone. We face deep, intransigent
challenges of increasing population and depleting
renewable resources. Somewhere in these conditions also exist the innovative and collective
solutions that we might make more accessible
through cultivating the “network of networks”
that is emerging.

I see Philippine companies truly practicing thefive disciplines and moving toward societal sustainability and global citizenship? Was the spiritof the learning organization lost in translation?”
The more I learned about learning organizations,through reading and participating in Otto Scharmer’s Presencing in Action Lab, the greater my senseof urgency to share these important ideas withothers.

Standout Moments and Insights• Meeting Peter in 2008 and hosting him in
Manila in April 2011. He is such a busy man,and yet every time I have the opportunity to
be coached by him, I feel his genuine desire tohelp me succeed in the work of transforming
Philippine companies and other systems into
learning organizations.
• Organizing the ELIAS Philippines Learning
Journey in October 2010–2011 and learning
much from Otto Scharmer. I also participatedin the first Presencing in Action Lab from 2010–2012 with two colleagues and was part of apeer coaching group with members fromIndonesia, Singapore, and Australia.

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the Snowball Philippines learning community
to promote systems thinking in the country’s
K–12 schools.
I consider all of these encounters and learning
experiences as grace . . . and with much grace
comes much responsibility.

the initiative succeed. I haven’t even met them
yet but I feel part of the team and am willing to
do my share.
The third milestone is the fact that whole systemchange, systemic change, and sustainability are
the current buzz words, but SoL has been using
them for the last two decades. The challenge
for me is to develop practitioners faster without
losing the spirit of the original impulse.

Leverage Points
Milestones
The first milestone for me is the constancy andcommitment of the core group of members who
have stayed faithful to the work. Being a new kid
on the block, I immediately felt acceptance andsupport not only from Peter but also from Sherry
Immediato, Mark Alpert, and Frank Schneider.
Recently, I met Robert Hanig, one of SoL’s founding members, and he also impressed me withthe same spirit that characterizes other SoL
members. That’s “branding.”
The second milestone has been the very courageous
move to go global. Again, I’m impressed with thelevel of commitment from the core group to help

MichaelKillingsworthVice President Learning& Organization
Effectiveness
Upstream Americas,
Shell Oil Company
Association with SoL
I first joined as a Liaison Officer (LO) in 2002,
representing Shell. Shortly after being nominatedas the LO, I signed up for the Foundations for
Leadership course, which was led by Peter Senge.
This was an excellent way to fully embed myself
into SoL and to equip myself to bring the SoL
experience into Shell in as many ways as possible.
The foundational course, combined with my first
LO meeting, was all it took to create the passion

For me, at the end of the day, it is still about leadership. We need to learn how to be collaborative
leaders and transform mindsets to accept thetruth that we are all part of one big system. I havebeen fortunate enough to be coached by Peterand Otto, and in them I see the embodiment of
the message. I hope to be able to share what I
learn and inspire more Filipinos by also being themessage of oneness, wholeness, and sharing.

Highest Aspirations
To continue developing practitioners who live
the message. I feel quite fortunate to be part ofthis community. I hope to create the same kindof loving community in the Philippines.

and dedication I feel for SoL, which has only
increased over the past 10 years.

Standout Moments and Insights
On a personal level, being connected with SoL
over the past 10 years has enabled me to develop
many long-term professional and individual
relationships. Since the first meeting I attended,
my network quickly grew, and that network has
not only been sustainable but also continued
to increase. I am proud of this network, as theseare folks I feel totally comfortable calling on for
professional guidance as well as connectingwith as friends.
On a professional level, deepening my knowledge
and skills with systems thinking has proven to bevaluable to my career growth. I’ve been able tof e at u r e | voic e s f r o m th e co m m u nity

apply these skills as well as transfer them to others.
Something that seems so simple yet is profoundly
effective is the check-in process that I’ve learned
through SoL. Over the years, I have used it individually to prepare myself for certain interventions
and with groups to ensure focus on our objectives.
Many years ago, the LO group collaborated on the“SoL Applied Learning Process,” which is used forpressing business needs. To this day, I carry themodel with me in my computer case so I can constantly refer to it. It’s more than just a model, as
the LO team used the process to work throughsome organizational initiatives. Another projectthat has made a significant impact on my work iswhat we call “Hastily Formed Networks.” So, while
the Liaison Officer group is no longer connecting
on a regular basis, I continue to use some of the
key work we established.

