I want to share the story of a phenomenon that my colleague Mark Szpakowski dubbed the “Triple World Café”. I co-produced this event in late June of this year with Michael Chender, member of the Governing Council of the ALIA Institute, Mark Szpakowski, and other key ALIA & World Café members, as part of the Shambhala Summer Institute Program.

The Triple World Café experience was an extraordinary experience of collaboration, inspiration and magic among a large and loosely structured team – we learned an enormous amount, deepened old friendships and began new ones, got rave reviews and exceeded everyone’s expectations, but most of all we stepped out on a limb of sheer intention and imagination and felt it miraculously hold our weight.

Here’s how it happened:

ALIA Institute (formerly the Shambhala Institute of Authentic Leadership) and the World Café are long-time friends and collaborators – ALIA has embedded World Café conversations into their annual Summer Authentic Leadership in Action Conferences from their beginnings, and Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, Tom Hurley and other experienced World Café practitioners have led workshops at these gatherings pretty much every year since then.

Because of our history of friendship and collaboration, Michael approached the World Café for ideas about how to extend their Summer Programs to people who couldn’t be there in person, and to serve their alumni in particular. We’d never met, but after he and I had a wonderful two-hour conversation exploring the transcendent possibilities of virtual connection(!), Michael came back to me with the ambitious idea of three World Cafes held simultaneously - one at their gathering at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada, one on Skype, and one in Second Life. I was excited because I have been doing a lot more World Cafe work in Second Life, and agreed to help him develop the event as a prototype. The idea was that we would continue exploring together with the purpose of evolving and informing their ongoing Alumni programs.

Michael wanted these three World Cafes to be intimately connected with each other so that the participants would feel as if they were there together in one room, and together we devised a number of ways to weave the three strands together into one thread.

First of all, they planned to project images onto one of the walls in the conference room in Halifax - alternate views of the real-time World Café going on in Second Life and a map of names and geographic locations of the people in the Skype World Café.

That happened and was very effective at creating excitement and an inclusive atmosphere – in fact it had an unexpected consequence, which you’ll hear later.

As part of the weaving, we planned for the opening World Café introduction from the room in Halifax to be piped into the Skype World Café through an audio feed. With the help of the sound technician this was no problem. Hearing the familiar voice of the World Café host in Halifax was a powerful experience for the Skype Café participants (who were all, with one exception, Institute alumni) and allowed them to feel especially close and connected to the community gathering at the ALIA Institute’s center.

We also planned for all three World Cafes to address the same set of questions and follow the same timing and number of conversation rounds, and all three were organized to feed into the same final Harvest process so that insights from the Skype and Second Life Cafes could inform the graphic capture in Halifax. The graphic recording was to be reflected back into the virtual Cafes through photographs taken in Halifax, uploaded to Flickr and sent via link through text chat to both virtual platforms.

So as it turned out, everything didn’t exactly work out like that we’d planned it, but this was our blueprint, and I set to work using it to create the infrastructure guides, technical training, communications and scripts that would be necessary to support it all.

Each of the two virtual World Cafes called for carefully thought out logistics and a solid team. The team needed in both virtual World Cafés consisted of a World Café host, Table Hosts for each of the tables, a Tech Support Person to troubleshoot issues that come up during the Café itself, and a Liaison that was in the room in Halifax and simultaneously plugged into a Virtual Café.

Each of the Table Hosts in both mediums needed to be trained in the technology of how to call their table together and dissolve it and start a new one with each table change, and each of the Participants needed to receive some level of orientation to the conventions and technical requirements of their virtual World Café platform. In addition, they needed an AV technician in Halifax to help them connect the sound feed from the World Café introduction into Skype.

The detailed pre-event training sessions and logistical minutiae seem extreme to those of us used to producing face to face World Cafés, but the more practiced and organized the technological elements of a virtual World Café, the more fully the technology can recede into the background and “disappear”. The intent is to keep the focus off the technology and on the quality of the conversation, and that takes careful preparation and clear agreements.

