Volume 14, Number 1

Reflections
The SoL Journal

on Knowledge, Learning, and Change

Putting Theory into Action:
The Evolution and Practiceof Structural Dynamics
Part 1David Kantor
with Deborah Wallace
Part 2

Sarah Hill and Tony Melville

Learning to Learn:
Knowledge As a Systemof Questions

Michael Ballé, Jacques Chaize,
and Daniel JonesIs Your Town in Transition?
Jessica Stites

Commentary

Jeff Aitken and Tenneson Woolf

The Triple Focus:
Rethinking Mainstream
Education

Daniel Goleman and Peter Senge

Reflections on the2014 SoL Global Forum
Part 1Gitte Larsen
Part 2

Vicky Schubert© iStockphoto/Brad Sauter

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

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p u blish e r ’ s N ot e 1 4 . 1

While sophisticatedtechnologies havemade our world more
efficient and productive, they
have also made it alarmingly
impersonal. Our goal in thisissue is to bring to the foreground some of the ways inFrank Schneider
which connection, interrelatedness, and communication underpin our ability to create,sustain, and protect what we value most as humanbeings. Each article in this issue makes the case forregaining our natural tendency to engage with eachother to solve our common challenges—whether
these challenges occur in a family, on a shop floor, 		
or in our communities.
The issue opens with a two-part article focusing on
David Kantor’s groundbreaking work on interpersonal
effectiveness. In an interview with Reflections contributing editor Deborah Wallace, he explains the essence of
how communication in human systems works or doesn’t
work, and why he believes “communicative competency”
is the lynchpin for creating healthy families and organizations. To illustrate David’s theory in action, Sarah Hill
and Tony Melville describe the process of applying his
Structural Dynamics model to a difficult client situation.
In “Learning to Learn: Knowledge As a System of Questions,” Michael Ballé, Jacques Chaize, and Daniel Jones
look at why the Toyota Production System (TPS) has
been so effective in enabling Toyota to consistently
achieve high levels of performance. What they discovered is that TPS is a system of interconnected questions
rather than a set of best practices. Toyota has also developed a specific set of actions, one of which requires
employees to work with a master to help make senseof the system in their own local situation. Thus, problem finding, problem framing, and problem solving are
deeply embedded in a process that can only succeed
through strong connection and communication withanother person.

As described by Jessica Stites in “Is Your Town in Transition?”
the driving force behind the Transition Movement is thebelief that communities must become more resilient in
the face of the threats of peak oil, global warming, andeconomic instability. The preparations that Transition
Towns take are both infrastructural, such as solar energy
programs and local economic initiatives, and interpersonal, like the “heart and soul” groups that encourage
people to help each other in times of need. This article
and accompanying Commentary offer a glimpse intoa large-scale experiment in building the “social technologies” required to achieve long-term sustainability.
In an excerpt from their recent book The Triple Focus:
A New Approach to Education, Daniel Goleman and Peter
Senge examine the cognitive and emotional tools thatyoung children need to thrive in today’s environment.
They identify three skill sets essential for navigating 		a world of increasing distractions and decreasing faceto-face communication: focusing on self, tuning in toother people, and understanding the larger world.
This excerpt makes a compelling case for replacing 		
our current pedagogy with a curriculum of systemsbased learning.
Finally, in “Reflections on the 2014 SoL Global Forum,”
Gitte Larsen, a newcomer to the Global SoL community,
and Vicky Schubert, a long-time SoL contributer, shareinsights from the recent SoL Global Forum. Organizedby SoL France, the event invited change leaders to
explore, “How can we facilitate and accelerate the metamorphosis of our organizations, firms, and society?”
We would be most interested in receiving your thoughts
and comments about the articles in this issue. In our
fast-paced, increasingly depersonalized world, how
do you find ways to connect with others to accomplish
the work you most value? n		Frank Schneider, PublisherE x e c u tiv e D ig e ste x e c u tiv e dig e st 1 4 . 1

Putting Theory into Action: The Evolution
and Practice of Structural Dynamics
David Kantor with Deborah Wallace;
Sarah Hill and Tony MelvilleThis article gives a unique glimpse into both the development and the application of a key body of work by
one of today’s most important organizational theorists
and practitioners. In Part One, David Kantor explains
the evolution of his theory of Structural Dynamics, 		a model of how communication works—or doesn’t
work—in human systems. He also details how what 		
he calls “communicative competency” can lead tomore effective conversations—a key to creating healthyfamily and organizational systems. In Part Two, Sarah
Hill and Tony Melville describe the application of
Structural Dynamics to a client situation. These twocomplementary perspectives provide a window into
the profound possibilities offered by translating
Kantor’s theory into practice.

Learning to Learn: Knowledge As 			
a System of Questions
Michael Ballé, Jacques Chaize, and Daniel Jones
What is it about the Toyota Production System (TPS)that has allowed Toyota to achieve high levels of performance over time, despite occasional setbacks? The
authors have found that instead of being a system 		of best practices, the TPS is a system of interconnected
questions. As such, in TPS, knowledge does not involve
applying a cookie-cutter method to get a desired result
but rather posing the right questions to ultimately
improve the system as a whole. The authors examine
Toyota’s five-step cycle for problem finding, framing,and solving. They show that as employees develop theirproblem-finding capabilities and problem-solving skills,
they individually and then collectively enhance theorganization’s judgment in the long run.

Is Your Town in Transition?
Jessica Stites
Over the past decade, more than 1,000 municipalitiesin 43 countries have chosen to define themselves as“Transition Towns.” Frustrated by the slow pace ofchange in response to challenges such as peak oil,climate change, and economic instability, people inthese places have undertaken grassroots initiatives 		
to build the resilience of their communities to survive
sudden shortfalls of necessities such as food, oil, water,or money. These preparations take many forms, someinfrastructural—such as establishing solar energy programs—and others interpersonal—like creating groups
that encourage people to help each other in times 		of need. At its core, the Transition Movement seeks 		
to build the “social technologies” required to achieve
long-term sustainability.

The Triple Focus: Rethinking
Mainstream Education
Daniel Goleman and Peter Senge
In The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education, Peter
Senge and Daniel Goleman examine the cognitive andemotional tools that young children need to navigate
and thrive in today’s environment. The authors identify
three skill sets essential for navigating this world of increasing distractions and decreasing face-to-face communications: focusing on self, tuning in to other people,
and understanding the larger world and how systems
interact. This excerpt focuses on the third skill set andmakes a strong case for capitalizing on the connections
and synergies between Social and Emotional Learning(SEL) and systems thinking. The notion of transforming
and replacing the traditional pedagogy that anchors
our current curriculum with systems-based learning
has already taken hold with impressive results thathave surprised even the authors.

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reflections.solonline.org

e x e c u tiv e dig e st 1 4 . 1

Reflections on the 2014 SoL Global Forum
Gitte Larsen and Vicky Schubert
On May 21–23, 2014, 450 participants from around 		
the world gathered in Paris, France, to take part in the
SoL Global Forum: “Investing in Emerging Futures: New
Players, New Games—Welcoming Metamorphosis.”
Organized by SoL France, the event invited change
leaders and organizational leaders to explore an
urgent question together: “How can we facilitate andaccelerate the metamorphosis of our organizations,firms, and society?” In this two-part article, Gitte Larsen,a newcomer to the Global SoL community, and Vicky
Schubert, a long-time SoL contributor, share highlights
from—and personal reflections on—the event. Theirinsightful commentary paints a picture of a communityof people who are making the internal shifts necessary
to lead profound changes in all those external systems
that connect us.

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Putting Theory into Action

The Evolution and Practice of Structural Dynamics
D avid K anto r with D e bo r ah Wallac e ; S a r ah H ill and Tony M e lvill e
This article gives a unique glimpse into both the development and the application of a key body of work by
one of today’s most important organizational theorists and practitioners. In Part One, David Kantor explains
the evolution of his theory of Structural Dynamics, a model of how communication works—or doesn’t work—in human systems. He also details how what he calls “communicative competency” can lead to more effective
conversations—a key to creating healthy family and organizational systems. In Part Two, Sarah Hill and Tony
Melville describe the application of Structural Dynamics to a client situation. These two complementary perspectives provide a window into the profound possibilities offered by translating Kantor’s theory into practice.

Part I: Structural Dynamics Theory
D avid K anto r with D e bo r ah Wallac e
Deborah Wallace: You were trained and worked formany years as a psychologist and clinical researcher. How
did you get into the field of organizational consulting?
David Kantor: It happened over a number of years, andthere were several key events that led to my interest in it.
The first was in 1965 at a gathering of the pioneers of the
new theory and practice of family systems therapy. Scores
David Kantor
Deborah Wallaceof iconoclasts frompsychiatry and psychology were at that gathering. I was fascinated
I was fascinated with the leapwith the leap from individual to family systems therapy, where theemphasis was on systems rather than on individuals.
from individual to family systems

therapy, where the emphasis

It was also around that time that I established the Boston Family Instiwas on systems rather thantute,* which was a family systems training organization. Interestingly,
not only therapists wanted to learn this new technology but also
on individuals.
consultants. It was the consultants’ interest that led me to explore theidea that, from a structural perspective, organizational teams were
little different from families. Chris Argyris had just read my book Inside the Family, which is an exploration of family organization and behavior, and made the observation that the book was not only aboutfamilies but also about organizations. That observation clinched the deal for me, and I knew I was on
to something.
* Kantor later founded the Family Institute of Cambridge and the Kantor Family Institute.

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The Nature of Structure
Kantor: In 1990, I was invited to take part inmonthly meetings with Chris Argyris, Peter Senge,
Don Schön, Ed Schein, and others to discuss
our different takes on the nature of structure in
human systems. Shortly after that meeting, in

In high-stakes situations andcrises, people tend to become
one of three hero types:
Fixer, Protector, or Survivor.
				

Tools for Understanding Hidden Dynamics
Structural Dynamics is a theory of how face-to-face communication works—and does not work—in human systems. David
Kantor developed the model more than 35 years ago throughan empirical study of family communication, and it has evolved
and expanded over time to apply to families, couples, teams,
and whole organizations.
The Four-Player Model isthe core concept of Structural Dynamics and holds
that in all interactions
between people, there are
only four possible “speechacts”—move, follow, oppose,and bystand. Many communication problems
occur when individuals
become “stuck” in oneof the four speech actsor roles—something that
undermines group learningand effective decisionmaking.

4-player

MODEL
Move
Bystand

Follow
Oppose• Movers
Initiate and provide Direction• Followers

Support and provide Completion• Opposers

Challenge and provide Correction• Bystanders

Observe and provide Perspective

Communicative competency—understanding the structureof face-to-face communications in human systems—is key tomaking sound decisions and creating sustainable results.

1991, Diana Smith and I led a group of organizational consultants in a year-long seminar thatfeatured her version of Chris Argyris’s Action
Science theory and my evolving theory of Structural Dynamics, which focuses on how faceto-face communication works—and does notwork—in human systems (see “Tools for 		
Understanding Hidden Dynamics”).
In 2000, I was introduced to Mark Fuller, chairman
and president of Monitor Group, a strategy consulting firm. Diana Smith was an internal consultant at Monitor at that time, and with her help,
Mark developed a keen interest in my work andinvited me to join the firm as both an internal consultant and a thought leader. My task was to create
products and models that applied the theory ofStructural Dynamics to organizational issues, inparticular leadership and team development.
Wallace: Please describe the high-stakes,
low-stakes phenomenon and how it applies toleadership and organizations.
Kantor: I first saw this phenomenon in 1970
during my research on families. Trained observers
moved in with 21 families and interviewed themin their own homes. They probed and analyzed
everything from the locks on the doors to the way
family members dealt with crises. We set up taperecorders in every room of the households andtaped every verbal utterance, 24 hours a day, overa 30-day period. In analyzing that data, I recognized that the parents in these families, thecouples, had distinct communication patterns
when they were under great pressure or in 		“high-stakes” situations.
That study led to a second important piece of
research: a study of 21 couples who had cometo me in crisis for couples’ therapy. They agreed
to let me tape record their sessions for a period of
six to twelve months. That research led to anotherimportant concept—that in high-stakes situations
and crises, people tend to become one of three
hero types: Fixer, Protector, or Survivor (see“Heroic Modes”).

f e at u r e | kanto r , wallac e , hill , and m e lvill e

3© iStockphoto/milos-kreckovic

Additional observations of high-level teams inorganizations led to the conclusion that these
heroic types also apply in organizations. Leadersof high-level teams in organizations are constantly
under pressure, not unlike the couples in crisis I
studied in my research. Leaders live much of thetime in high-stakes decision making, which
affects a lot of people in their organizations.

The Importance of Model-Making

				Heroic Modes
A Heroic Mode is the internal prototype for how we behave
when we are most needed, especially in times of crisis. We
each have a dominant Heroic Mode that determines how wecope with anxiety in extreme situations and that dictates what
we do to make ourselves and others feel safe in the world.

Wallace: In your book Reading the Room, you
say that leaders have to have models of their own
if they’re going to be successful. Why is this so
important?

The Fixer: All Fixers have an indomitable will that drives themto overcome whatever gets in the way of their mission or theirmessage—be it an enemy, rivals, or even cultural norms—
but it is physical power that allows fixers to win.

Kantor: Leaders, whether in families or organizations, play a crucial part in the lives of theirconstituents. If they don’t have a model of theirown that articulates and guides what they do,they are essentially operating in the dark andvery likely making the same mistakes over andover again.

The Survivor: The Survivor can endure no matter the circumstances. Whereas the Fixer relies on physical power as the sourceof her strength, the survivor relies more on mental power tosurvive.

Wallace: How does this kind of model playout in real life?

The Protector: Protectors are guardians and caretakers of
the sick, the poor, the politically disadvantaged, the ecology/
environment, and relationships. Protectors tend to speak thelanguage of feeling and emotion fluently, particularly when
they are focused on their missions and causes.

