Global Leadership Initiative
“No problem can be solved by the same consciousness
that created it. We must learn to see the world anew.”
—Albert Einstein
“Never underestimate the power of a small group of
committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the
only thing that ever has.”
—Margaret Mead
The Call of Our Time
We have reached a critical juncture in our ability to address the most vital global issues of our time. Increasing poverty and disease, shrinking biodiversity and habitat destruction, and political and social conflict all threaten global stability and prosperity. The inability of nation-states to work together effectively on such issues—as evidenced by the collapse of the World Trade Organization negotiations, the stalemate over the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, and the discord over the war in Iraq—signals an emerging systemic breakdown in established methods for addressing global challenges. Furthermore, some of the greatest threats to global peace and prosperity come from problems that cannot be resolved solely by nation-states, but require new, cross-boundary approaches that include non-state actors (especially marginalized groups). The confluence of issues that cry out for our immediate attention has reached a critical threshold, yet few of our current leaders or institutions seem willing or able to answer the call.
Much of the challenge lies in the unique nature of the problems we face. Though vastly different, they share a common set of features: they are dynamically complex, meaning that cause and effect are far apart in space and time; they are socially complex, involving actors with very different interests and worldviews; and they are generatively complex, requiring solutions that are new and unfamiliar. Our established ways of solving problems—attacking each problem individually, and imposing or negotiating solutions based on past experience—do not work when applied to problems of such complexity. Mediation and bargaining will only get us so far. It is time for a radical shift: a quantum leap in our ability to address our most vital global issues. If we do not find an adequate response to these problems, we face the possibility of catastrophic failures on a massive scale—perhaps within our lifetime.
Yet moments of great danger can also provide unprecedented opportunity. During World War II, the U.S. government, in cooperation with its European allies, brought together leading scientists from around the world in an intensive and ambitious effort to create a breakthrough weapons technology: the Manhattan Project. Today, the opportunity exists for the world community to come together in an equally intensive and ambitious effort to create a breakthrough social technology—one whose aim is not military victory, but peace and sustainable development. It is with this end in mind that we propose the Global Leadership Initiative, an unprecedented global effort dedicated to developing, applying, and mainstreaming advanced methods for multi- stakeholder, trans-boundary, dialogic problem solving. The Initiative’s mission is to use these tools to address the world’s most complex global challenges and critical emerging risks.
The Global Leadership Initiative
Our goal at the Global Leadership Initiative is nothing less than to generate a “tipping point” in humanity’s ability to address its most critical global challenges. To achieve this goal, we intend over the next five years to launch ten international projects that will address inherently global challenges, such as AIDS, malnutrition, water, and climate change. In the process, we will develop and nurture a cadre of global leaders—from all sectors of the human community—who understand how to harness the collective power of small groups to co-create better futures. The Global Leadership Initiative is committed to taking on this challenge and achieving a standard of excellence and professionalism unsurpassed by any other organization or institution.
Founded in August 2002, the Global Leadership Initiative is a not-for-profit initiative of the
Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), an international community that connects organizational leaders, consultants, and researchers to create knowledge about fundamental innovation and change. The Global Leadership Initiative emerged out of a series of groundbreaking conversations convened by SoL among leaders from multi-national corporations, national governments, multi-lateral institutions, and civil society and activist organizations, from across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The result of these conversations was the decision to launch the Global Leadership Initiative to address critical issues by fostering a new capacity for individual and collective leadership.
The organizers of the Global Leadership Initiative—from SoL, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Generon Consulting—bring to this effort extensive experience in organizational change, multi-stakeholder dialogue-and-action, scenario planning, leadership development, and action research. The theory and practice behind the Global Leadership Initiative is based on 20 years of work in:
• Deep and large-scale systems change, involving work with multi-national corporations, government agencies, and civil society organizations all over the world;
• Scenario-based strategic planning at Royal Dutch/Shell and other organizations, and by tri-sector leadership teams in South Africa (the Mont Fleur Project), Guatemala, and elsewhere;
• Leadership development in diverse groups, through the American Leadership Forum, the
MIT Organizational Learning Center, and the Society for Organizational Learning; and
• Action research, theory building, and writing on these topics. 1
On this foundation, the convenors of the Global Leadership Initiative are building a broad international coalition of partners to further develop and support this effort. We are reaching out to forward-thinking individuals from across all sectors who share our commitment and dedication to this work. Through this process, we seek to build a community of extraordinary leaders who understand and lead with a sense of responsibility for the good of the whole.