Luckily Michael was not fazed by the daunting list of people and details that needed to be organized. In spite of being a self-professed “Luddite” he bravely took on the role of both Liaison and Host for the Skype World Café, and George Por, Carolyn Baldwin and Chris Grant, who served as the Skype Table Hosts, joined him. Their Tech Support person was Anthony Meyers, and they had additional support from the University person on sound tech duty that day.

I was the World Café Host in Second Life and the final in-world Table Hosts included Doon Bury (Mary Pat LeRoy), Anachie Easterwood, Ravi Amaterasu (Ravi Tangri), and Charlie Loxely (Alexandra Grant-Paul). Widget Whiteberry from Commonwealth Island, among her many contributions to the success of the event, served as Tech Support and Vivienne Cassavetes from the Peacemaker Institute, also, made huge contributions during key points in the process. Last but by no means least in this excellent team was Eos Amaterasu (Mark Szpakowski), who was ALIA’s advance scout already active in Second Life. Mark was an invaluable partner and we worked closely throughout the whole project. Mark was also present in the Halifax World Café, and he played the role of our Liason - we stayed in touch via a Skype line throughout the Triple World Café and linked our timing and the pace of what was happening in all three places.

So, as you can see we had a very tight Second Life team which had been working together for at least two weeks and already weathered a storm or two by the launch of the Triple World Café itself. Many of our participants were members of both the World Café and ALIA Institute communities, and we were all excited to see them show up. There were people there from all over the world, including one from Bangladesh where it was 4am!

There was a slideshow of images made from that day, taken from the ALIA Summer Institute blog they created to accompany the conference.

So let’s see, where shall I start with our learnings?!

Well, let’s start with the questions. Working with the idea of unity amongst the three World Cafes, the task of coming up with the questions was left with the team in Halifax, and they were to communicate them to the virtual hosts the day before the event.

The problem with this was that the questions that worked in the face-to-face conference in Halifax, where they had been exploring a thread of conversation over several days, did not translate well into a virtual environment where many were gathering for the first time. When the team in Second Life got the questions, we immediately knew they wouldn’t work for us. As we all know, finding the right questions is essential to the success of a World Café, so that was the first learning – to either involve the virtual teams when conceiving the questions, or allow them to be adapted to make sense within specific environments.

As it happened, we came up with a great set of questions that made sense for the Second Life World Café participants, and the Skype World Café crew were satisfied with a slightly different wording of the face-to-face Café questions.

Another practical learning was to have at least one run-through with each virtual team, and one with the key people on all three teams. The Skype team didn’t have a dress rehearsal and they ran into several “just in time” learning moments, including a storm that took out one of their Table Hosts. Michael had to pinch-hit as both Café Host and Table Host (Note to Self: assign a back-up Table Host). Thankfully they were able to think on their feet and rose to the occasion beautifully, and they also had the good luck to draw a Sound Tech person who had experience running Skype Conferences.

The Second Life World Café team did have a full dress rehearsal, at least two other training sessions for Table Hosts, and an alternate Table Host in place in case of emergencies. All that preparation helped - we only had a few minor tech glitches and for the most part we were able to leave the technology behind and enjoy a deep and probing World Café conversation.

Here’s an excerpt from my initial de-brief exchange with Michael:

“It sounds like you had the same exhilarating experience of alternating chaos and bliss that we experienced in Second Life! The Second Life learnings sound parallel to yours in many ways - prepare, prepare, prepare, back everything up and know things will go wrong SOMEWHERE anyway. As the host in Second Life I found I really needed to stay in the moment and adapt to the inevitable glitches with as much grace and ease as I could to keep the feeling of “hospitable space” flowing.

Something interesting happened in Second Life that we hadn’t foreseen, which was that two people from the face-to-face event in Halifax got so turned on to what they could see of the World Café in Second Life that they got out their laptops and joined us! This was very exciting, even though it was also a bit problematic since they were both completely new to Second Life, which has a definite learning curve!