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Kantor: There is a strong link between a leader’s preferred role and the leadership model heor she develops and displays. Thus, a leader whose
profile is mover and opposer, that is, someone
who initiates and challenges, will build thesebehaviors into his or her model. Someone whose
profile is bystander will develop a different model.

I think leaders in the future will
see the necessity of having theirown models to prevent themfrom getting into trouble.
Many leaders simply will not spend the time
to develop their own models. I appreciate therationale but don’t accept the conclusion that itshouldn’t be done. I think leaders in the future will
see the necessity of having their own models toprevent them from getting into trouble and will
understand the benefit of having their own
models rather than relying on the models of
consultants and executive coaches.
Wallace: Do consultants need certain prerequisite skills to be able to support today’s leaders?
Kantor: A resounding yes! In my opinion, no
matter what their practice model, any consultant
working with leaders or their teams would benefit
from an understanding of how Structural Dynamics
equips them to move toward the goal of communicative competency. To develop these skills,
consultants must understand their own behavioral
profiles and their possibilities and limitations.
Structural Dynamics has a detailed practice modelfor helping consultants develop these capacities.

Communicative Competency
Wallace: What is communicative competency
and why is it so important?
Kantor: Communicative competency meansthat each member of the team can “read theroom”—that is, diagnose an ongoing dysfunctionalsequence and recognize the precise “vocal act”
that is missing. For example, a team is stuck
because no one is stepping forward to move theconversation. But each individual is responsible
for recognizing the “stuckness” and either making
a move or calling upon someone whose repertoire
better enables him or her do so. The assumption
is that when all members of the team are capableof communicative competency, collective intelligence—which is group intelligence greater than
the intelligence of any of its individual parts—
will occur.
Wallace: What is the relationship between
the Four-Player Model and communicative 		
competency?
Kantor: In any effective face-to-face interaction,
all four vocal acts need to be present. A “move”
sets forth a direction, a “follow” validates and completes, an “oppose” challenges and corrects, anda “bystand” provides a perspective on the overall
interaction and attempts to reconcile competingacts. What is so noticeable about stuck interactions is that they do not have a balance of these
vocal acts. They usually display dominance in one
or two particular modes at the expense of theothers. A team that possesses communicativecompetency can recognize and correct imbalances.

Lasting Impact
Wallace: What aspect of your work do you
think has had the greatest impact?
Kantor: The theory that emerged from my 1970
in situ family study and the subsequent researchon high-stakes behavior in couples and then inorganizations all strengthened my understandingof Structural Dynamics. The emerging nature ofthis theory and increasing evidence of its widespread applicability in different systems has beena major source of satisfaction. Concepts like theFour-Player Model have caught the attention ofmany organizational consultants around theworld, and that has been an obvious source ofsatisfaction.

f e at u r e | kanto r , wallac e , hill , and m e lvill e

5

But I think the biggest impact and the greatest
source of satisfaction is yet to come. I am currently
undertaking a research project with Kathryn Stanley of the Massachusetts School of Professional
Psychology and Gillien Todd of the Harvard Negotiation Project. The project sets out to test theability of a Structural Dynamics intervention toeffect measurable change in organizational teams.

The second unique feature is how we measurechange by measuring vocal acts. Vocal acts, which
are units of speech, form sequences that eventually become repetitive patterns, some of which arefunctional and some of which are dysfunctional.
We identify the dysfunctional sequences and thenapply our metrics to quantify the change in the
structure of a communication pattern—that is, theshift from dysfunctional to functional sequences.
In later stages of this research, we intend to link
such changes to the bottom-line goals of key
decision makers in organizations. We also plan
to measure how individuals in the study teams
expand their repertoires.
Wallace: What else is in store for the future?

© iStockphoto/Eskemar

Two features of the research could make a significant impact on all future consulting. First,
the research attempts to meet rigorous scientificstandards by having an experimental group thatreceives the designed “treatment” (the experimental variable) and two control groups, one that is
introduced to the language of Structural Dynamics but goes no further and a second that receives
no treatment at all.

When all members of the teamare capable of communicativecompetency, collective
intelligence will occur.
Kantor: I see the Kantor Institute doing moregroundbreaking work. I see three paths converging—research, training, and instrument development—all aligned toward making measurable
change that is sustainable. When the paths converge—in my lifetime or beyond—Structural Dynamics will have changed the fundamental natureof human systems consulting and intervention. n

abo u t th e a u tho r sDavid Kantor is the founder of the Kantor Institute. Over the past 50 years, he has brought his uniquemodel and counseling expertise to families, couples, organizations, leaders, and interventionists.
During his career, David has trained more than a thousand systems interventionists and has written
dozens of articles and several books. http://kantorinstitute.com
Deborah Wallace is contributing editor of Reflections and principal of BrinkPoint Consulting.
dwallace@brinkpointconsulting.com
Janice Molloy also contributed to this article. janice@solonline.org

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Part 2: Structural Dynamics in Action
S a r ah H ill and Tony M e lvill eDavid Kantor’s theory of Structural Dynamics provides thefoundation for the interventionist work that we do in manydifferent organizations and communities in both the public
sector and corporate settings. Underpinning our approach
to applying David’s theory is the belief that leaders needto stop just leading change and first think carefully about
how and what they want to change. Structural Dynamics
interventions focus on working with behaviors in order toSarah Hill
Tony Melvillechange the prevailing culture and enable transformationalchange. It is this kind of fundamental change that has the potential to liberate individuals or organizations from stuck patterns of behavior that can hold them back from realizing their aspirations.

Structural Dynamics
interventions focus on
working with behaviors
in order to change theprevailing culture andenable transformationalchange.

Perturbing the System
Our experience from one of these interventions demonstrates how Structural
Dynamics works with some of the challenges presented to interventionists
and their clients:
We were mid-way through a day working with a group of 35 senior leadersin an organization. They had come together to discuss business risks and, inparticular, a mounting financial crisis. Hundreds of years of experience weregathered in the room, along with specialists from every conceivable field.
The CEO’s hope? That by unlocking participants’ collective wisdom, the group
could put itself in the best possible position to tackle the challenges ahead.

However, this is not what we were seeing as the day unfolded. The CEO was struck by the circular superficiality of the conversation and was frustrated by a repetitive pattern of behavior that she had observed
elsewhere in the organization
It was not uncommon for meetings of this group to become stuck, paralyzed forums, but somehow
this one was different. Prompted by the sheer frustration of not knowing what was going on, the CEO
become uncharacteristically blunt. She said: “As senior leaders, I think you are the single biggest risk tothis organization because we are unable to effectively work together, interact with one another, or
reach decisions together.”
The room was silent. We sensed acknowledgment, agreement, confusion, and denial in the group, but
no one said a word. The CEO’s comments were increasingly filled with moral judgment as she blamed thegroup for the stuck patterns in their interactions. She had not yet fully realized that what was happening
could be described in the language of Structural Dynamics, a language that is morally neutral in its
perspective, or that an intervention could change the nature of the discourse. She was making an intervention that she hoped would perturb the system, but she was also exhibiting a type of self-righteous
behavior.

f e at u r e | kanto r , wallac e , hill , and m e lvill e

Seeing the Structural Story
Moving beyond the CEO’s moral story of what was
taking place in the room that day, we could see
the structural story. We were witnessing a groupthat had gone into a spiral of “moves,” a situationin which each member of the group was attempting to reconcile the interaction from his or her
perspective. Group members had a strong andstuck pattern of random moving. There was noeffective opposition (“oppose”), and no membersof the group expressed support for any particular
stance (“follow”). The speed with which the moves
emerged left anyone who might have been able
to provide perspective (“bystand”) reeling in theirwake. It was an example of the very behavior
that was causing chaos and frustrating any kindof change in the organization. But, as with theStructural Dynamics of any conversation, we knew
it was possible to change it by identifying theparticular stuck pattern of behavior for the groupand then outlining what had to happen to changethat pattern.

The group appeared to flounder, and members
increasingly looked to the CEO to tell them what
to do. At this point, we all knew that we hadn’t yet
reached the subterranean levels of the organization, which is where we needed to be. There wasa great deal more drilling to do.
As we watched the repetitive behavior, we began
to wonder whether the covert opposition we saw
in the organization, now replicated in this group,
was intentional and part of multiple and hugely
complex individual, group, and systemic invisible
realities that extended from the shop floor to the

The CEO’s comments wereincreasingly filled with moral
judgment as she blamed thegroup for the stuck patterns
in their interactions.

In the weeks that followed, we worked with the
CEO to try to interrupt—or “release”—the patternof behavior that was preventing the group frombeing able to achieve anything meaningful. We
focused on trying to change the discourse so that
there was clear and effective opposition and sufficient “following” for an action to be completed,and to make space for people to provide theirindividual perspectives on what was happening
within that forum.

Achieving Fleeting Success* Kantor, D. (Forthcoming). On Becoming an Interventionist: A Noble and Dangerous Profession. Meredith Winter Press. Kantor, D.,
and S. Hill. (August 2014). “The Perils of Working with Invisible Reality: The Practitioners’ Greatest Challenge,” Training Journal.

© iStockphoto/Can Balcioglu

This intervention was initially successful. We saw
a behavioral change that the group welcomed
and that they could see the benefits of. However,
our well-intentioned and well-executed intervention had triggered each team member’s “invisible
reality”*—or set of hidden assumptions—and as
a result, we saw the old pattern of behavior returnand intensify.

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board room. Had the behavior been set in motion
by the established culture to ensure that sustainable change would never be possible?
It is not unusual for an organization to find a way
to maintain the status quo. The status quo is comfortable and known, unlike change, which for manyof us is synonymous with discomfort and uncertainty. If we assumed that the organizational culture
was one that said, “No matter what you do, there
will be no change here. We will maintain the statusquo and do whatever it takes to guard against all
threats from outsiders,” much of the behavior wewere experiencing began to make sense.

Had the behavior been set inmotion by the established culture
to ensure that sustainable change
would never be possible?
Members of the group were randomly throwing
out move after move as a covert way of opposing
any kind of change. In fact, they had developed anastonishing ability to ward off any threat to thestatus quo with their obstructive patterns of conversation that prevented any change from being
achieved. This was mirrored across the organization, which had become so efficient at managing
the flow of information to the highest levels thatthe reality of what was really going on was almost
completely hidden from view. When the CEO unilaterally set a course of action, which had so often
been the case, senior leaders did what was necessary to give the appearance of change taking
place, but in reality they were doing what they
could to protect the status quo in their own
spheres of influence.

Impact of Transient LeadershipThis way of doing things had existed for decades,
and it had been set in place precisely to deal withthe transient nature of leadership and requirements for change. We had both seen this kind of
behavior elsewhere. Policing, for example, wasalso notorious for transience. Many police officers
are repeatedly posted from one role to anotherthroughout their careers, which means that leadership structures are constantly changing. What
police officers are charged with delivering is also
continually changing. New governments predictably bring with them a wealth of measures andinitiatives designed to solve the problems of theones that preceded them. This makes for a complex and overwhelming degree of change inwhich only one aspect is certain—it is perpetual.
This transient nature of leadership made it understandable, perhaps even reasonable, that the organization we were working with might see theinstigation of obstructive behaviors as one meansof protecting itself from the next passing phase orleader. But what was happening here had reachedextreme proportions. The organization was now
so proficient at protecting the dominant practicemodel that no matter what changes were made,or where any innovation or pushback came from,the existing system found ways to exert its control
to ensure it prevailed. This was nothing short ofcomplete paralysis borne out of a desire to stop
all change, regardless of whether or not it wasnecessary for survival.

Working with Invisible Structures
To stand any chance of effectively identifying
and working with invisible structures of this kind,interventionists and leaders need to:
1. Be creative, resilient, and courageous as theybuild their own practice model, which requiresthat they be knowingly in command of theirown story and the invisible realities it createsin themselves and those they serve.
2. Work with others to plumb the depths ofidentity-forming stories that can be the sourceof so many invisible realities.
3. Purposefully design and facilitate interventions that jolt an individual, team, or organization into a position where the possibility
for change finally opens up. In the midst of a
perturbance, the environment can be visiblyf e at u r e | kanto r , wallac e , hill , and m e lvill e© iStockphoto/abluecup

and palpably awash with anxiety. However, thisanxiety also creates the potential to transformdysfunctional behaviors into an endless sourceof positive energy to draw upon in service ofthe organization.
Our work throughout the organization continued
for some time, with many people demonstrating
great personal courage as they began to integrate
Structural Dynamics practices into their work.
However, the CEO left the organization sooner
than anticipated and was replaced by a new CEO
who has a different agenda and approach. As aresult, our work with the organization has been
put on hold during this transition period. While
many individuals have been able to positively
affect decision making within their spheres of influence, the systemic change efforts have stalled.

The organization was now 		so proficient at protecting thedominant practice model that nomatter what changes were made,the existing system found ways
to exert its control.

The current situation at this organization highlights the importance of not only the leader’srole in change but also the impact of unforeseen
circumstances. We are hopeful that teams within
the organization will continue to benefit fromapplying the practices of Structural Dynamics
to improve the work together. n

abo u t th e a u tho r s
Sarah Hill is a director of the Kantor Institute and Dialogix Ltd, which is the global provider of all
Kantor Institute-certified training programs. She is at the forefront of developing and applying
Structural Dynamics concepts through training, development, and whole system intervention.
sarah.hill@dialogix.co.uk
Tony Melville is a director of the Kantor Institute and Dialogix Ltd. He has extensive experience leading large organizations at a strategic and policy level, including working with national governments.
Tony has led innovative change programs across these complex systems and uses this experience
to design and facilitate Structural Dynamics interventions. tony.melville@dialogix.co.uk

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Learning to Learn

Knowledge As a System of Questions
M icha e l B all é , J acq u e s C hai z e , and D ani e l J on e s
What is it about the Toyota Production System (TPS) that has allowed Toyota to achieve high levels of
performance over time, despite occasional setbacks? The authors have found that instead of being a systemof best practices, the TPS is a system of interconnected questions. As such, in TPS, knowledge does not involve
applying a cookie-cutter method to get a desired result but rather posing the right questions to ultimately
improve the system as a whole. The authors examine Toyota’s five-step cycle for problem finding, framing,and solving. They show that as employees develop their problem-finding capabilities and problem-solving
skills, they individually and then collectively enhance the organization’s judgment in the long run.