Milestones
Each and every Liaison Officer meeting I joined
over the years provided one more nugget ofknowledge and one more opportunity to further
strengthen my global network. Someone recently
asked me, “As a leader, what makes you happy?”
My quick response was “a cancelled meeting,”
given the number of meetings I am requested
to attend. This was not the case with the LO meetings; I looked forward to them and acquired new
knowledge, skills, and actions at each session.
In addition, there are three major events thathave made a strong impact on my personal andprofessional development through SoL:
In September 2005, I was part of the design teamthat helped to build and deliver the 2nd Global
Forum, held in Vienna, Austria. Under the theme“A Symphony of Innovation: Leveraging Complexity to Create Knowledge and Confidence,” hundredsof practitioners from many countries gathered inthis beautiful location to collaborate, share, andexplore learning through business case studies,
research, and various methodologies.
In February 2007, I hosted the Liaison Officer
meeting at The Woodlands, Texas. This particulargathering was more than our regular meeting,as we kicked off with a day of focus on diversity
and inclusion. Various organizations demonstrated
what they are doing in the D&I space as a bestpractice. To date, those who experienced thatday are still reflecting on their learnings.
In April 2008, I again had the honor of being
part of the design team for the 3rd Global Forum,
held in Muscat, Oman. The theme that year was“Bridging the Gulf: Learning Across Organizations,
Sectors, and Cultures.” This fantastic event, held
under a tent, provided us opportunities to learn
from inspiring keynote speakers, practitioner
roundtables, workshops, cultural excursions,and even learning “souqs” (or “marketplaces”).

Leverage Points
To create healthier and more sustainable humansystems, I believe it is important to maintain aholistic, diverse, positive frame of mind, which requires us to learn from all situations we are facedwith and to seek the good from those experiences.
We must keep a strong work-life balance and carefully determine the amount of time and energy
we spend on work and the amount we allow for
our friends and families. I am a strong advocateof Accelerative Learning, adult learning methodologies, and the principles of SoL, and believethese elements are required for learning to beeffective and efficient in any environment.

Highest Aspirations
As I consider the future of SoL over the next few
years, I would love to see the Liaison Officer network come back to life, given the powerful impact
it provides organizations. Additionally, I would
like to see the Global Forum become the desired
annual event to attend. We continue to explore
new avenues that we’ve not yet traveled using theexpertise that SoL holds, so I encourage strong
participation in those areas. An example is a project that we are currently considering where organizations can come together to discuss, review,and decide how we can improve our approachto safety performance.

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Nancy Southern
Executive Faulty and
Chair, Organizational
Systems Programs,
Saybrook University
Association with SoL
I have been associatedwith the Society of Organizational Learning since
1999, when I attended my first Bay Area SoL meeting. Within a year, I became a Steward of the Bay
Area Sol community and continued in that role
for the last 13 years, supporting programs, newmember connections, and liaison to the global
SoL community. In the mid-2000s, I became a
researcher member of SoL.

Standout Moments and Insights
The work itself, the purpose of the work, thewonderful colleagues have all shaped who I am
as a person, researcher, teacher, and consultant.

Milestones
The movement to establishing SoL as a true global
community was the greatest milestone, in myopinion, in stretching the boundaries of who weare and the impact we want to create in the world.
Along with this change, the conversation andstructural changes to creating SoL North America
and more local communities seem to be opening
the door to becoming a less exclusive and more
dynamic learning community.