Another learning was that you need a little more time for each round in a virtual World Café to accommodate the inevitable extra minute or two each round that it takes to change tables physically and get the technology for each table working. We were a bit behind schedule in Second Life and our harvest came in too late to be counted in the initial sharing, and as it turned out the harvesting process in Halifax was a several step process that gathered individual reflections and clustered them for further face-to-face conversation over the next two days.

One of my favorite surprises came from The Skype Café’s innovation in communications conventions. When I say “communication conventions” I mean the little gestures we agree to use in virtual World Cafes when we are about to speak, or when we have finished speaking - in lieu of the more immediate indicators that we can use in our face-to-face conversations. So for example, we would say/write “next” when we wanted to begin “speaking” in Second Life (which in this case was actually writing in text), and “done” or “dfn” for “done for now” when we had finished.

Borrowing from the Shambhala traditions, in the ALIA Institute programs they are used to bowing to each other as they start and finish their sessions, so they used the word “bow” to indicate they were ready to speak, and again when they were finished. I found that delightful!

I could go on and on, as this was a rich learning ground and we had an amazing team and substantive de-briefing process that was fed from many directions. Some of the feedback from the Skype Cafe participants is up on their blog, and wonderful reading. Everyone felt it was a great success, and I too was very happy with what happened.

In closing, I want to share this video that the talented Arthur Thomas made showing the beauty of this extraordinary event:

Shambhala Summer Institute 2009 from ALIA on Vimeo.

I’m constantly trying to bridge what is so beautiful and so special in the great classical music, and I’m fighting for the role of these arts within the dilemmas of the modern world.

Great art should be there where the real problems are, especially there where people are solving those problems, who are making the tough decisions… These people need help, so I always say the artists have to come and help them.

Miha will be joining us for ALIA Europe 2010, and also playing at the Cathedral of Chartres in May 2009. His website is mihavision.com.

Miha Pogacnik - The Art of Gentle Warriorship from ALIA Institute on Vimeo.

Excerpt from the 2008 Summer Institute Opening Address

by Michael Chender
“Our working hypothesis here at the Institute is this: Whatever the question you’re carrying, and whatever the specifics of it and the skills necessary to bring to it, that the ability to act powerfully, accurately, compassionately, and sustainably, is rooted in authenticity. So what do we mean by authentic leadership?”

To hear the audio file, click here.

Presentations from the 2008 module Solving Tough Problems

Watch the video by Louise Koch here. Flipchart notes reproduced here.

* * *

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”—Martin Luther King Jr.

“Power is the drive of everything living to realize itself with increasing intensity and extensity” “Love is the drive towards the unity of the separated.”—Paul Tillich

* * *

‘Shih (pronounced shrr) is a configuration of forces that focus power. Power is the application of force to produce a particular change or result. Force is the application of energy to produce change.”—Jim Gimian

* * *

A virtuous circle is produced with power engaging love that in turn legitimates power.

* * *

Power creates new social realities. Power plus love create new beneficial (sustainable?) social realities.

Power is the will or ability to shape reality. This is not bad!  Love uses energy in a system to co-create inclusively.

* * *

Power is more powerful being charged by love. Love is more loving being charged by power. So power and love feed each other in a virtuous circle.

* * *

Force is like water (polluted or clean) flowing downhill. It turns a water wheel, which provides power: the organisation and mobilisation of force (intention, the U-Process). Downstream the water is provided for villagers; flour is also produced.

* * *

Creation can happen from love or power. Co-creation requires both love and power.

* * *

Russian dolls of  love within energy within force within power.

* * *

The co-creative process is like a dance: open awareness of each other and of the content, and the constant exchange between love and power sometimes flows and sometimes struggles.

* * *

The co-creators of new social realities need to: understand the flow of power and energy in the current system; find a place to stand where power and love are congruent within them; and have compassion and empathy for the depth of transformation they are asking of others and of themselves.

* * *

Power is either a movement into love, or a movement into a quest for dominance. This is dependent on your stance or worldview: a worldview of connection in the presence of separateness or a worldview of fundamental isolation. Choosing to deepen into love opens a palette of possibilities for play and how we engage power.