Some people feel they have all theknowledge they need to get ahead,and performance is a matter of usingthat knowledge well. Others realize
they need to learn but feel confident
they already know what knowledge
they are missing. Other individuals
are aware that they still must disMichael Ballé
Jacques Chaize
Daniel Jones
cover exactly what they need tolearn and how to distinguish what is important from what isn’t. They understand that they need to learn
how to learn. But how can someone produce knowledge if they don’t know what they’re after? The trick
to learning how to learn is in knowing where to look by asking the right questions.
We have spent 20 years studying and practicing organizational improvement
and learning systems. Based on our experience with a range of lean approaches,
The trick to learning how
we would like to suggest that the Toyota Production System (TPS) is a tool forto learn is in knowing
learning how to learn that has introduced a radical shift in the handling of
where to look by asking
knowledge. Its unique features separate it from its many copycats and explain
its effectiveness and longevity. This system has had an impact far beyond thethe right questions.
automotive industry and manufacturing sectors, reaching into healthcare andservice industries. But often when it has been applied in different settings, theresults have been disappointing. Why is this the case? We have found that, instead of being a systemof best practices (which is the kind of learning one seeks if one already knows what to learn), the TPS isa system of interconnected questions. As such, in TPS, knowledge does not involve applying a cookiecutter method to get a desired result but rather posing the right question to ultimately improve thesystem as a whole.

f e at u r e | ball é , chai z e , and jon e s

What Knowledge?
Before we make the case for the value of questions, bear with us as we backtrack and establish
what we mean by “knowledge” in this context. We
look at knowledge as a fundamental source of
productivity: It is what enables us to make robust
decisions and carry them out in the best way inorder to reach our goals. From this point of view,
knowledge has three main features:First, the most common way of describing 		knowledge has been with us since the Greek
philosophers. Plato and those who followed him
saw knowledge as “justified true beliefs.” To be
counted as knowledge, the beliefs we have about
the world must be considered true. If a long-heldbelief is discovered to be wrong, it cannot havebeen known. Therefore, if I discover that thehuman brain remains plastic and trainable throughout its lifespan, then my deeply held belief thatit’s unchangeable after the age of 20 is not knowledge but a fallacy. A belief is not knowledge
unless I can justify or prove it.

the buying and selling of companies and haverule-of-thumb heuristics, such as a multiplier of
earnings according to the industry or a multiplierof EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) minus capital expenditure.
Equity firms whose job it is to purchase and sellcompanies have sophisticated valuation spreadsheets that take into account the various parametersof due diligence. Yet in many cases, our attempts
to generate an algorithm fall short because conditions rapidly change. For this reason, leaders
have to be ready to continuously question theirassumptions and redesign their organizations.

Inquiry and Knowledge
Inquiry has always been an important part 		of learning and knowledge, predating Socrates
as our ancestors sought to understand theirworld. We generally find questions at the frontier
between the known and the unknown, either asa method of exploration or a teaching device toSecond, we tend to organize our beliefs as listsof positive statements. These may be generalstatements such as “heavy rainfall causes flooding”
or more conditional ones such as “heavy rainfall
in coastal areas causes flooding if it coincides
with high tides.” But in any case, most of what we
consider knowledge comes in the form of active,
positive statements that “this is so.”

© iStockphoto/rafal_olechowski

Third, according to Michael Polanyi, we all “knowmore than we can tell”; that is, much of what weknow is tacit rather than explicit knowledge. It’s
futile to try to codify all knowledge because somuch of it is situational, context dependent, andpotentially subject to obsolescence. Roger Martin1
recently suggested that learning is a process ofmoving from mystery (exploration of the problem)to heuristic (creation of a rule of thumb to narrow
the field of inquiry) to algorithm (documentationof an explicit formula) (see “The Knowledge Funnel” on p. 12). For instance, most executives wouldfind it hard to assess the value of their companies.
They rely on professionals who are familiar with

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f ig u r e 1

The Knowledge Funnel
From inquiry to knowledge

According to Roger Martin, learning is a process of moving from mystery (exploration of the problem) to heuristic(creation of a rule of thumb to narrow the field of inquiry) to algorithm (documentation of an explicit formula).

guide the flow knowledge from expert to novice.
Questions typically probe the three parts ofknowledge:• How do we believe what we believe?
• Is this belief true?
• What is our method for justifying this belief?

The human mind naturally thinks
in terms of questions and answers,
problems and solutions, with astrong bias toward single, overgeneralized responses.

In his action learning formula, Reginald Revans2
provides a good description of how knowledge
and questioning intuitively interact:
Learning = Programmed Knowledge +Insight Questioning
First, there are a certain number of rote-learning
facts to know (constituting an established bodyof explicit knowledge/experience). Second, thesefacts are assimilated or accommodated by questioning, which triggers insights in what you see,hear, or feel.
The human mind naturally thinks in terms ofquestions and answers, problems and solutions,with a strong bias toward single, over-generalizedf e at u r e | ball é , chai z e , and jon e s

responses. The brain evolved to organize
thoughts, through language, into statements
about what things are, whether they are good orbad, how they can be handled, and what consequences different actions may have. The questioning process is essential to counteract our tendency
to form stereotyped descriptions and schemata. It
also helps us better apprehend reality through therealization that there is no single narrative: What
we experience is a matter of perspective, and consequences change from one situation to the next.
We can’t avoid instinctively feeling that knowledge is a list of what we know in terms of how
to describe things, solve specific problems, 		or anticipate how situations will evolve. Nowhereis this set of assumptions more at play than inorganizations. Arie de Geus, co-founder of SoL,
stated a few decades ago, “The ability to learn
faster than your competitors may be the only
sustainable competitive advantage.” Many executives accept that learning is an important sourceof value and therefore they seek best practices:
They want to identify “better” knowledge on themarket to replace the “obsolete” knowledge intheir own organizations. Companies recognized
as having superior track records are studied andcopied endlessly, none more so than Toyota,
whose practices have permeated the automobile
industry over the last three decades and havespread to fields such as healthcare and banking.
Yet although the spillover of Toyota’s approach
has as a whole been spectacular, the road hasn’t
been smooth, and failures and misunderstandings
have been far more frequent than clear-cut
success stories.

Learning How to Learn
What, How, Where, and When
Many organizations seeking to improve will latch
on to what they recognize is a Toyota-like practiceand then try to apply it in-house. This process
is made easier by the fact that Toyota itself has
provided an explicit description of its system,
the “what, how, where, and when” of its own
learning how to learn approach, which involves:• Customer satisfaction (quality, cost, lead-time)and employee satisfaction (safety, morale)• Just-in-time (what is needed, when it is needed,in the quantity needed) and Jidoka (stop at
first defect)• Standardized work and kaizen (continuous
improvement)• Employee engagement and mutual trust
Based on this model, a large number of corporations have come up with their own production
systems, drawing on what they see as Toyota’s
essential best practices to achieving high performance. Unfortunately, for a number of structural
reasons, the effects of such efforts are far fromclear. First, the ecological validity problem is very
real: Why would automotive practices apply outside the company or, even further, the industry?
Second, identifying Toyota’s best practices is noteasy. The company’s plants—and thus practices—
differ greatly from one other, according to theirlocal context and specific history.
Having studied Toyota’s use of its own system
within its plants and at suppliers, we have come torealize that the real value for other organizations
lies in the specific set of instructions for how tolearn it (as we have described in “The Lean Leap”3).
They are:
1. Go and see firsthand at the real place (genchi
genbutsu). The TPS is not supposed to operate
in absolutes but rather as a guide to observationand discussion in real, contextualized situations.
2. Work with a master—a sensei, coordinator,
or trainer whose job is to help you make senseof the system in your own local situation.

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3. Apply kaizen, or small-step improvement,
before making large-scale changes.
Best practices clearly exist within TPS, as do libraries of local standards (detailed descriptions of thebest-known way of doing an operation at the time),
but within Toyota, these are used for inspiration
not rote application. The basic instruction is to copy
and apply kaizen: Gain inspiration from an idea
but improve it to meet your own local conditions.

Best practices clearly exist within
TPS, but within Toyota, these areused for inspiration not rote
application.
A System of Questions to Produce Knowledge
The founders of TPS had a clear idea of the kind ofknowledge they were seeking. Taiichi Ohno, considered the founder of the methodology, taught
members of his group to “look with your feet andthink with your hands.” His aim was to teach his
direct reports to realize their “misconceptions”—
wasteful errors in thinking—through hands-on
learning activities. For TPS practitioners, the mostcommon answer to any direct question is “itdepends.” Generic answers are discouraged, as
the system is aimed toward helping every person
develop tacit understanding of specific situations.
In this sense, the TPS is not a system of best practices but rather a structured system of questions
that, once you master it, will allow you to correctly
learn about any given situation. The knowledge isin the questions themselves, not in the answers.
For instance:• What is your current level of customer satisfaction in terms of quality, cost, and lead-time andhow can you improve it? What is your current
level of employee satisfaction in terms of safety
and morale and how can you improve it?
• What is your current level of just-in-time production in terms of whether you can deliver

exactly what was ordered within the month,week, day, hour, minute, etc. and how can you
improve it?
• What is your current level of Jidoka in terms of
spotting defects at customer delivery, at final
inspection, at line inspection, within the line, ateach technical operation, during the operation,etc. and how can you improve it?
• What is your current level of employee engagement in terms of “presentism,” improvement
ideas, suggestions, and mutual trust and how
can you improve it?
It’s a system because each of these questions
leads to a Russian doll-like architecture of further
questions. For instance, “How can I improve mylevel of just-in-time production?” leads to thefollowing questions:• How close is the production pace to thesales pace?
• How leveled is production loading?
• How continuous is the production flow?
• How good is logistics at pulling?
Each of these questions can in turn drive further
questions. For example, “How leveled is production loading?” leads to:• How fractioned are production batches?
• How mixed is the production sequence?
• How flexible are the production lines?
In volume? In mix?
All of these questions are interrelated. For 		
instance, the question of better production flow
leads to the question of spotting defects within
the flow, which links to the question of correctly
following work instructions, and so on. The 		point of these questions is not to find immediateanswers but to steer you to discovering what
you need to learn. Once what you need to learn
emerges, actual learning then occurs throughlearning-by-doing: Try and see, try and see(In Toyota’s language, this process is called thePlan-Do-Check-Act cycle).

f e at u r e | ball é , chai z e , and jon e s

Socratic inquiry involves asking mostly high-level
questions to help students clarify their thinking,state their evidence, and follow through on thepotential consequences of their thoughts. There isclearly an element of this process in TPS questioning, something that western observers pick up on
right away. Our contention, however, is that TPS
questions seek far more specific knowledge about
technical processes than a more general inquiry
would provide. These questions guide observationand discovery far more than they serve to clarify
previously held knowledge. In essence, they areapplied to a situation to produce knowledge as
opposed to clarifying existing knowledge. The
knowledge starts with the questions themselves.

f ig u r e 2

The Role of the Institution
If we pursue Roger Martin’s knowledge lifecycle,
what happens when knowledge has matured
to the algorithmic—or formulaic—stage? If it’salgorithmic, it can be reproduced (that’s the whole
point). Typically at this stage, an institution will insome way maintain and protect this knowledge(see “From Learning to Institutions”). For instance,
Renaissance thinkers4 invented the double-entry
accounting “rule of thumb” in the fifteenth century, and by the 1800s, professional organizations
for accountants started to appear. Accountancy
practices are now established, maintained, andexpanded by a number of official bodies. But as
the lean accounting movement has shown, many

From Learning to Institutions

From inquiry to knowledge

From learning to institutions
When knowledge has matured to the algorithmic—or formulaic—stage, an institution will in some way maintainand protect this knowledge.

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f ig u r e 3

Sample Trade-off Curve

Even in science, which is designed to be the fastest
evolving field of knowledge, progress is said tohappen one funeral at a time.
Institutional knowledge generally forms aroundsolutions. Leaders fixate on those solutions andthen create bodies of people to support others in
adopting these solutions, whether Taylorist expert
groups to train individual workers or power lobbies to impose certain norms. Solutions, in thissense, are “applied” to people, irrespective of local
context, and compliance becomes more important than competence (or even performance).

The trade-off curve is a graph that illustrates what happens to theperformance of one variable when another variable changes.

current accounting rules misrepresent today’s
business realities. The most obvious example isthe view of inventory as an asset rather than as
waste. This “zombie knowledge” (long dead, stillwalking around and attacking people) is profoundly
built into the system and defended by the accounting profession. When people commit themselvesto preserving algorithmic knowledge throughinstitutions, those algorithms become dogma.

When people commit themselvesto preserving algorithmic knowledge through institutions, thosealgorithms become dogma.		
This perspective shows why collective learning
is so arduous and slow. First, institutions need toconvince a critical mass of people to adopt a pieceof algorithmic knowledge, which takes time andeffort. At the same time, the existing dogma lives
on way beyond its actual relevance precisely
because so many people have committed to it
and institutions exist to preserve and maintain it.