The U-Process: A Social Technology for Radical Innovation
The Global Leadership Initiative’s core social technology for fostering breakthrough thinking and action on complex, cross-sector problems is the U-Process. The U-Process provides a rigorous method for creating unified learning fields in which teams made up of highly diverse individuals become capable of operating as a single intelligence. From that place of greater clarity and connection, a new operating consensus can emerge, allowing for the co-creation of breakthrough innovations and solutions to previously stuck problems.
Practical examples of the value and effectiveness of this method have been generated in business, government, and civil society organizations, and in tri-sector regional and national collaborations. The Global Leadership Initiative is committed to applying this method to global challenges.
Unlike traditional learning theories, which are grounded in reflections on past experiences, the U- Process is designed to enable practitioners to pay attention to, and learn from, emerging realities or opportunities. The process comprises three major stages: observing the current reality carefully and in depth; retreating and reflecting to allow “inner knowing” to emerge; and acting swiftly in order to bring forth the new reality.
More than just a problem-solving tool, the U-Process involves a fundamentally different approach to co-creation, in which we recognize that the self and the world are inescapably linked. Our emphasis then shifts from acting on the world to acting in it. The process of moving down the left-hand side of the U involves a change of perception, from experiencing the world as something “out there” to one of seeing from inside the living processes underlying reality. Then, as we move up the right side of the U, we start to experience the world as unfolding through us. The most profound work, however, occurs at the bottom of the U, in which we reach a state of clarity and connection to what is emerging. This experience has been termed presencing because it is about becoming totally present—to the larger space or field around us, to an expanded sense of self, and, ultimately, to what is emerging through us. Once we have achieved that stance, as individuals and as a team, moving up the U involves acting in service of bringing that emerging reality into being.
The U-Process
I. Observe current reality
II. Retreat and Reflect
III. Enact new reality
The Leadership Laboratory: Putting the “U” into Action
The Global Leadership Initiative’s Leadership Laboratory design embeds the U-Process in an innovative, action learning cycle, in order to address a particular global challenge. The Leadership Laboratory is undertaken by a Lab Team comprised of approximately 25 committed people. As a group, they are a microcosm of the social system they intend to understand and influence. They are diverse enough—sectorally, socially, demographically, politically, geographically, professionally, etc.—to be able to see the whole system, and for most stakeholders to be able to see their own views reflected in the team. Although team members are influential and well-respected individuals in their communities and institutions, they are invited to participate in their personal capacities, not as official representatives of any organization or group. Above all, the team members are people for who the Lab’s purpose is of supreme importance—to themselves and to their constituents—and who will therefore volunteer enthusiastically to invest the requisite time and energy. The Lab Team is supported by a group of senior Executive Champions, who provide feedback, credibility, and resources, and by a Lab Secretariat.
The activities of the Lab involve team members in approximately forty days of workshops, learning journeys, and work on pilot projects, over the course of one to two years. In accordance with the U-Process, those activities are organized in three distinct phases:
Phase I: Observe the current reality
The conveners of the Lab delineate the project through a series of 30-40 dialogue interviews with key formal and informal leaders from different parts of the system. This iterative process, with one interviewee leading to the next, is intended to illuminate the highest purpose of the project and to identify the Lab Team: the 25 persons whose mission it will be to achieve this purpose. The results of the interviews, including key perspectives, questions, and proposals are used to refine subsequent phases of the project.