Christoph Mandl
Senior Partner, Mandl,
Luethi & Partner, andProfessor at the Schoolof Business, Economics,
and Statistics,
University of Vienna,
Austria

Leverage Points
Developing the capacity for systems thinking andsystemic change is critical to a sustainable future.
Systems thinking needs to be seen as more thanthe use of the tools of system dynamics. A true
systems thinker understands herself as a relational
being and takes action based on that understanding. Also important is the recognition of the participatory nature of systems work and the theories
and models that support it. These are all part ofthe conversation in the SoL community, yet theyneed to be made more explicit, so that peopleview systems thinking and being from a larger
perspective.

Highest Aspirations
One of my main objectives would be increasing
membership and creating a network where people can more easily connect with one another. We
need to have many strong local communities anda robust virtual global community. We need tofind new ways to get our message out. I think of
the impact the Pachamama Alliance has had in
the world. They have done this through inviting
people in around a powerful message and purpose in creating change. Yet they are not strongin creating learning communities. We have theknowledge of what learning communities can be.
Now we need to find a better way of developing
them and supporting people who will keep them
alive and relevant.

Association with SoL
I was first associated with SoL Austria in 2001,
and then soon afterward I became involved withFounding SoL. I’m presently involved with Global
SoL, which is quite exciting because it’s still in avery early stage. Basically, there is now a legal
framework that the different local or regional
communities of SoL can use to create conferences
or work on projects or create publications together. It’s totally open at the moment, but thevery fact that there’s now this kind of framework

f e at u r e | voic e s f r o m th e co m m u nityof the Global SoL Association is actually a major
step forward.

Standout Moments and Insights
A profound experience was when I happened toget an early copy of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook.
I was in Boston for a different reason, and I went
to the Harvard Coop and there were lots of Fieldbooks there. I knew something like that was coming out but I didn’t know when. I took the bookwith me on a vacation in the Azores, and I remember reading a piece by Bill Isaacs on team learningand dialogue. That was a real eye opener that substantially changed my professional work. I guessthat was also the reason I became interested in
SoL, because for me it was the only organization
at the time concerned about this kind of communication approach in teams. I’m still working withthese concepts, ideas, and methods today.
One of the other experiences was when the first
Global SoL conference in Finland came into being
in 2003. Earlier, at a SoL meeting at the University
of Nyenrode in the Netherlands, a group of us
created the idea of a Global SoL conference. We
brought it into the plenary, and people picked
it up, and it actually materialized. I’ve never experienced something starting in the heads of a few
and then materializing to that extreme except
at SoL. It is something that I really cherished.

Another interesting milestone was the set of
dialogue interviews that Otto Scharmer did andpublished on the web. I also think that the whole
U-Process that Otto brought into being wasanother milestone.

Leverage Points
I’ve been very much influenced by the thinking
and concept of team learning over the last 15
or 17 years. The greatest leverage point is whenpeople at all levels – at very big levels such as the
UN climate change conferences but also on verysmall levels in some departments and organizations – can communicate in such a way that theycome to a clear understanding of the interdependencies between them and the next steps theyneed to take. Unless people can talk to each otherand come to a consensus about what needs tobe done, we won’t be able to solve the challenges
that we are facing. The only method or conceptthat I know with the potential to cope with theseissues is team learning or dialogue.
The other thing is that when I’m teaching at theuniversity, I always tell my students that the 21st
century is going to be the century of the tragedyof the commons. The only construct I know offor addressing this is systems thinking. So to me,team learning and systems thinking are the coreleverage points.

Milestones

Highest Aspirations

The first real major milestone before SoL existed
was The Fifth Discipline together with the Fieldbook.
After the creation of the Organizational Learning
Center at MIT and then the founding of the Society
for Organizational Learning in Boston, the next
major milestone was the major effort, led by
Gören Carsted, to support the creation of different
SoL communities around the world. That was a big
step from having the Society for Organizational
Learning in Boston as the only organization versus
20 or 30 different communities all over the world.

The highest aspiration would be to bring those
two ideas – team learning and systems thinking –into global society at large. We’re 7 billion people,
and maybe a couple of thousand or a couple
hundred thousand people have an understandingof systems thinking and team learning/dialogue.
So the biggest challenge for me is to bring theseconcepts into the world. And I know it takes along time to get this kind of thinking across. My
personal vision of SoL is an organization that has
two core competencies – systems thinking andteam learning – that we bring to the world.