On the other hand, the idea of knowledge as asystem of questions has the huge advantage that
although questions can be set and context-free,their answers are local and thus context-adapted.
The expectation that you shouldn’t just apply
existing practices but rather take inspiration fromthem to improve the local situation (what in TPS
terms is called yokoten) creates a flexible learning
environment that is both tight in that no one
needs to reinvent the wheel and loose in that each
person is asked to seek a better fit-to-fact answer
to the given question.
In this scenario, the institution’s role is no longer
to preserve a solution but to explore and collect
all variants of solutions according to context. Thisapproach leads to a fundamental and little-known
aspect of knowledge capture within TPS known
as the “trade-off curve”—a graph that illustrates,
instance by instance, what happens to the performance of one variable when another variablechanges (see “Sample Trade-off Curve”). Toyota
technical experts are far more interested in capturing boundary conditions—that is, exploring
the boundaries of knowledge when known facts
become uncertain—than justifying dogma byfinding striking illustrations of what is alreadyknown. By institutionally capturing knowledge
in the form of trade-off curves, the speed of collective learning is vastly increased, as the institution
follows step-by-step innovation rather thandefends zombie knowledge.

f e at u r e | ball é , chai z e , and jon e sConclusion: Problem Finding, Framing,and Solving				Five-Step Cycle for Problem Finding,
Framing, and Solving

Seeing knowledge as a system of questions solves
yet another vexing puzzle in researching Toyota’s
approach to knowledge and performance. To becertain, Toyota trains vast numbers of its employees in problem solving, but in reality the old-time
TPS masters seemed less interested in how you
solved the problem than in whether or not you
saw it. You were supposed to look at a situation
for hours (stand in the infamous “chalk circle” onthe shop floor) until you could explain the problem to your master. He would then task you tosolve it, but to the immense frustration of many
learners, he would never show much interest in
the actual solution, instead moving on to the next
issue. To the TPS masters, true productivity lay ineffectiveness—solving the right problem—rather
than in efficiency—solving a problem the right way.

how goals are set, how the problem is framed andvisualized, how progress will be evaluated, andwhat is an acceptable solution as opposed to what
is not (see “Problem Finding, Framing, and Solving).
Basically:

Indeed, the founders of the TPS insisted thathigher efficiency did not necessarily lead to lower
costs. Problem solving may be about efficiency,
but problem finding is the key to effectiveness. In
any given situation, problem finding determines• If you feel you already know what to do, thengo straight to the action plan.
• If you feel you need to learn something andyou know what that is, then identify the bestpractice and learn to apply it.

f ig u r e 4

1.	Explore the problem
2. Define a test method
3. Visualize the problem in the field
4. Train people to “problem face” and “problem solve”
5. Better understand the nature of the problem

Problem Finding, Framing, and Solving

Toyota’s approach to knowledge and performance involves an an ongoing five-step cycle.

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To the TPS masters, true
productivity lay in effectiveness—solving the right problem—rather
than in efficiency—solving aproblem the right way.

• If you feel you need to learn what is importantto learn, then ask the right questions to discover what is important to know, investigate
and experiment in order to explore, and produce specific knowledge in doing so.
Thus, the overall aim of a system of questions is todevelop employees’ problem-finding capabilities
and problem-solving skills, which individually andthen collectively enhance the organization’s good
sense and better judgment. We suggest then thatthe true value of the Toyota Production System isthat it shows us another way to see knowledge ina world with plentiful information but a dearthof meaning.
What is the system of questions that corresponds
to your field? Can you put those questions in ahierarchy and link them in a coherent way thatsteers the eye of the questioner to focus on highpay-off problems and so truly learn? n

Glossary
Genchi genbutsu: the real place
Kaizen: small-step improvement
Jidoka: stop at first defectSensei: coordinator, trainer, master
TPS: Toyota Production System
Yokoten: copy and improve

Res o u r ces
Ballé, M., Chaize, J., Fiancette, F., & Prévot, E. (September 2010 ). “The Lean Leap: Lean As an Accelerator.” Reflections,
Volume 10 Number 3.
Martin, R. L. (2009). The Design of Business. Harvard Business Review Press.

ENDNOTES
1 Martin, R.L. (2009). The Design of Business. Harvard Business Review Press. Chapter 0ne, “The Funnel of Knowledge.“
2 Revans, R. (1980). Action Learning: New Techniques for Management. Frederick Muller Ltd.
3 Ballé, M., Chaize, J., Fiancette, F., & Prévot, E. (September 2010 ). “The Lean Leap: Lean As an Accelerator.” Reflections,
Volume 10 Number 3.
4 The double-entry accounting system was described in 1494 by Fra Luca Pacioli in “Summa de arithmetica,
geometria, proportioni et proportionalità.“abo u t th e a u tho r s
Michael Ballé is co-founder of the Institut Lean France and associate researcher at Télécom Paristech.
He is also co-author of The Lean Manager, The Gold Mine, and Lead with Respect, three novels of leantransformation. m.balle@orange.fr
Jacques Chaize, ex-CEO of Danfoss Socla, is co-founder and vice president of SoL France and authorof Quantum Leap. jfjchaize@yahoo.com
Daniel Jones is co-founder of the lean movement, co-author of The Machine That Changed The World,
Lean Thinking, and Lean Solutions, and founding chair of the Lean Enterprise Academy. dan@leanuk.org

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Is Your Town in Transition?
J e ssica S tit e sOver the past decade, more than 1,000 municipalities in 43 countries have chosen to define themselves
as “Transition Towns.” Frustrated by the slow pace of change in response to challenges such as peak oil,climate change, and economic instability, people in these places have undertaken grassroots initiatives 		
to build the resilience of their communities to survive sudden shortfalls of necessities such as food, oil,water, or money. These preparations take many forms, some infrastructural—such as establishing solar
energy programs—and others interpersonal—like creating groups that encourage people to help eachother in times of need. At its core, the Transition Movement seeks to build the “social technologies” 		
required to achieve long-term sustainability.

When I set out to investigate the appeal of Transition, a sustainability movementthat has spread to 1,105 towns in 43 countries over the past eight years, I started
with what I thought was a basic question: What are “Transition Towns” transitioning to?
“Resilience,” I was told. “What does that mean?” I asked, thinking vaguely of steel.
“The ability to absorb shocks to a system!” was the reply. Well, yes, but …? Pressedfor details, Nina Winn, who runs a Transition initiative at the Institute of Cultural
Jessica Stites
Affairs in Chicago, said, “I don’t think there’s a conclusion. Like when a person’s
trying to self improve, it’s a constant growth. Our communities would grow to be a lot more intimate.
We wouldn’t be hesitant to ask for that cup of sugar or tomato. The streets would be narrower insteadof expanding; there would be fresh produce on every corner thatwas grown just down the street. You would see people on the street
Transition seeks to address
because of that because where there’s food, there’s people.”
Such bucolic but fuzzy visions are typical of Transition, which ismore about shifting paradigms than prescribing solutions. With anit’ll-take-shape-as-we-go ethos, most Transition Town websites sport
a “cheerful disclaimer:” “Just in case you were under the impressionthat Transition is a process defined by people who have all theanswers, you need to be aware of a key fact. … Transition is a social
experiment on a massive scale.”a source of frustration in theenvironmental movement:
Personal action feels likea drop in the bucket, while
governments often moveat a glacial pace.

On a basic level, however, the experiment seeks to address what founder Rob Hopkins sees as a sourceof frustration in the environmental movement: Personal action feels like a drop in the bucket, while
governments often move at a glacial pace.
This article was originally published by In These Times on May 20, 2013 and is reprinted in its original form with permission.

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r e f l e ctions | vol u m e 1 4 , N u mb e r 1“Until now, there’s been the things you can doat home on your own—changing your lightbulbs
and sharing your lofts and things—and thenthere’s everything else that someone else is meant
to do: the sort of mythical ‘they,’” says Hopkins.
“Transition is what’s in the middle, what you cando with the people on your street.”

If the Transition movement has 		a sine qua non, it is the belief that
communities must become more
resilient in the face of threecatastrophic threats: peak oil,
global warming and economic
instability.
The seed for Transition came in 2004 when Hopkins,a young teacher with a degree in environmental
quality and resource management, encountered
the concept of peak oil: the theory that easy-to-reach oil will run out at a specific date—some say2020 precipitating a rapid decline in oil availability
followed by the collapse of civilization as we know
it. At the time, Hopkins was teaching a permaculture
course at the Kinsale College of Further Education,an alternative school on Ireland’s southern coast.
Permaculture is another one of these concepts
that, as Hopkins notes, is “notoriously difficult to
explain in two minutes in the pub,” but it’s mostcommonly described as an ecological design
movement that sees nature in terms of interlocking
systems. Alarmed by peak oil, Hopkins assigned
his students to apply the principles of permaculture to the problem.
The result was a concrete plan to make Kinsale
dramatically less fossil-fuel dependent, with recommendations such as a green buildings officer anda horse-and-cart taxi. The Kinsale Town Council
enthusiastically adopted the plan, and the principles underlying it became the precepts ofTransition, as outlined in Hopkins’ 2008 Transition
Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilienceand as adopted by Transition Towns worldwide.

© David Gerratt/NonprofitDesign.com

f e at u r e | stit e s

Practically, this means preparing towns to better
survive sudden shortfalls of such necessities as
food, oil, water or money. These preparations takemany forms, some infrastructural—such as solar
energy programs and local economic initiatives—
others interpersonal, like the “heart and soul” groups
that encourage people to help each other in timesof need and open their minds to new solutions.
Totnes, England, declared the first official Transition
Town in 2006, offers perhaps the most fully realized
example. The town, with a population of 7,400,
boasts nearly 30 Transition projects and sub-projects.
Some are small-scale, like nut-tree planting and afree “bike doctor,” while others are more ambitious,
like an incubator for sustainable businesses and a
305-page Energy Descent Action Plan to cut the
town’s energy usage in half by 2030. The movement is enthusiastically backed by the city mayor
and the town councilors, one of whom attests that“the [Energy Descent Action Plan] has filtered into
everyone’s plans for everything, so that’s had amajor impact.” A much-heralded neighborhoodlevel project has been Transition Streets, whichbrought residents together, block by block, tosupport each other in decreasing their homeenergy use through improvements like insulationand solar panels. On average, each of the 550 participating households cut its annual carbon use
by 1.3 tons and its annual energy bill by £570
(about $883).

© iStockhphoto/Adam88xx

But it would be a mistake to think that becominga Transition Town means setting off on a clear-cut
path to energy independence. From permaculture,
the movement has inherited a non-linear, bottomup approach—even the original 12 “steps” outlinedin Hopkins’ handbook have been renamed “ingredients.” If the Transition movement has a sine qua
non, however, it is the belief that communities
must become more resilient in the face of threecatastrophic threats: peak oil, global warming
and economic instability. Whether the movementmeans to avert or adapt to future disasters is
ambiguous; when I ask, Transition members tend
to respond, “Both!” as though I have just recitedtheir favorite koan.

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Transition spreads primarily
through serendipity. One member
likens it to a mycelium network, 		
a fungus with underground rootsthat can sprout new shoots 		
miles away.
Hopkins stresses, however, that the Transition
movement is not in the business of stamping out
cookie-cutter copies of Totnes. Transition spreads
primarily through serendipity. One member likens
it to a mycelium network, a fungus with underground roots that can sprout new shoots miles
away. In effect, this means that someone—oftenwith a background in sustainability—stumbles
across Transition online or in print and decides
to start a local chapter.
While guidance is available from umbrella support
groups such as Transition U.S. and the U.K.-based
Transition Network, the movement is intended tomutate as it grows. “We designed it with a simple
set of principles and tools and sort of set it off,
and it keeps popping up in the most incredible,
surprising places, in the most incredible, surprising ways,” says Hopkins. “When there’s Transition

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happening in Brazil, it feels like a Brazilian thing,
it doesn’t feel like an English imported thing.”
Indeed, the organizers of Brazil’s Transition movement say that two of the three core principles—
peak oil and climate change—don’t resonate
strongly with the Brazilian public, so Transition
trainings focus more on “assuring education andhealth for all, protecting biodiversity and enhancing
autonomy of traditional (indigenous or not) local
communities.” In Brasilândia, one of the slums ofSão Paulo, Transition primarily fosters social enterprise projects; it has given birth to a community
bakery and a business turning old advertisingbanners into bags.
In parts of Europe, Transition has had to respondto the pressing needs of communities decimatedby the ongoing Eurozone crisis. When the city ofCoin, Spain, went bankrupt and decided to privatize the water, Coin En Transicion gathered 3,000
signatures to convince the city to squash the plan.
Now the movement is working with the city government to design a regional water plan grounded
in principles of sustainability and resilience.
In Portugal, where unemployment is at 16.9 percent
and climbing, the Transition Town of Portalegre
has drawn inspiration from ajujeda, an ancientrural practice of trading chores in the fields. This
month, Portalegre em Transição will meet to figureout how to translate the principle of ajujeda intoa functioning gift economy, allowing those whoseskills are not being used (for instance, the unemployed) to share them with those whose needs
are not being met.