* * *

In unity, we co-create the environment that nourishes the realisation of ourselves extensively and intensively, thereby becoming fully human and capable of engaging in social change.

* * *

Lightning, reckless in its strike The desert, lacking life In unity we become the rod to tame the destruction bringing nourishment to barren soil.

* * *

Power and love together, Like heaven and earth, Create life.

Earth alone is sterile, a desert, The anemic love. Heaven alone is destructive, lightening, The abusive power.

But from a fertile earth, A forest grows towards heaven.

* * *

To know and act from (your) core fundamental beliefs is where power and love dance.

* * *

Dialogue is an act of love. Communication is an act of power: the capacity to identify the common good. The ability of people to change their belief systems through dialogue and communication is co-creation.

* * *

The words “power” and “love” are too loaded to be effective in describing the challenge we face. Co-creating new social realities requires us to assert and describe reality and needs equal measures of both “power” and “love.” Power and love are so inter-twined in both meaning and the reality they describe that we have to find some way not to see them as separate.

* * *

In the middle, between the extremes of all power and no love and all love and no power, lies a space with both power and love: the “nimble zone.”

* * *

How do you relate power and love to the human triad of courage, compassion and wisdom or willing, feeling and thinking? During the week I kept thinking that I missed something like reflection when I was playing with love and power. In your work you use scenarios. I suppose you could see that as a form of reflection or thinking.

I mentioned it earlier in the week. I was intrigued by the difference between power and the language of power and between love and the language of love. Is it possible that you have power (or love)  but are not very good in using both, not very good at the language of both power and love. So is being fluent in the language and extra asset that can compensate (to a certain extent) a lesser position (amount of power)?

Peter van der Lugt

Reflections on the plenary session “Strategy at the Edge” led by Adam Kahane, Margaret Wheatley, and Jim Gimian,
June 26, 2008, by Susan Szpakowski.

Comments in the aftermath of this year’s Thursday plenary ranged from “very provocative and brave” to “manipulative” to “What was that?!” Thursday evening and the following day there were a few conversations, some jokes, and then everyone left for home. Although much time has now passed, I’d like to offer my own reflections and open a space to continue the conversation.

There are two lenses for reflecting on that session: the process and the content (the actual messages conveyed). Here I propose focusing on the second lens, as I suspect this will have more enduring value.

The key messages in that plenary, as I recall them: It is possible that our most cherished beliefs are false. If we are not open to this possibility, we become blind and deaf to disconfirming data (to what is actually going on). It is possible that our best efforts will not succeed. We must therefore transcend hope as well as fear. The opposite of hope is not fear, but fearlessness.

These sentences may be easy to read here, but when contemplated deeply, personally, and unexpectedly in a hot room near the end of an intense week, they can elicit shock, relief, despair, anger… all of which were “in the room.”

I would like to bring in some further background. The theme of hope and fear, and the need to transcend both, is not new to the Institute. Fourteen years before Institute programs began, Trungpa Rinpoche brought a particular message and lineage stream into the Western world that gave rise to the Shambhala Institute community, among others. He brought both the essence of the Buddhist teachings and the vision of Shambhala as an enlightened society that can withstand the forces of a dark age. Having escaped from Tibet as a young meditation master, and having seen the devastation of the spiritual and cultural traditions of his country, he arrived in North America in the early 1970s. Over the next 17 years he showed up in many forms – meditation teacher, trickster, revolutionary, poet, flower arranger, military general, prophet, king. He saw the gathering clouds of darker times and conveyed a sense of urgency, yet he was always contagiously cheerful and down to earth.

Although he died in 1987, the spirit of Trungpa Rinpoche continues to haunt those of us who studied with him. It is a spirit of truth-telling and shape shifting, of not becoming seduced by hope or habit, or paralyzed by fear. Of discovering joy and freedom within disciplines of mindfulness and nowness. Of discovering delight in elegance and simplicity, and tapping into the power of “ordinary magic.” Of celebrating human goodness and dignity. In Colorado, Trungpa Rinpoche founded Naropa Institute with the slogan “When East meets West, sparks will fly.” He would have loved the Shambhala Institute.