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Cristina D’Arce
President of SoL Brazil
Association with SoL
Some friends and I
founded SoL Brazil in 2000.
We shared a profound interest in the field of organizational learning. Since then, I’ve also been thecoordinator and, more officially, president of
SoL Brazil.
It was a long journey until the container could
be fertile enough to grow the seeds and we wereable to sustain a large, committed membership.
For 12 years, we have had monthly meetings, eachfive-hours long. The group has focused its learningon themes of interest to all members of the SoL
community: education, sustainability, cultural
biology, systems thinking, the economy, business,transdisciplinary approaches to education andhealth, collective thinking, design thinking, and soon. We chose to be a learning space that inspires
and gives support for people to create crosssectoral networks and to act in their own 		
working environments.

Standout Moments and Insights
One of the most important moments was our
first attempt, in January 2004, to create a truly
global and connected SoL spirit. A group of SoL
coordinators met in Boston, with the guidanceand support of Sherry Immediato, and engaged
in a deep reflection on how each community
could work locally while aiming to be in serviceof the whole by sharing knowledge, practices,
tools, and stories.

finally see ourselves not as isolated communities
but as a much larger group of intentionally connected groups. We could feel vision and purpose
create the community’s life and body.
The second milestone was the 2005 Forum in
Vienna. I was part of the design team and could
feel our confidence grow as a group to expand
horizons, create together, be daring on our goals.
We really acted as team, and the event was very
successful.
A third critical milestone was a meeting on theoutskirts of Paris in May 2009, with representatives of SoL communities and sister communities(Presencing Institute, Sustainable Food Lab, World
Café, and others). Global SoL, in its present structure, evolved from a three-year journey thatstarted at that Paris meeting.
A fourth milestone was the meeting in Stockholm
in May 2012 that led to the consolidation of the
new Global Sol.

Leverage Points
I believe that the most effective leverage points
are SoL’s social networks, which create a collective
dialogue and sustained action with whoever feels
the urge and willingness to act. Every humanbeing should feel responsible for and be involvedin this kind of transformation, in the areas andconcerns that he or she feels deeply drawn to. If
we rely only on defined structures and particulargroups to lead people toward their goals, I do notbelieve that we will generate the transformations
we need.

Highest Aspirations
Milestones
From my perspective, a first important milestone
was the 2003 Forum in Finland. There we could

May our highest aspirations aim for and find thepath and the means to be a true community.

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Heidi Sparkes
GuberFounding Partner,
Fourth Quadrant
Partners and Systems
Perspectives LLC
Association with SoL
I joined SoL in 2002 and very quickly got involvedin a number of activities, first to discover how SoL“worked” and then to participate fully in realizing
the purpose of this remarkable self-organizing
entity. One of the opportunities my business
partner and I created right away was facilitating
the quarterly convenings of the SoL organizational
members: We systematically applied and amplified
SoL learning organization practices with the
Liaison Officers and continued to propagate theseamong other emerging communities in SoL. I
also joined the SoL Council of Trustees as a way tobuild a leadership voice for SoL Consultant members as a body and saw that function become thedevelopment field for many of the SoL Consultants
who have continued to take leadership roles in
SoL and elsewhere.

Standout Moments and Insights
The greatest defining moments in my affiliation
with SoL have all been around the proven powerof applied learning in accelerating the depth andquality of self-organization and real-time results,
i.e., seeing that it works reliably and that if one
truly pursues that discipline, great things canhappen. I have many stories about this, butthree stand out:First, in a set of self-organized learning sessions
that emerged in 2003 out of the SoL Greenhousethe previous year, we explored several organizational archetypes (in particular, “Success to theSuccessful”) within SoL. This exploration led to
the formation of the Consulting Convergenceas an experiment in convening the vast array ofexperience and tacit knowledge we were all holding. This group thrived as we tested various ways
to share and build on what we knew.