Across the Pond
In making the leap across the Atlantic to theUnited States, where more than 139 Transition
Towns and 200 unofficial “mullers” have sprouted,
Transition has also taken its own, distinct path.
Most of the Transition towns in the United States
have popped up in places one might expect:
relatively moneyed, green, hippie enclaves like
Boulder, Colo. (the first official U.S. Transition
Town); Sebastopol, Calif.; Northampton, Mass.;and Woodstock, N.Y. None have taken root so far
in any conservative strongholds, although there
are a number of urban initiatives, in Boston, Houston, Los Angeles and Cleveland, to name a few.
As in the United Kingdom, members of the U.S.
Transition movement tend to split up into working
groups around specific projects. A common one
is an “emergency preparedness” group, which
devises things like phone trees and alternative
heating sources for use in the event of disaster.
“Yard share” working groups match would-be
gardeners to landowners willing to lend a patchof fertile ground. “Heart and soul” or “inner transition” working groups stress psychological andspiritual transformation, drawing on the teachings of thinkers such as Buddhist deep ecologist
Joanna Macy. “Reskilling” working groups offer
trainings in all manner of practical pre-industrial
skills, from cheesemaking to animal husbandry
to knot-tying to knitting.
Of course, Transition is not the only sustainability
game in town. Wherever it goes, and especially incities, it enters a terrain thick with environmental
non-profits and local government initiatives. Morethan 1,060 mayors have signed the U.S. Conferenceof Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, a pledge
to meet the goal of the Kyoto Protocol (the UnitedStates was one of only four countries not to join)
to reduce carbon emissions below 1990 levels.
Some cities have gone beyond that: Last year,
Chicago drafted a sustainability plan for the year
2015 that reads something like Totnes’s Energy
Descent Action Plan—a laundry list of goals suchas improving citywide energy efficiency by 5 percent and decreasing water use by 2 percent (14million gallons a day). To get there, the city haslaunched numerous projects, such as eco-friendly
overhauls of city buses, a “rails-to-trails conversion”
of a disused train line into a park (modeled on
New York City’s High Line), and a Sustainable
Backyards Program that urges residents to installcompost bins and rainwater collectors.
Given this abundance of initiatives, many Transition
movements, especially in cities, take on a network-f e at u r e | stit e s

23© iStockphoto/Thewarit1976

ing role to connect existing sustainability projects.
Transition Pittsburgh’s mission is to offer “resources—such as educators, movie screenings and licenses,
and a library of shared knowledge—to various
local initiatives, as well as a city-wide communityand some of our own projects.” Chicago’s Transition chapter—called Accelerate 77 after the division of the city into 77 unofficial communities
by social scientists at the University of Chicago—
set out by creating a dense map of the more than
800 sustainability projects underway in Chicago,
which are remarkably evenly spaced throughout
the areas of poverty and wealth that stratify thecity. It hosted a “Share Fair” in September forthe various groups to connect with each other,followed by three neighborhood gatherings
on Chicago’s South, West and North Sides toconnect with residents.
I asked Ryan Wilson of the nonprofit Center for
Neighborhood Technology (CNT), a sustainability“think-and-do tank” that participated in the ShareFair, whether he thinks Transition has anything to
add to Chicago’s wealth of sustainability initiatives.
“It was helpful to learn what other projects areout there—maybe more helpful for some of thesmaller groups,” he says. “The Transition folks—
I like the people. I like their energy.”“We have all the technologies
to [achieve sustainability], but wedon’t have the social technologies
to make it happen.” — Rob Hopkins
This jives with Hopkins’ thinking on Transition,
which has progressed from seeing “resilience” asa strictly environmental process to a more social
one: “We have all the technologies to [achievesustainability],” he says, “but we don’t have thesocial technologies to make it happen.”

The Art of Hosting
Transition’s freewheeling structure, however, doesmean that certain problems—or “challenges”—
seem to crop up frequently. As with any volunteerdriven movement, members describe burnout
and lack of accountability. After a stage of initial
enthusiasm, projects can fall dormant. Moresuccessful Transition Towns often have paid staff.
After observing that most initiatives “were struggling with an all-volunteer leadership team,” Transition Sarasota founder Don Hall decided to raise
the money to pay himself as a full-time organizer,
cobbling together his salary from “a mix of event24

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and workshop fees, donations, local businesssponsorships and grants.” In many cities, Transition
has been adopted by non-profits that provide
paid staff, like Chicago’s Institute of Cultural
Affairs, a 50-year-old organization dedicated tosustainability and social change, and Jamaica Plain’s
Institute for Policy Studies, the Boston branch ofa progressive, multi-issue D.C. think tank.

The Transition movement
grapples with the challenges of
non-hierarchical, collective
leadership.
The Transition movement also grapples with thechallenges of non-hierarchical, collective leadership. When I contacted Transition Sebastopol,
in California, a longstanding, apparently thriving
Transition town with a busy events calendar, I was
surprised to learn that all was not well. A disputein September had put the central Working GroupCouncil on hold, although several working groups—an elders salon, the “heart and soul” group—arechugging along independently. Former working
group member Julia Bystrova ascribes the blowup to a lack of conflict-resolution mechanisms.
She hopes that a fresh team will take over andresuscitate the group.
Hopkins is quick to cop to these pitfalls, and Transition is good at tapping into existing knowledge
bases to fix problems. Transition U.S. has partneredwith an organization called The Art of Hosting tooffer facilitation trainings and will begin hostingregional courses on “effective groups” starting in
September. Transition U.K. offers Thrive workshops
for the same purpose, and ecofeminist and spiritual
activist Starhawk gave a workshop in Totnes lastmonth about clear communication and constructive critique in collective decision-making.
Another common concern about Transition,levied from both within and without, is that it is amovement of “white hippies.” While the definitionof “hippie” is open to debate, each of the half

dozen Transition towns I surveyed in the U.S.
indeed lamented a lack of diversity. In addition to
being predominantly white, participants in several
towns mentioned that their initiative was madeup primarily of older women.
While many in the Transition movement said they
were working to increase diversity, by far the mostimpressive effort I encountered is being stagedby the Boston branch of IPS’ Jamaica Plain New
Economy Transition (JP NET), which has hired
an organizer to help meet this challenge. Carlos
Espinoza-Toro, a Peruvian immigrant with a master’s in city planning from MIT, aims to identify
spaces where different demographics intersect—farmers’ markets, festivals—as well as to find people like himself who enjoy serving as cross-cultural
bridges. But he’s going beyond mixed-race spaces
to foster Transition in the heart of Jamaica Plain’s
Latino community. A series of IPA-hosted meetingsin Spanish (with simultaneous English translation)encourages residents to talk about how they are
weathering environmental and economic crises.
Espinoza-Toro’s bilingual fliers for the first meeting read:Us Latinos have adapted to economic crises
in our countries and in the US for many years.
And we have always prevailed! We are creative,
resourceful and entrepreneurial. Currently in
the US, MA and JP we are experiencing a crisis
that challenges our capacity of adaptation.
Work opportunities are scarce, rent keeps
going up, it becomes more difficult to afford
a healthy diet and take the T, the quality ofeducation in our public schools diminishes. …
We invite you to share how you are adapting
to this crisis or how you have adapted to previous crises. Tell us your stories of adaptation.
We could transform your effort into a neighborhood effort with great impact in JP.
Espinoza-Toro anticipates that the needs of Jamaica
Plain’s Latino immigrant community may be very
different from the white, middle-class needs thathave prompted JP NET’s existing programs, suchas garden shares and urban orchards. “Folks in thef e at u r e | stit e s© iStockhphoto/sissy_12

Latino community may say, ‘Well, we cannot do
our own gardening if we are getting evicted fromour homes,’ ” he says. JP NET has one program
underway to address housing issues, a community
land trust called Pueblo, but Espinoza-Toro estimatesthat it is years from fruition thanks to high property costs in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. He hopes other ideas will emerge fromthe meetings.
Outside of urban areas, the barriers that limit thereach of Transition can be subtler than ethnicity.
In New York state’s Hudson Valley and other agricultural areas around the United States, Transitionis one of many sustainability initiatives to run
up against a cultural divide between traditional
farmers and those who practice newer, moresustainable methods like organic, permaculturaland biodynamic farming.
“You have organic farmers who are pretty disdainful and smug, and traditional farmers who are kindof threatened,” says Maria Reidelbach, an artist
and member of Transition Marbletown, N.Y., whofound herself spanning both sides when she

Transition is one of manysustainability initiatives to run up
against a cultural divide between
traditional farmers and those whopractice newer, more sustainable
methods.
partnered with a 177-year-old local farm to createa mini-golf course featuring entirely edible plants(along with the world’s third-largest garden
gnome, “Gnome Chomsky”). “When the traditional
farmers adopted machinery and pesticides in the20th century, the yield increased incredibly, andall of a sudden they were able to feed so many
more people with the same amount of land andless help,” says Reidelbach. “To them, that’s great.
And then we come along 30 years later and starttelling them that they are feeding people poison.”Reidelbach thinks Transition Marbletown has gonesome way toward bridging this divide. The movement, she says, managed to “rope in” the local

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Modest Expectations, High Spirits
Asked if he eventually envisions Transition scaling
up and being adopted by regional or national
governments, Hopkins assents cautiously, explaining that the goal would be for government tobetter enable local projects (for instance, by making laws more friendly to small-scale farming).
He also hopes that Transition will hit a tipping
point at which new solutions seem possible—
where, for instance, local governments don’t feelthat the only solution to economic hardship is totry to attract large corporations in a deregulatory
race to the bottom.

© Wavebreakmedia Ltd

growers’ association to cosponsor a “Common
Ground Celebration” last fall. At a farmers’ market,
growers mingled and tasted each other’s crops,
and farmers of all stripes were recognized with
“Signs of Sustainability Awards.”“There’s a value to the farmers listening to eachother, humanizing each other,” says Reidelbach.
“Then they are much less likely to dis each others’
methods, modus operandi and motives. I think
everybody’s got to get down off their high horses.
That’s one of the things that Transition enables.”“I don’t know if we’re going to solve
the world’s problems. [But] theunderlying ethos is that the processneeds to be fun enough to be worth
doing anyway.” —Maria Reidelbach

Espinoza-Toro says that he chooses Transition overother forms of organizing because he is inspiredby the movement’s tangibility. “What I find mostfruitful and rewarding about my work here is thatI’m dealing with folks face-to-face in order totackle some of these issues,” he says.
Again and again, for Transitioners, it seems tocome back to that social aspect. “Between you andme, I don’t know if we’re going to solve the world’s
problems,” says Reidelbach. “[But] the underlying
ethos is that the process needs to be fun enoughto be worth doing anyway. I love that about it.
There’s a bit of anarchy, which is wonderful.
People who are attracted to it tend to be upbeat,
optimistic, joyous people.
“I don’t see anything meaningful happening at
the top, with governments and multinational
corporations,” Reidelbach continues. “Whether or
not we win, Transition is the only group offering amodel where I can deal with fossil fuel depletionand climate change myself.” n

abo u t th e a u tho r
Jessica Stites is In These Times’ Deputy Editor. Before joining ITT, she worked at Ms. magazine andGeorge Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute. Her writing has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books,
Ms., Bitch, Jezebel, The Advocate, and AlterNet. jessica@inthesetimes.com

comm e nta r y | A itk e n and wool f

C omm e nta r y 1 4 . 1

CommentaryJ e f f A itk e n and T e nn e son W ool f

A
Jeff Aitken

Tenneson Woolfs practitioners, social change facilitators, and participative
leadership professionals, we are inspired by the qualities
inherent in the Transition Movement:• The belief that communities must become more resilientin the face of global threats• The efforts to shift paradigms rather that prescribe cookiecutter solutions• The willingness to engage in local experiments with
global relevanceOur world needs innovative approaches created and supported by people everywhere. As we see from Jessica
Stites’s stories of Transition initiatives from around the world, what’s essential now is a social architecture to
support passionate citizen activists in their efforts.
To support the development of that kind of cohesion and participatory framework, we served as members of two
teams that offered three-day Art of Hosting trainings for 160 Transition leaders and people from other like-mindedorganizations. The first two took place near Petaluma, CA, in June 2013 and March 2014, and the third near
Portland, ME, in April 2014. Our experience in these trainings
as well as our other work have lead us to several reflections
Whether in response to peak
important to the Transition Movement and other local andoil, climate change, environtrans-local undertakings.

The Art of Hosting

mental racism, or other crises,
this is an age that requires
participation.

Whether in response to peak oil, climate change, environmental racism, or other crises, this is an age that requires participation. Most of us observe that while resilience leaders are driven
by passion, many have also become exhausted. While some communities have social resources to draw upon,
there is a need for processes to help groups be inspired together, see together what can’t be seen alone, and create
together what can’t be created alone. The Art of Hosting provides frameworks to help these things happen.
The Art of Hosting (AoH) is a way of harnessing the collective wisdom and self-organizing capacity of groups ofany size. Based on the assumption that people give their energy and lend their resources to what matters mostto them, it blends a suite of powerful conversational processes to invite people to step in and take responsibility
for the challenges facing them. As such, AoH is a kind of operating system for networks of impassioned, experimenting people. By connecting individuals working on things that matter in constructive ways, it helps them
to be smart, thoughtful, and heart-full together.

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C omm e nta r y 1 4 . 1

Through the Art of Hosting, people:
1. Learn and sense together
2. Build and strengthen lasting relationships
3.	Roll their sleeves up to work with the experiments,
offerings, and practices needed now

Essential Frameworks
Two Loops of Change
One essential framework we use—which we learned
through association with our colleagues Meg Wheatleyand Deborah Frieze at The Berkana Institute—is called“Two Loops of Change.” This model proves helpful tocitizen activists in two ways. First, it helps them locate
their current work and strategy in the context of what
others in the movement are doing. It invites a systemic
view, to make possible more collaboration amongpeople with different roles and in different phases of
networked change. Second, “Two Loops” invites people
to see their work from a living systems perspective, towitness the decline of old systems and the birth andemergence of new ones, and to notice what leadershipacts help in working with the natural dynamics of
emerging systems.

According to Saira Austin, a participant in one of theTransition trainings, “The biggest spark of learning was
the life cycles of systems—physically placing myself inthe two loops map, and then viewing and listening toothers around me, all of us simultaneously interrelated
but in very different places along the path of emerging
and dying.”