At a time of spiritual seeking and new age rebellion and romanticism, Trungpa Rinpoche warned about the seduction of goal-oriented “spiritual materialism” and the “myth of freedom.” He talked about the wisdom of hopelessness—of giving up the continual and often subtle strivings of ego, no matter how seemingly noble or spiritual, because these strivings are ultimately a source of deception and suffering. They leave us smaller than who we truly are.

Trungpa Rinpoche talked about hopelessness as the foundation of the spiritual journey. Does this message also apply to the context of leadership? As agents of positive social change, many of us depend on hope. Isn’t hope the antidote to apathy and despair? Isn’t hopelessness the real enemy?

So far we have not said much about this topic at the Shambhala Institute. It seems that the conversation could easily become philosophical or righteous, especially when led by people who are comfortably distant from those living and working closer to the burning fires of the world. But at this year’s summer institute some of us were feeling that heat. One of the presenters, a resident of South Africa, described that country as “ready to explode.” We were also receiving emails from friends in Zimbabwe, which was increasingly tense and dangerous in the lead-up to the elections, when opposition or even non-compliance was being punished and crushed.

These situations illuminate the real and practical danger in clinging to hope. If South Africa falls into chaos, if Kufunda Village in Zimbabwe does not survive, if U.S. politics go the wrong way, if our project fails, will we go on? And what if our core beliefs don’t hold? Will we plunge into despair? Or will we resist despair by tightening our grip—by holding onto our beliefs so fervently that we are unable to really listen and see? Will we become ever more dogmatic about our truths, our community, our methodology, our way?

All of these threads were present in the plenary session. The challenge was given from the front of the room in a way that made it difficult to hear for some. But I think it is an important challenge for our time.

At the final banquet, I asked a question that was very alive for me at the time: What do we come back to? If it isn’t our hope and our core beliefs, what can we depend on?

I think there were many clues about this during the week’s meditation talks, Aikido lessons, and arts exercises. It is not just about cultivating a state of mind; it is also about posture. When we are rooted in the earth below and connected to an expansive space of vision and possibility above, we are like a willow tree, both open and resilient. We have a strong back of engagement and courage, and an open front of accommodation and tenderness. Our experience, our intention, and our humanity are continually arising. We are not being pulled forward by hope or pushed from behind by habit and fear. Through practicing in this way, a natural knowing and compassion begins to strengthen and radiate. In my opinion it doesn’t matter if we call this posture hopeful or hopeless. It is grounded and it is real.

I am realizing that coming back to the simplicity of this posture is a core leadership practice, and a way to discover fearlessness that is beyond hope and fear. I have heard this from my teacher and I am gradually discovering it to be true. After this year’s Summer Institute, I have a heightened sense of the need to use the privilege of my own circumstances to strengthen this posture.

As the Art of Hosting and Berkana folks remind us, we can also come back to community – to loving relationships among people who are working together for a common purpose. This is also a core leadership practice for our time – building networks of trust and commitment.

A month later, the voice that has stood out most vividly for me is that of Marianne Knuth, whose mid-program email reminded us that renouncing hope is not necessarily existential or heavy, and in fact is a source of strength and joy:

“When we have no hope left we have let go of attachment to outcome. It does not mean that we no longer do the work that we are called to do, or that needs doing, but that we do it without being caught up in how it is all meant to turn out. I feel that in many ways we have been working from this place at Kufunda for many years now. Not a place of despair, but a place of simply doing, not dampened by any external negative contexts – and in that we have found so much joy and gratitude for small yet enormously meaningful shifts in ourselves, in the people we work with, and in their communities.”