The Lab Team starts off their work with a three-day Foundation Workshop. (This is the first of four multi-day, residential, whole-team, facilitated workshops.) At this workshop they begin to construct a shared picture of the system and decide which aspects of the problem or issue they need to learn more about (their learning agenda). They are also introduced to the principles and practices of the U-Process. In the following months, sub-teams go on five-day Learning Journeys. A learning journey is a trip organized around a part of the learning agenda, that is carefully designed to help the participants expand their perspective, learn about relevant systems, and conduct dialogue interviews with individuals who have insightful perspectives on the issue at hand.
Phase II: Retreat and Reflect
After the sub-teams return from and synthesize the results of their journeys, the whole team reconvenes for a six-day Scenario Retreat. At this workshop, they share and assess the observations and insights from their journeys; construct a set of scenarios around how the system might develop in the future; crystallize their vision of the future that they want and believe needs to come forth; and identify leverage points for shifting the system towards this vision.
The core of the workshop is a 36-hour solo wilderness retreat, designed to help the team members uncover their deeper knowing about both what is going on in the system and where they, individually and collectively, need to focus. This activity is based on the principle that nature is a portal to social transformation, and that experiences in and with nature can foster a sense of deep knowing that leads to innovation and social change. Quite simply, it is the most reliable way we have discovered for opening up the hearts and minds of participants, enabling them to tap into their innate ability to sense the emerging future. This phase of the process, which corresponds to the bottom of the U, is the “eye of the needle” in the U-Process: passing through it, the acquired knowledge of the first phase translates into a deeper form of knowledge, which can then be applied in the projects and activities of the third phase.
Phase III: Enact the new reality
The members of the team, working in sub-teams, develop Prototype Projects. The emphasis in this phase of the work is on the hands-on, rapid-cycle creation and evaluation of multiple alternative solutions to the problem at hand. The next team workshop consists of a two-day Mid-Course Review. The sub-teams present to each other the insights from their prototype projects, coach each other, and make plans for moving to pilot projects. The sub-teams then build these concrete Pilot Projects and begin testing them in the real world. These pilot projects are intended to be the “seeds” or living examples that can be learned from, reproduced, and grown. The concluding project event is a two-day Project Presentation, involving the team, the Executive Champions, and others who have been or will be involved in the work. The results and insights from the pilots are presented and reviewed, and decisions are made as to how the work will be expanded and institutionalized.
The Leadership Laboratory
Specify purpose, participants, and process
Hold Foundation Workshop
Go on Learning Journeys
Scenario Retreat
Develop prototype projects
Prototype Review
Pilot Projects
Present and review projects and Lab
I. Observe current reality
II. Retreat & Reflect
III. Enact new reality
The Work of the Global Leadership Initiative
In order to fulfill our mission of advancing and supporting this breakthrough approach to critical global issues, we have organized our work around three main areas of activity: leadership laboratories, social technology research, and training and education.
Leadership Laboratories
At the heart of the Global Leadership Initiative’s work is the creation of “living examples” of breakthrough solutions to particular global problems. To generate such examples, we will launch ten Leadership Laboratories over the next five years. Projects under development include:
• The Sustainable Food Lab. The purpose of the Sustainable Food Lab is to accelerate the movement of sustainably-produced food from niche to mainstream. A Lab Team with members from food companies, governments, farmer and farm worker organizations, and non-governmental organizations, from North and South America and Europe, will create prototypes and pilots of sustainable food supply chains that can become large, mainstream and economically, environmentally and socially sustainable for all actors in the chain. This Lab is being co-convened with the Sustainability Institute, Unilever, and SYSCO.
• Future projects. With various partners, we are incubating Labs on the following areas, among others: AIDS in Southern Africa, healthcare in the United States, conflict prevention, and relations between aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples.