Dynamics of Chaos, Order, and Control
A second key framework in the Art of Hosting is exploring the dynamics of chaos, order, and control. Most
Transition leaders are familiar with chaotic environments.
What is less familiar is how to orient ourselves with the
dynamic energy or inherent order found within chaos.
When a messy, complex situation disrupts our senseof order—when funding doesn’t come through, whenpolicy thwarts an intended innovation, or when people
aren’t listening to our well-crafted plans—many of us
habitually attempt to regain control.
An alternative is to shift toward a skillful dance withchaos—for example, by inviting even more diverse
voices and perspectives into the conversation. When

Two Loopsof Change

Image courtesy Amanda Fenton

As one systemculminates and starts
to collapse, isolated
alternatives slowly
begin to arise andgive way to the new.
Large-scale change
emerges whenlocal actions getconnected globally
while preserving
their deeply local
culture, flavor,
and form.

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C omm e nta r y 1 4 . 1

well hosted, this can lead to a new, emergent sense oforder that is more robust and resilient. Learning to trust
these dynamics, to welcome emergence, takes practiceand is a core competency in Transition leadership.
Jesse Watson, a participant from Midcoast Permaculture
Design, comments, “When an organization gets stuck
in a rut, the thing that might help is to introduce chaos
into the situation. This chaos may take the shape of aparticipatory meeting with no set agenda beforehand.”Development of Core Teams
A third key framework in these trainings is the development of core teams. Movements don’t begin as movements; they begin with small groups of individuals thatbegin to name the work and connect with others. If welltended, core teams may grow into networks and begin
to connect with allied networks. And then they may growinto communities of practice—in the case of Transition
and allies, cultivating the emergence of new approaches
to energy, food, economy, community, and resilience.
Transition US Communications Manager Marissa
Mommaerts reflects, “Strong core teams, built on trust,are vital to the success of our work. Strong, dynamic
core teams can alleviate burnout, build a more robustand diverse vision, and are a much more resilientmodel than having a single leader.”Core teams have a hidden role; they are not just forhands-on action projects like gray water systems andeducation campaigns. They are also a practice groundfor developing essential personal and interpersonal
capacities.
In AoH, we speak of a four-fold practice:• Engaging in self care to be more fully present
for the work
• Practicing generative conversation by cultivating
curiosity rather than judgment• Hosting conversations among others,
at varying scales• Co-creating a community of practice and learning

Social change is thus rooted in fundamental practices of
democracy—good conversation and learning together
inside core teams, among core teams, in allied and 		
diverse networks, and in broader public conversations
around our shared future in our communities.

Added Capacity
Participant Angelo Silva noted that the Art of Hosting
trainings reflected the permaculture principle of “stacking functions,” in that people could simultaneously havedeep conversations about issues, learn a new meeting
method, practice their own capacities of hosting, anddeepen their connections with one another for
ongoing work.

Movements don’t begin as
movements; they begin with small
groups of individuals that begin 		
to name the work and connect
with others.
Through experiential learning, participants left withseveral portable principles. In her blog, participant
Beth Tener eloquently summarizes some of them:• Circle. We began the event sitting in a circle and 		
returned to this circle multiple times. The emphasis
was that the learning is in the center, and we all havesomething to contribute to that learning.
• Story. “The shortest distance between two people
is a story.” This quote from Meg Wheatley kept resonating with me through the weekend as I saw how
the opportunity for people to share stories createda growing sense of trust and camaraderie among
the group.
• Hosting. Participants were invited to help “host” 		
various parts of the gathering—an opportunity forpeople to share their skills and creativity, embodying
the idea that we all have something to offer, we can
all contribute to the gathering, and we can show 		up in various roles in a group at various times.

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C omm e nta r y 1 4 . 1• Space. When meetings are tight on time and strictly
wedded to a fixed agenda, there is little space for the
serendipity that enables new things to emerge. We
used a variety of engagement processes, including
Open Space. By the afternoon of the second day, it
felt like all of our interweaving had created a qualityof space that was humming with good will, appreciation, inspiration, ideas and deeper understanding,and a sense of possibility.
• Wisdom. People had profound insights, powerfulstories, and so much wisdom. In most gatherings,
this is latent, yet with this format, so much moreof this could be accessed, by creating the space tohave real conversations and listen to each other.

Thriving Movements Through Simple Practices
We are learning that, as our friend Meg Wheatley shares,
three practices are key to the emergence of movements
like Transition:• Stay awake. Fortunately, by definition, most people
involved in movements like Transition are people
who are awake. They are not asleep or numb to thefrightening trends and frailties of our current world.
They are willing to face facts and fears together, andto stay present and curious to what is unfolding.
• Dwell in complexity. It’s not always easy to lean into
uncertainty or dwell in complexity. The job for mostof us is to resist our tendencies to oversimplify—		
to impose solutions that satisfy our need to reduce
anxiety but don’t create lasting solutions.

• Pay exquisite attention to relations. It is not our
blaming and judging of one another that will pull us
through uncertainty. When situations are complex,
many stories are true. To be able to be in a multiplicity of truths, a plurality inherent in democracy,
we must continue to develop our relationships
together.

It’s Time to Be Inspired Together“I am inspired to reach out to non-like-minded
individuals, build connections, and support a resilient,earth-friendly future with ‘unlikely candidates.’”—Lesley Heyl, participant
Like Transition, The Art of Hosting is a commitment 		
to working individually and together at scale on behalfof a world in significant change. It is a participative
process to catalyze shared perspective and action. It
is large- and small-group methodologies that bringpeople into deeper relationship and commitment
together. It is a set of models and worldviews toreclaim democratic process and action. Emergence,
self-organization, and living systems inspire the work.
Passionate local and trans-local responses—like that of
the Transition movement—can only help us respondto the key issues of our times. nMore can be found at www.transitionus.org
and www.artofhosting.org.

abo u t th e a u tho r s
Jeff Aitken, PhD, is a facilitator, trainer, convener, and coach who helped bring the Art of Hosting to
the San Francisco Bay area. He received his MA and PhD from the California Institute of Integral Studies.
r.jeff.aitken@gmail.com
Tenneson Woolf is a facilitator, workshop leader, speaker, and writer who learned his trade throughthe Art of Hosting Community of Practitioners, of which he is a steward, and The Berkana Institute.
www.tennesonwoolf.com, tenneson@tennesonwoolf.com

B ook e x c e r pt | G ol e man and S e ng ebook e x c e r pt 1 4 . 1

The Triple Focus

Rethinking Mainstream Education
D ani e l G ol e man and P e t e r S e ng e
In The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education, Peter Senge and Daniel Goleman examine the cognitive andemotional tools that young children need to navigate and thrive in today’s environment. The authors identify threeskill sets essential for navigating this world of increasing distractions and decreasing face-to-face communications:focusing on self, tuning in to other people, and understanding the larger world and how systems interact. This excerpt focuses on the third skill set and makes a strong case for capitalizing on the connections and synergies between
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and systems thinking. The notion of transforming and replacing the traditional
pedagogy that anchors our current curriculum wth systems-based learning has already taken hold with impressive
results that have surprised even the authors.

We believe we are at thevery beginning of rethinking
our views of human development in a more integrative
way: cognitive (frontal brain/lobes), emotional (mammalianbrain and limbic system),spiritual and energetic (which
Daniel Goleman
could be embedded in thewhole mind-body system
functioning rather than particular circuits). Again andagain, we find one of the mostpowerful experiences of Socialand Emotional Learning (SEL)and systems educators everyPeter Senge
where is seeing that thegenuine potential of students far exceeds what thecurrent mainstream education system, with its emphases on cognitive development and analysis oversynthesis, is designed to produce (see “Social andEmotional Learning Defined”, p. 32). In that sense, it isa system of “dumbing down” these innate capabilities.

Reprinted withpermission fromthe publisher. From
The Triple Focus: A New
Approach to Education
Daniel Goleman andPeter Senge
Copyright © 2014 byMore Than Sound, LLC.
All Rights Reserved.

It is useful to remember that the factory model wehave inherited through the Industrial Age School wasnever about tapping and cultivating this innate potential. It was never about growing human beings—it was
designed to train factory workers en masse. Thoughalmost everything has changed in the reality for ourstudents since this model was implemented almost 		
200 years ago, the basic design of school has only been

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				Social and Emotional
Learning DefinedSocial and Emotional Learning (SEL) is anapproach to learning in which children develop
the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary
to manage their emotions, demonstrate caring
and concern for others, establish positive relationships, make responsible decisions, and 		
handle challenging situations constructively.
For children to succeed in developing these life
skills, SEL must be taught in the context of safe
and supportive school, family, and community
learning environments where they feel valued
and respected.
	For more information, go to The Collaborative
for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning(CASEL).

adjusted incrementally, not fundamentally. We still have
fixed grades (Grade 1, Grade 2, and so on right to Grade12)* that most students move through en masse, withrigid curricula guidelines and expert teachers who aresupposed to endorse them. We are now standing at theedge of . . . a fundamental innovation, and through the
combined lenses of the SEL and systems work, seeing
how this innovation could occur.
[An] important synergy between SEL and systems
thinking has to do with transforming pedagogy andthe culture of school. For example, a key to making
such a spiral view of cognitive-emotional development
practical in real educational settings is profound respect.
You don’t try to teach kids something that has no

meaning to them, something that does not connect
in any way with their lives. But unfortunately, that’s still
the modus operandi for 80–90% of school curricula.
In contrast, students at every level find SEL compelling
because it helps them deal directly with the issues thatmatter most to them: bullying, friendships, getting
along, and the like. . . .

The factory model we have inherited
through the Industrial Age School
was never about growing humanbeings—it was designed to train
factory workers en masse.
A common discovery is that neither effective SEL nor
effective systems education can be accomplished by 		traditional pedagogy, where teachers stand in front ofclasses and deliver information. When either is done well,there is a natural emphasis on experience-based lessons
and on project-based learning, action learning, and 		
cooperative learning, with students getting deeply 		
engaged in matters that are important in their lives andtaking responsibility for their own learning. These are
all familiar instructional strategies to most educators,
and can be effective across ages and diverse academic
content. Yet, they are still the exception rather than thenorm, in large part because educators know the concepts but are not adept at their practice, or because
the constraints of most school cultures inhibit them		
in building these capacities.
We believe a wonderful joint project would be for leadersin SEL and systems education innovation to work on acommon set of pedagogical principles, like:* Senge, Peter, et al. (2012, updated and revised). Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents,
and Everyone Who Cares About Education. Crown Business.

B ook e x c e r pt | G ol e man and S e ng e

• Respect the learner’s reality and processes ofunderstanding.
• Focus on issues that are real to the learner.
• Allow students to build their own models, construct
and test their own ways of making sense of problems.
• Work and learn together.
• Keep the focus on action and thinking, how I or
we need to act or behave differently, not just think
differently.
• Build students’ ability to be responsible for theirown learning.
• Encourage peer dynamics where students help
one another learn.
• Recognize teachers as designers, facilitators, anddecision-makers (more than “curriculum deliverers”).
This requires that teachers have strong content
knowledge, continually being advanced throughrobust peer-learning networks.

Focusing on real innovation in pedagogy does not preclude attention to skills, curriculum, or standards. Rather,it builds more effective strategies for accomplishingoverarching educational goals. . . .
But these pedagogical principles are only half the story.
Though commendable, they won’t be followed widelyand effectively until they are paired with implementation principles.
Roger Weissberg, the founding director of the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning(CASEL), has often said that the most important—but
also most neglected—aspect of SEL is its implementation. In the United Kingdom, the Ministry of Education
ordered that a program called SEAL (“Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning”) be started in schools there
in 2003. This was a top-down mandate, and not every© Stockbyte/Jupiterimages

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head of school or teaching staff was necessarily keenon the program, nor was there a standard curriculum.
Perhaps no surprise, a study of the program’s effectiveness found that on average, SEAL didn’t really help kidsthat much. However, there was a great deal of variationin outcomes, with some schools having very positive
results, even though others had poor outcomes.
And a major factor in the program’s success seemed
to be how it was implemented. It’s not just having 		an outstanding curriculum that makes SEL succeed, 		
but having all those involved understand, embody, 		
and teach it effectively. It’s changing the culture of 		the school.
Beyond the programs themselves, bringing SEL intoa school requires helping teachers prepare well, so theycan embody what it is they’re going to teach. We should
also involve parents to the greatest extent we can—		
the best SEL programs all have a component for parents.
There’s a natural two-way flow between classroom 		and home. Children who learn a technique for, say, selfmanagement, will often bring the school lesson hometo the family, as in, “Mommy, you’re starting to get upset,
why you don’t take some deep breaths.” Such reports
from home are common because the wall between

A simple rule-of-thumb is the more
you’re really innovating, the more
you’re stretching the norm, themore you must involve parents.
school and home is somewhat of a fiction. A child lives
in her whole world, not in walled-off parts. And what
she learns in one place she brings to the other naturally
whenever and wherever it applies.
One of the best practices in SEL is involving parents asmuch as possible. That way what children learn in school
gets reinforced and supported by the people who matter to them the most: their families.
A simple rule-of-thumb is the more you’re really innovating, the more you’re stretching the norm, the more
you must involve parents—for two fundamental reasons.
One is that parents can either get very threatened orthey can become be really engaged. The second is thatkids don’t live in school. To be really respectful of theworld of the child, you must reach out. Whether or not
you realize it, you are really not educating kids, you are
educating families. n

abo u t th e a u tho r sDaniel Goleman is the author of the best seller Emotional Intelligence, called one of the 25 most influential books
by Time magazine. He is co-director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations.
Peter M. Senge is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; founding Chair of SoL, theSociety for Organizational Learning; and author of the widely acclaimed book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art andPractice of the Learning Organization.

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f e at u r e 1 4 . 1

Reflections on the2014 SoL Global Forum
G itt e L a r s e n and V icky S ch u b e r t

On May 21–23, 2014, 450 participants from around the world gathered in Paris, France, to take part in the
SoL Global Forum: “Investing in Emerging Futures: New Players, New Games—Welcoming Metamorphosis.”
Organized by SoL France, the event invited change leaders and organizational leaders to explore an
urgent question together: “How can we facilitate and accelerate the metamorphosis of our organizations,firms, and society?” In this two-part article, Gitte Larsen, a newcomer to the Global SoL community, and Vicky
Schubert, a long-time SoL contributor, share highlights from—and personal reflections on—the event. Theirinsightful commentary paints a picture of a community of people who are making the internal shifts necessary to lead profound changes in all those external systems that connect us.