Second, the early National Security Agency
executive coaching team began to work as anintentional community of practice in order tosupport each other and build on what we were
finding, even though the client was not requesting that level of learning and capacity building.
Again, this group thrived and propagated othertools, methods, and applications for that clientand others that continue to evolve today andthat have contributed to the emergence of,among other new communities, the SoL Global
Coaching Network.
Third, during the famous blizzard of 2005, which
stopped many of us from meeting together in
Boston, we conducted a virtual Emergent Learning Map through synchronized large- and smallgroup conference calls throughout the day.
That exercise revealed many valuable collective
insights and hypotheses about how to expand our
impact that have since become the foundationfor vital work for many of us.

Milestones
Marblehead I in October 2001 and Marblehead II
in April 2005 in which the funding sponsorsof the global Sol network met to provide theirperspective on the continued development ofour community. In these conversations, the participants identified a set of trans-organizational
issues – and core questions – of great importanceto our firms and to society. This was a milestone
for us in that it affirmed that we were not about
anything we did, but rather about the pursuitof core social issues and questions that would
make our work together relevant and powerfulin the world.
The development of the SoL Project Guidelines,
which freed up those of us who wanted to dowork together and in SoL organizations. These
guidelines put principles in place to address theconcerns of how to take this work into the world
in a way that honored our affiliation with SoL. This
was a milestone for me, because it allowed us toself-organize and work together freely, rather than

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sit around wondering how to do it. And it seemedto effectively address a number of the old issues
that had plagued us up until then.
The development of the Capacity Lab, whichgave us ways to share what we know and practicewhile acknowledging the sources of our learningand making clear to others how to access, use,and share our work. This was a milestone for me
because, up until that time, sharing was restricted
for numerous reasons that these Capacity Lab
principles addressed.
The dissolution of the Council of Founding SoL
in 2009-2010 and the subsequent emergence of
the Global Association of SoL Communities in2012. This was a milestone because it was a clear
step – not a bunch of rhetoric – in the acknowledgment that SoL is a global entity and not theproperty of “SoL Boston” (aka Founding SoL). Participants engaged in this process without knowing
what would happen, and over several years, the
new form of SoL began to emerge. There is muchwork still to do, but the ownership of SoL has
indeed been passed on to its members. Three
milestones within that event were the original SoL
Group of 25 design meeting in Paris in May 2009,
in which the seeds for Global SoL were planted;
the first Global SoL Charter Members meetingin Amsterdam in November 2011; and the first
Global SoL General Assembly in Stockholm inJune 2012, where our charter SoL Community
representatives actually showed up for our first
Global SoL General Assembly. These events andparticipants are a living demonstration of theremarkable SoL purpose and principles thathave continued to emerge.

Leverage Points
First, we need to focus on critical conditions thatmust be transformed for the good of humankind;then we need to find those who are already doing
good work and network them to build capacity
for a critical mass of citizens. SoL can do this bymaking visible and relevant the network of networks that is already proliferating by calling out
specific high-leverage endeavors upon which
to focus our partnerships and resources, and byproviding convening opportunities that bring
together diverse stakeholders.

Highest Aspirations
A world in which intractable problems become
immediate triggers for effective collective innovation . . . that this is a shared capability by young
and old, all nations, all socioeconomic levels, allcultures . . . that as a result, people, organizations,communities, and nations are confident, grateful,and happy . . . and can only barely remember
those times when this was not the case.

N O T E : Since writing this response, I have been elected Board Chair of the Global Association of SoL 		

Communities. In fact, four others in this section – Ágota, Irène, Christoph, Marisol – are now also active
Global SoL Board members. The existence of this vital community certainly marks a step forward andhonors all who have brought us to this new emergence!

Reflections
The SoL Journal

on Knowledge, Learning, and Change
Volume 12, Number 4

E ditorial T ea mManaging Editor
Janice Molloy
Contributing Editor
Deborah Wallace
PublisherFrank Schneider

S u b scriptio n O ptio n s
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