Social Technology Research
In support of the core work of the Leadership Laboratories, and in order to achieve the goal of creating a “tipping point,” the Project’s second core activity involves conducting basic research on dialogic consensus-building and problem-solving approaches, with a particular emphasis on the family of methods and processes related to the U-Process. A basic assumption underlying our work is that knowledge developed collectively by people actively engaged in such work will be more solidly based and ultimately more useful than any produced by individual or abstract efforts, and that in order to generate applicable and transferable knowledge, we must therefore ground our work in co-creation process that involve practitioners and researchers in ongoing communities of practice. Key deliverables from this research will include:
• Global Dialogue Project. This project will start with a series of interviews to identify and map current efforts to use tri-sectoral generative dialogue to address global problems.
This research will be reported at an international meeting of leading practitioners, problem owners, and donors on The State of Global Dialogue, to be followed by an intensive two-year, network-based action research process, which will be reported in a Global Dialogue Fieldbook. Modeled on The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook—authored by Peter Senge and other members of SoL, which provides a similar seminal mapping of the field of organizational learning—the Global Dialogue Fieldbook will include learning histories of important global dialogue processes and, based on these, best practice tools and methods. This project is being supported by the Norwegian Agency for Development Co-operation (NORAD) and the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
• Democratic Dialogue Fieldbook. This project, which builds on an ongoing collaboration with the UNDP, will bring together a group of senior practitioners of multi-stakeholder political dialogue in Latin America and the Caribbean to produce a Fieldbook on the use of dialogue to strengthen democratic processes.
Training and Education
The Global Leadership Initiative’s third area of activity focuses on the development of leadership education and practitioner training programs in the domain of tri-sector generative dialogue. The following education and training programs are a critical component of this strategy:
• Global Leadership Forum. A small annual gathering that enables senior leaders from business, civil society, and government who are currently involved in Leadership Laboratories to engage in cross-sector, peer-to-peer dialogue and knowledge sharing, as well as deepen their understanding of the U-Process.
• Practitioner Workshops. Four-day immersion programs designed for practitioners and consultants interested in deepening their theoretical understanding and developing practical skills associated with the U-Process and related social technologies.
• Executive Leadership Program. A year-long program offered in partnership with one or more leading business schools or schools of public administration, designed to deepen the practical knowledge and skills of emerging senior leaders from the government, civil society, and business sectors, with a particular emphasis on tri-sector generative dialogue.
An Invitation
We recognize that the goal of the Global Leadership Initiative is an ambitious one. But the problems we face—as a human species and a community of nations—demand nothing short of a radical new approach to the most critical challenges of our time. The Initiative brings together the best theory and practice from 20 years of work on processes for individual, organizational, and societal change. Our hope is that its scope and intention will attract the world’s greatest hearts and minds to the global problems that most demand our concerted attention. The risks are great, but so too is the potential payoff. The future is at stake; nothing less will do.
We invite you to join us.
[Since the above document was prepared, the Global Leadership Initiative and its programs have taken shape. Generon has now partnered with Synergos Institute to begin launching the leadership labs, now referred to as “change labs”. The Sustainable Food Lab is well underway: Generon, Synergos, and the Sustainability Institute have convened a coalition of leading food companies, government, foundations, and non-governmental organizations from Europe, the US, and Brazil to establish a whole-systems partnership to generate solutions to making the global food supply chain more economically, socially, environmentally and nutritionally sustainable. The benefits are aimed at small as well as large food producers, the land and fisheries that supply the food, local communities where the world’s food is produced and consumers of foodstuffs everywhere. (www.glifood.org) Other labs will begin shortly.]
1 The theoretical and practical foundations of the Global Leadership Initiative are outlined in a 2002 paper by Brian
Arthur, Jonathan Day, Joseph Jaworski, Michael Jung, Ikujiro Nonaka, Claus Otto Scharmer, and Peter Senge, entitled
“Leadership in the Context of Emerging Worlds: Illuminating the Blind Spot.” They are also articulated in three
forthcoming books: Peter Senge, Claus Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers, Presence: Human
Purpose and the Field of the Future; Claus Otto Scharmer, Presencing: Illuminating The Blind Spot of Leadership; and
Adam Kahane, Victory of the Open Heart: Solving Tough Problems Through Talking and Listening