Marianne also relates that “simply doing” may not be enough to keep despair at bay when external pressures become overwhelming:

“These days, I am realising that as the situation has worsened – significantly, in Zimbabwe, it is ever harder to stay in this place of no hope, or perhaps I should speak of it as the place of not needing hope…. We need to find ways of continuously returning to the energy and practices of turning on the light. When everyone is crying over what is being lost, or rallying in anger against the injustice, generating a stronger field of despair, we have seen that we need to stay in the light. Stay with the beauty of what is right now, stay in community, stay present, stay open hearted.

“It doesn’t mean we wish to pretend that we are good and happy. Sadness and grief can be a part of that too, but when we come together in circle – even in our grief, we find a sweetness – and a different power – of being simply together in a place of love and appreciation. Steven, a young father at Kufunda, spoke to what faith is in his church – it is the appreciation of what is not yet, believing it, and what’s more, appreciating it, and through this calling it into being…. In the midst of the deepest darkness that we are living through right now, we are learning to appreciate a different way of being with each other; and believing that this light will one day be the way of our land. (But of course it will!) And so our most important task is to stay with that. With a field of light, of companionship, of open heartedness.”

I personally don’t see any contradiction here. When we come together for a week at the Shambhala Institute, when we sit in circle with trusted colleagues, when we prepare a good meal for family or friends, we are “turning on the light” of a tangible current reality and also a possible future. In this case “hope” is a raising of our spirits, not a dependence on outcome. It seems that the practice of authentic leadership is to create these spaces for ourselves and others—to create new social realities that are beyond the distortions of naïve hope and fear. Although we don’t know the outcome of our efforts, or how the story will end, we do know that it is good to be together this way—with dignity, compassion, and courage.

Time to reform, see our relations reborn
from the inside out watching repression die into clarity
wet in the eyes where
hope falls in
and old worlds shed their skins
and we sit in the raw light of the new.

This is what we’re going to do.

Hang on to each other through the chaos
of fucked up panic that plays us
like dupes into not knowing the truth
that everything we do is a choice.
I’m here to meet hearts
that choose authentic restarts.

Different is on its way, starting right now and later today
and tomorrow as we fly
from uplift to sorrow
we’re called into balance and focus,
hard work and hocus pocus where the magic meets the tragic
and challenge appears and our spines straighten
and urgency seers its invitation upon us.

Start here.

It’s getting late and the state of things
requires that sensitivity attention brings;
the precision of decision
the gift of the incision that cuts the bonds to the old -
something climbs…

These are the times.

We are served by our fear, present and here
and escaping the fantasy of skill
letting the messiness fill
the spaces that lie between us.

The flux between optimism and the cynicism that
paralyses our lives,
leaves us to foster the faster
speed of work and communicate the
state of things:
listen to the planet’s song. It fills our structures
and brings along a new life that comes when we fall
into the possibility that the micro births the macro,
the large from the small.

Practice moving to courage from fear
letting go of what is no longer clear.

Back to your corners
find those of like mind and appear together
as good people, impatient but kind.

Everywhere it is time to collaborate
create and elaborate
containers of capacity that resonate.

Time to come home, switch it on
dance between poles, rest in centre,
this time of change is a mentor
teaching courage to
reach back to places where each
small effort is supported by this trembling field.

Our tools are not enough - the challenge remains:
connect to source and course through each other’s veins

In the summer of 2004, the World Cafe, the Berkana Institute, and the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership convened an innovative inquiry into intergenerational wisdom and collaboration for the common good…From that powerful encounter, we began to realize that if we and others could create spaces for authentic dialogue and effective collaboration across the generations, a tremendous force for social change and innovation across the globe might be ignited. Read more…

I’ve just recently returned from the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Nova Scotia, where Tom Hurley, who is guiding the global evolution of the World Café network, led a module on Leadership in Emergent Networked Systems. I co- hosted, with Claudia Chender, a young leader from the board of Shambhala, an inquiry into future possibilities for the Shambhala Institute in the arena of multi-generational collaboration, a thread we had begun with the first Intergenerational Dialogues at Shambhala in 2004. Read more…