Part I: My SoL Global Forum Moments
G itt e L a r s e n

Gitte Larsen

I was looking forward to participating in the SoL Global Forum in Paris thisspring, not least because I’ve been invited to take part in the upcoming Danish
SoL community by Steen Buchreitz, who’s a new member of the Board of the
Global Association of SoL Communities (GASC) (see “Global Association of SoL
Communities”). I was curious about the event, the content and form, and theinternational participants, and I was eager to learn more about what it means
to be a member of SoL. I’m a first-timer to the SoL Global Forum, so you might
consider me an outsider, an intruder, or just a traveler sharing some of mypersonal highlights and reflections from this event.

The purpose of SoL, which is to “discover, integrate and implement theories and practices of organizational learning for systemic change and toprogress towards the vision of a living system in order to co-create a moresustainable world” perfectly fits my areas of interest. Being a futurist foralmost 20 years has given me a holistic, interdisciplinary approach tothinking about transformational change. My work within the fields of sustainability and leadership during the last years has only confirmed that weneed our minds and our hearts, our doing and our being, and a systemic
as well as a personal approach if we are to create a future worth living.

We need our minds and ourhearts, our doing and ourbeing, and a systemic as well
as a personal approach if weare to create a future worth
living.

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				Global Association of SoL Communities
The Global Association of SoL Communities (GASC) is formallyregistered in Vienna, Austria. It has 31 established and emerging SoL Community members active on six continents. The
Global SoL Board meets monthly and is currently in the process of establishing minimal structures that support all thecommunities in collaborating for systemic change and social
well-being.

New Humans, New Structures
In the opening session of the Global Forum, we
heard different voices from the two panels on
stage, the first representing what you might call“the elders” and after them the next generation ofleaders. Besides setting the tone, these voices together touched upon many of the most important
aspects of where we are today and where we needto go tomorrow. (Recordings of the sessions canbe found on the SoL Global Forum website).
Alain de Vulpian, social anthropologist and cofounder of Cofremca, stated that one of the mostimportant changes since WW2 is that people havebecome increasingly individualistic, independent,
and open-minded, including in the emotional
dimension of life. “This is the first time in the“Internal structures of businessand governmental institutions
must be much more in harmony
with our evolution as humans.”—Arie de Geus
history of mankind where we nourish both therational and the irrational, and this has a huge
impact on our society,” he said, noting that we
use our rationality to deal with the irrational. “We
discover something new and move forward, andwe constantly have the impression that we can gothat extra mile. Little by little, we become smarter,

the scenarios look better, and we fine-tune ourstrategies on how to interact with other people
to reach our goals. We find identity and meaning
when we succeed in optimizing ourselves, andthis fulfillment is one of the big things about ourperiod compared to earlier stages of civilization.”
Another core aspect of transformative changethat de Vulpian mentioned is communication
technology, which allows people to establish links
and relationships that will help them fulfill themselves and others. He concluded, “A new society
is emerging, and there is a resistance among theformer powers, for example, due to the traditional
hierarchy, bureaucracy, and financial economy.
These powers are out of sync with this newsociety—a society that is running better andbetter. Metamorphosis is underway.”
Arie de Geus, former vice president of RoyalDutch Shell, co-founder of SoL, and author of
The Living Company, spoke next. “This forum’s
program—the speakers, the title, and the focus
on fundamental change—reminds me of the beginning of SoL. I was working for Shell, and when
we began to look at our decision-making processes like a learning process, it opened a way toa whole new world for us. We found out that we
had two kinds of learning processes. Assimilation
was one where all the Shell leaders sat at a table
and resolved the problems. They used knowledge
that was already there. The other process is much
more difficult, that is learning by accommodation.
Something around you in the world is changing ina way that demands internal structures to change
as well. When we started these processes, the answer
wasn’t known. We had to learn to apply [them]. Thatbrought us to the idea that organizations learn
and to MIT, where we met Peter [Senge],” he said.
“A lot has changed [since then] in business andgovernmental institutions. Basically, people havechanged, as Alain said.… We moved away fromcommand and control, and the decision-making
process should thereby have become much more
visible, but in many companies this is not the case.
We still see command-and-control companies

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today. The decision-making process in the company still has an old structure, which is furthermore based in the law of most of our countries.
[Corporate] law advocates for one particular party,
namely the capital supplier, the shareholders who
have the absolute power. This is built into thepower structure of the company and the decisionmaking process. We have built this up since WW2,
but the economic game has changed considerably. . . . We need to find ways to practice newinternal structures of business and governmental
institutions. They must be much more in harmony
with the values that have emerged, that is, with
our evolution as humans,” concluded de Geus.
Peter Senge, senior lecturer at MIT, co-founderof SoL, author of The Fifth Discipline, and co-authorof The Necessary Revolution and Presence, spoke
next. “I would like to ask what it means to be acoordinated global society. Alain talked aboutthe ‘western-centrism” of our thinking. We havea classic western dualism: Rationality versus
emotions, and the versus part is really the heartof our western culture. The deepest level ofchange is cultural, not biological.”37“We should treat life as anexperiment. It’s too late to be
pessimistic!”—Next-generation panel participant“We will be the first ones to do more with muchless. Inequality is spreading, and we have noillusion of progress as we have known it so far.
We have to reinvent it. But young people are
optimistic about the future. We should not be
afraid, but really enjoy and appreciate learningby doing. Failure is a key to success.”“We should treat life as an experiment. It’s toolate to be pessimistic! Technology, computers,social networks haven’t scaled the wealth, but wegrew up with [them], and we have to find the rightbalance between technology and humanity.”“Ideas have no value until they are tested andimplemented. We believe in the circular, where wework, implement, and learn, and then start overPeter mentioned the three divides we needto bridge that Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kauferdefined in their book Leading from the Emerging
Future: The ecological divide (between self andnature), the social divide (between self and other),and the spiritual divide (between self and self ).
“The separation of human and nature has been
unfolding for many thousands of years, and theagricultural revolution was where it happened
rather that the industrial age. We lost our connection with the living world. It has been a long journey of separation, and it will take us generations
to re-establish, but it’s important to understandthis journey ahead,” said Senge.

Next-Generation Leaders
Three next-generation leaders on a panel thentalked about doing more with less, community
power, happiness, values, and attitudes. Someof their comments were:© Olivier Goirand38

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again. We believe in being open to the outcome
and not attached to a specific result.”
And finally, “What brings all these things together?
Happiness is something that everyone strives
for—let’s take it seriously! Today the educational
system only prepares us for financial success.”

A Sneak Peak into Other Plenum Sessions
Here are highlights from three other talks that
profoundly affected me:				

4 Principles and 10 Commandments
The members of the next-generation leaders panel 		presented a shared vision for metamorphosis with four
key principles and 10 commandments:

Marie-Eve Marchand is a professional coachand founder of two programs at the University of
Laval. She helps leaders to lead in creativity, fromthe heart as well as the mind, and she led theplenum meditations during the Global Forum.
Title of presentation: “Self Transformation: 		A Prerequisite for Transforming the World.”
In her talk, Marchand said, “What does it mean
to transform consciousness? There is no certainty,
but it includes a need to be mindful in a world
where we do not know the answers and where
there’s no right solution. We need to be openminded and use the intelligence of the heart or
the brain cells at the heart level. I remember
back in 2000, I was leading a group meditationand someone looked through the windows in the
doors and said, ‘They all sit there looking totally
spaced out!’ There wasn’t a lot of research about
the effect of meditation back then. Today, articles
are published daily, and we are a lot more familiar
with the vocabularium.”
Marchand also touched upon the development ofconsciousness as a dynamic process, change within
the same order of consciousness versus transformation of the order itself, orders of consciousness
in adulthood, and intentional transformation.
“Can we transform intentionally when we are notin crisis?” she asked. Her answer was, “Yes, if wewant to.”Marchand explained that in the higher orders ofconsciousness comes a simplicity, and that certain
qualities are then inherent to the order itself, e.g.,
openness of heart linked to evolution. She also
stated the convergence of many theories happening at this moment, including Spiral Dynamics andKegan’s fifth order, which is labeled “we-consciousness.” The practices for intentional self-transformation toward this fifth order are meditation; yoga;
a community of persons sharing; inspiring books,
films, or presentations; spending time with wise
persons; volunteer work; time in nature; and time.
The inner dispositions that support transformation are a firm intention, deep listening, humility,

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self compassion, self observation, and the courage
to face our own resistance.
After her talk, Marchand invited us to share witha person next to us our response to the question:“What is transforming in me at this time of mylife, and which challenges do I face?”
Adam Kahane is a partner with Reos Partners
in Canada, and he advocates storytelling to initiatesocial change. Title of presentation: “Power andLove to Manage Complexity.”
Kahane began, “I help people move forward on
the most important issues—health, food, development—on all continents and with multiple actors(activists, academic, etc.). This is trial and error, andthe social transformation of Power and Love is theessence of what I have learned from the last 20
years of work. We sometimes get stuck when trying to move things, and as Peter Senge and Otto
Scharmer talk about, this is the nature of complex
systems: These are systems we cannot change
alone, but where we have to work with strangers
and opponents. I have asked myself, How we candeal with this situation? When I observe myself
and the people I work with, there are two basic
ways or cycles of social transformation, and that isPower and Love. Both of them have two flip sides,
a generative and a degenerative action.”
After Kahane had explained the two sides ofPower and Love, he stated that there is symmetry
between Power and Love. “Remember Martin
Luther King. Power without Love is recklessness
and abusive, and Love without Power is sentimental. And this is the central crisis of our time, andit’s about our capacity to act. Power and Love are
primarily associated in their generative aspect,
and they are only generative when they are combined—that is the guiding formula,” he said.
The success lies in moving between Power andLove before going into the generative action ofeither one or the other. Adam said, “It’s like walking on two feet, and we need both the left and theright. Both Power and Love are required. They are

not the same, but at an abstract level they are
two faces of the same thing, and we need to learn
to work with both of these social transformation
drivers. We should not try to weaken the one thatis stronger, and we should not try to achieve astatic balance, as there is only the dynamic relation—like walking. Only in this way, by learning
to work with both these drives or aspects, canwe achieve mastery in dealing with a complex
challenge—and thereby get un-struck,” he said.

“Can we transform intentionallywhen we are not in crisis?”—Marie-Eve Marchand

Lord David Owen, member of the House of Lords
in the UK and former secretary of State for Foreign
and Commonwealth Affairs, studies the “hubris
syndrome” and its impact on decision-making. The
title of his presentation: “The hubris syndrome, anobstacle to the transformation of organizations.”
Lord Owen, who has a medical education as background, talked about mental illness among US
presidents and went through the symptoms of
the hubris syndrome. He raised the importantquestion of the health of any leader in politics
and business. “How can the boards of companies
check this?” he asked. In many cases, illness,
including mental illness, is kept confidential between a personal doctor and the patient, partly
due to the fear of the press. Lord Owen stated thatwhen it concerns crucial decision makers like presidents, we should have independent doctors tomake public statements.
The hubris syndrome shows that someone’s
mental stability changes when he or she is in
power. “Power is a heavy drug,” Lord Owen said
and referred to a classic General Motors study
that showed how powerful people distancethemselves from reality and how the decision
makers no longer live in the same world as 		
the organization they lead.

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Silence, Space, and Leadership				The Symptoms of the Hubris Syndrome
Proposed criteria for hubris syndrome and their correspondence to features of cluster B personality disorders in DSM-IV.
1. A narcissistic propensity to see their world primarily
as an arena in which to exercise power and seek glory(NPD.6)
2. A predisposition to take actions which seem likely
to cast the individual in a good light—i.e., in order toenhance image (NPD.1)
3. A disproportionate concern with image and presentation(NPD.3)
4. A messianic manner of talking about current activities
and a tendency to exaltation (NPD.2)
5. An identification with the nation or organization to theextent that the individual regards his/her outlook andinterests as identical (Unique)
6. A tendency to speak in the third person or use the royal“we” (Unique)
7. 	Excessive confidence in the individual’s own judgment
and contempt for the advice or criticism of others(NPD.9)
8. 	Exaggerated self-belief, bordering on a sense of omnipotence, in what they personally can achieve (NPD.1
and 2 combined)
9. A belief that rather than being accountable to themundane court of colleagues or public opinion, thecourt to which they answer is: History or God (NPD.3)
10. An unshakable belief that in that court they will bevindicated (Unique)
11. Loss of contact with reality; often associated with
progressive isolation (APD 3 and 5)
12. 	Restlessness, recklessness, and impulsiveness (Unique)
13. A tendency to allow their “broad vision,” about the moral
rectitude of a proposed course, to obviate the need toconsider practicality, cost, or outcomes (Unique)
14. Hubristic incompetence, where things go wrong because
too much self-confidence has led the leader not to worry
about the nuts and bolts of policy (HPD.5)
APD = Anti-Social Personality Disorder
HPD = Histrionic Personality Disorder
NPD = Narcissistic Personality Disorder© Lord David Owen

Wrapping up the three days happened over a
couple of hours, including a last meeting up in
basecamps (small groups of 3–5 people that met
a couple of times each day), a silent walk aroundthe graphic facilitation posters, more questions,some reflections from the participants, plus closing words from Peter Senge (see “Take Aways”).
The closing session also including well-deserved
applause for all the organizers and helpers.
“Silence is an untapped potential. Even though
we all have a lot to say, let us sit in silence for someminutes,” said Senge. After the silence, he continued, “I realized that I enjoyed the pauses and the
meditations the most, and that this is a newawareness in my life, which is so filled with doingat the expense of being. The space for change is
not created through our actions.”
Closing the Global Forum, Peter also said, “Thereis an ambiguity about being present. When weshare our story, have conversations, turn together,something happens. It starts by two dancers thatare having a conversation, and then 10 are. At
some point, something shifted. Yesterday, in the
middle of the day, when we sat in the circle, what
was that? You talk and you talk and talk until the
talk starts. This could be at any time in your life.
It arises naturally and is spontaneous among us.
Notice when the talk starts.”

Less Is More: A Personal Reflection
At the Global Forum I once again confirmed that
Mother Earth needs our care and collaboration now
if we—the people, the human race—are to have ahome in the future. It’s the only place for us to live
and thrive, but we seem to be somehow out oftune with the universal tone, internally as well
as externally.
It’s not only people or our internal world that haschanged a lot during the last century and decades. In particular, population growth and exponential economic growth has had an enormous
impact on societal development. To illustrate thescale of this change, almost 80% of total global

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economic output over the last 2,000 years has
been produced since 1900, and a quarter of this
output has taken place since the year 2000
(source: Angus Maddison; UN; The Economist).
World population has risen from 1.822 billion
in 1910 to more than 7 billion now, and the estimates are for 10 billion people in 2100. Given
these projections, some scientists think that there
is only a 50% chance that the human species willsurvive the 21st century.
For many of us, it is hard to believe in this “fastest,
best, cheapest” society. Every morning, we “puton” the rationality of a growth-oriented capitalism
invented in and for the past. It is so well established that we don’t even think about it; we justaccept that this is the way the world is and works.
It’s not only how we act; it is who we are. And yet,as Alain de Vulpian spoke about, new economies
and more enlightened human beings are emerging all over the world. But emancipation isn’t
enough. We also need to take the step to the nextlevel of consciousness, as Marie-Eve Marchandspoke about. Too few leaders know what theywant to do with their leadership besides improve
Key Performance Indicators. Many more leadersneed to personally make a new choice to serve
not only the past and present, but also the future,
the next generations, the whole.
I’ve always been inspired by Buckminster Fuller, avisionary madman and a futurist, who was born in
the last century (1895–1983). He went to Harvard
and was expelled twice, first for spending all his
money partying, and then for his irresponsibility
and lack of interest. By his own appraisal, he wasa non-conforming misfit, and he lived a poor
and unhappy life. But in 1927, at the age of 32, hedecided to do his “own thinking.” What gave him
the courage was that he believed he’d been rightabout the unsustainable state of society evenwhen society didn’t know it yet. By coining theterm “Spaceship Earth,” he invented a new perspective, long before we all saw the Blue Planet
from the moon. He was able to go beyond thethinking of his time and declared that we arecalled to be architects of our own future, not				Take Aways
Peter Senge led the forum’s closing session by hearing
from different people, and he said: “The goal is to start toget a feeling of moving collectively. So, what do you takeaway from this forum?” Here is a selection of the one-liners
from the floor:
•
•
•
•
•
•

•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

•

Knowing that I’m not alone.
Position of gratitude.
I think I only want to share my breath [sound of breath].
Cannot stop thinking about people who are not here
and the fact than I’m here.
Came with big problems and go back with solutions.
Thank you, it was nice and loving.
Feel the power of this community, and it takes timeand energy to create a better world, so we need to know
we’re together.
Talking about the things that could go wrong, I founda lot of goodness here.
The metaphor about the caterpillar becoming a butterfly
showed up at any stage of the journey.
There are 30-40 people that I would like to meet again
and work together with.
I lost my iPhone, but this is me here in touch, in my own
space, and I’ll enjoy the silence for a while.
We are building a common structure for humanity.
Deep emotions currently, three days of connection.
Many names come to mind, embodying presence andwarmth.
Missed talking about the shadow side and the criticalfeedback.
I was challenged by a friend to start from the inside,and during these days I experienced what that is.
I trust life now.
Very grateful to be part of something bigger, and I leavefeeling more powerful, daring to care, taking this energy
back into my everyday life.
Met my light and my shadow, both part of the life.

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communities. We need a whole new perspective,
not only on decision making and institutionalorganizing, but on what it means to be human.

© Olivier Goirand

We can and we do create the future
every day—and the future must
always be with us in the present.
its victims. “Bucky,” as he was called, believed inhumanity’s ability to create a future worth living.
More and more people are seeking and longing
for a more coherent and sustainable lifestyle, personally and professionally. A growing percentageof the world’s population also experiences a moreor less desperate need for resilience in the shortrun due to lack of income, water, food, medicine,and energy, or due to natural disasters. Ourcommon challenges are many—and there are
no experts. More and more people are realizingthat the necessary and fundamental change, themetamorphosis, cannot be done by individuals
but only in co-creative circles, networks, andSamsoe, the renewable energy island in Denmark,is a great example of a community-based transformation to renewable energy, including wind
power, solar plants, bio-fuel, and energy reductions. The lesson learned, both from Samsoe andsimilar projects all over the world, is that whatmakes the difference is local ownership (e.g., 90%of the windmills are owned by the local islanders),
the involvement of local citizens in the decisionmaking processes (including addressing the“what’s in it for me” question), and the joining
together around a common goal, or “commonity”(community+common=commonity). Samsoe’s
present vision is to become independent fromfossil fuels by 2030. Citizens around the world haveto make new paths to reach these kinds of goals.
The challenges ahead are massive. And thechanges in the external environment demandchanges in our internal environment as well. We
cannot change the outside world without alsochanging our inside world, our worldview, ourmindset. We have learned that becoming materially richer (after a certain level) does not make us
happier. What we are about to learn is how we cando more with less. How can we become humansof the future? Are we resilient enough to survive,
and if we are, what is the future we want?
We can and we do create the future every day—and the future must always be with us in the present. A sustainable society will not grow out of thepast, but out of doing more with less—out of
space, silence, curiosity, compassion, trust, andcourage. Let’s go! n

abo u t th e a u tho r
Gitte Larsen, MA Pol. Sc., is a futurist and the editor and director of Editions and House of Futures. She
is author of numerous articles about the future, co-author of four books, and a board member of Centre
for Sustainability and Resilience in Denmark. gitte@houseoffutures.dk

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43Part 2: Inside the Cocoon—Witnessing theMetamorphosis of a Global Learning Community
V icky S ch u b e r t
While Gitte Larsen may be new to SoL, she expresses in her reflection two
beliefs that give her instant membership in this global learning community. The
first is that “we can and do create the future every day,” and the second is that thetransformation called for in this evolutionary moment can only be realized in“co-creative circles, networks, and communities.”
It was with equal conviction in those two ideas that I attended the Global Forumin Paris not as a newcomer like Gitte, but as a returner, eager to contribute and to
Vicky Schubert
see what Global SoL had become in the decade since I had helped organize thefirst two Global Forums in Helsinki and Vienna. What I found was a community actively welcoming metamorphosis, as suggested in the theme of the meeting—focusing not so much on what we have become
as on what we are becoming—and pulsing with life as seen in the many action research initiatives its
members are pursuing.

In the Nutritive Soup
Like the organizations and institutions whose learning practices
SoL seeks to transform, the Global Association of SoL Communities(GASC) is, of course, subject to the same prevailing conditions of
uncertainty and discontinuity described by Alain de Vulpian, Ariede Gues, and Peter Senge in the Forum’s opening session.

The transformation called for inthis evolutionary moment can only
be realized in co-creative circles,
networks, and communities.

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It is interesting to note that when Senge published
The Fifth Discipline in 1990, the World Wide Web
was just in its infancy, having been proposed ina memo by Tim Berners Lee the previous year.
As SoL has grown up alongside it, the Web has
catalyzed a new era of individual empowerment
and networked connectivity that has irrevocably

eliminated the notion of “business as usual” forevery kind of organization. The resulting environment is ripe for the kind of innovation and experimentation that SoL has represented from the start.
The community’s commitment to self-organization and chaordic principles now seems strikingly
ahead of its time and perfectly suited to the present
moment.

The SoL community’s commitment
to self-organization and chaordic
principles now seems strikingly
ahead of its time and perfectly
suited to the present moment.

But that’s not to say those principles don’t posechallenges for those who have taken the lead incrafting minimum sustainable structures for theorganization. In iterative conversations and agreements that began as early as 1997, aspirational
community stewards have nurtured SoL’s sometimes tumultuous progression from an academic
center at MIT, to a nonprofit organization basedin Cambridge, Massachusetts, to an international
network of networks with a shared vision of organizational and planetary well-being. Members of
the current General Assembly report that their
meeting just prior to the Global Forum was particularly productive and, at the same time, raised
continuing questions. When enthusiastic change
agents in Mainland China are legally precluded
from incorporating as an official member of
GASC, community leaders must reach beyond
familiar frames of reference and stay oriented toinquiry: “How do we adapt to this different wayof thinking about organization?” “How do we
accommodate the legitimate co-existence offormal and informal alliances?” And so, the 		soup continues to bubble.
By its nature, GASC is an experiment, a concoctionof becoming whose members have already doneenormous good and that—now with 31 establishedand emerging communities active on six continents—holds the promise of exponential impact.

Some Bright Imaginal Cells
What do we know about the butterfly wings thathave been taking shape in the midst of this nutritive soup? The Forum in Paris offered lots of evidence that, at the cellular level, GASC is gaining
strength in ways that will lead to sustained flight.
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f ig u r e 1

The Butterfly Framework© Elise Crespin

Vibrant Communities:
SoL France As Role ModelSoL France, our host community for this Global
Forum, is one of the most enduring and generative
communities in the global SoL network. Successfully blending practice and research, they havedemonstrated a commitment to documented
action learning that serves as a model for otherexisting and emerging SoL communities (see, forexample, the 2011 special edition of Reflections
in which they captured the lessons from theirfirst 10 years).
Many of SoL France’s strengths were embeddedin the Forum design. In plenary sessions, we heard
stories reflective of an integrated local/global perspective, from La Poste’s reimagining of the role ofthe mail carrier to the World Bank’s efforts to scale
up innovative sanitation practices. With plenty oftime devoted to “basecamp” meet-ups and learning story sessions, peer sharing and reflection wasgiven an equal footing with expert presentations
as a context for learning. Whole-person awarenesswas honored throughout the event, with lots ofopportunities for multiple-learning modalities,
mindfulness, and movement. And the final day,devoted to cross-fertilization among participantled projects, reinforced the place of appliedresearch at the center of SoL’s identity.

An Instinct for Knowledge Sharing
Another encouraging sign of GASC’s cellular health
was the generosity and curiosity of individual
Forum participants. I had the privilege of offering
a workshop on the Butterfly Framework of Complex Human Systems—a visual tool that serves
as a kind of Global Positioning System for helping
people see and navigate their systemic environ-

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ments (see “The Butterfly Framework”). The Butterfly Framework is itself a product of the SoL learning community. It was developed by a small groupof SoL consultants, several of them now my partners, who through exploratory conversation in2009 discovered that they had each, in varying
ways, integrated the notion of a systems perspective into their coaching practice. Compelled toadvance the field by sharing their learning back to
the global community, they designed a course
called Coaching from a Systems Perspective,
which has since been offered in several cities
around the world; the workshop at the Forum wasdesigned with the same co-creative intention.

That appetite for connection andsharing points to the community’s
growing confidence in itself as aliving, complex adaptive system,
open to learning from its edges.
What was most gratifying about the workshop
was the way the Butterfly Framework stimulatedparticipants to share the system navigation tools
and methods they have found most effective intheir work. I came away with a wall-full of possibilities for collaborative inquiry and action.

Attunement to the Edge
That appetite for connection and sharing points
to another vital sign that, in Paris, seemed morerobust than ever: The community’s growing
confidence in itself as a living, complex adaptive
system, open to learning from its edges, where
it overlaps and intersects with other systems.
For example, two of the people I was most impressed with at the Forum were young researchers

who, in their separate ways, bring an interdisciplinary perspective to organizational learning.
Andreas Hieronymi of St. Gallen University in
Switzerland was recently recognized for his contribution to transdisciplinary research by td-net,
an initiative of the Swiss Academies of Arts andSciences, for his paper “Understanding Systems
Science: A Visual and Integrative Approach.”Camille Morvan, a French post-doctoral researcher
and co-founder of the award-winning cognitive
science start-up Goshaba, is in the early stagesof a project look-ing at the relationship between
our hard-wired survival instincts and our capacity
for collective intelligence. In general, while there
is still room for improvement in intergenerational
engagement, younger participants contributed
significantly to the quality of the Forum, not justas learners but equally as teachers and as active
representatives of complementary learning
networks.
Another edge dynamic was visible in the excitement surrounding an “East Meets West” subtheme,with representatives from several Asian countries
active in the Forum community, and two of them
—China and India—vying to host the next Global
Forum in 2016. One of the leaders of SoL’s emergence in China, Will Zhang, is partnering with SoL
France on a project dubbed “New Silk Road” thataims to revive a dialogue between two ancient
cultures. GASC’s vision of additional SoL communities in the East and in the global South is motivated not just by a desire to grow the community
in numbers, but also to expand understanding
about how organizational learning can beadapted to new and different cultural contexts.
In short, I would say that I saw in the cocoon of
the Global Forum encouraging patterns of balance,
resilience, flexibility, and aspiration. That makes
for a beautiful butterfly in progress. n

abo u t th e a u tho r
Vicky Schubert is a partner in Systems Perspectives, LLC, and a member of the SoL Global
Coaching Community. victoria.f.schubert@gmail.com

Reflections
The SoL Journal

on Knowledge, Learning, and Change
Volume 14, Number 1

E d i t o r i a l Te a m
Managing Editor
Janice Molloy
Contributing Editor
Deborah Wallace
PublisherFrank Schneider

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