Leadership in Networked, Emergent Systems: Practical Challenges and Opportunities

with Thomas J. Hurley and Keith Webb

How are we called to lead in today's increasingly complex, dynamic, and interdependent organizations and communities? What qualities and capacities do we need to liberate the collective potential in these "chaordic" systems? What can we learn from the natural world about the principles and practices that influence these systems?

Drawing on case examples brought by participants, as well as other examples drawn from business, other organizations, the new sciences, and ancient wisdom, we will explore the practical challenges and inspirational opportunities involved in growing and leading networks. Our approach will be experiential and inquiry-oriented, and will include guided time in nature.

In this module you will increase your ability to

• articulate clear, compelling purposes
• establish core principles and infuse them at all levels of the network
• design "architectures of participation" that invite engagement and enable creative self-organization
• foster connections that support the emergence of higher-level capacities
• facilitate the types of guidance and governance that can nurture "coherence without control" at all levels of system

Through this module, our collaborative journey of learning will personally nourish each of us, while growing our capacity to ensure that the organizations and communities we serve contribute most powerfully to creating positive futures.

Tom Hurley is currently guiding the global evolution of the World Café and serves as a senior advisor and executive coach for leaders seeking innovative approaches to key strategic issues and large scale systems change. He was co-founder of the Chaordic Commons, a nonprofit consulting organization in which he partnered with VISA founder Dee Hock, and served for seventeen years with the Institute of Noetic Sciences as a member of the senior management team that guided the Institute's growth into a leading global organization on expanded human capacities and positive futures. He serves on the board of directors for both the World Café Community Foundation and the Berkana Institute.

Keith Webb is a "business ecologist" who is on the Leadership Programs faculty at the Banff Centre. For the past seven years, he has been demonstrating to leaders how nature's hard-learned lessons apply to organizations, working with groups that range from Royal Dutch Shell executives to Communist Chinese Party members to a sexual addictions group. He has shaped his career out of doing what he loves: taking people into the Rocky Mountain landscape. He has worked as a ski-mountaineering guide in winter and run a one-person tour company in summer, taking clients on backcountry trips that range from gentle nature strolls to week-long mountaineering trips. For a decade, he managed the environmental education programs for Mount Revelstoke and Glacier National Parks. For 35 years, he has been on a quest to understand how Nature works, for his conviction grows that the problems that afflict us, from pollution to poverty to failing banks, have already been resolved by nature. As Gregory Bateson said, "The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way man thinks."

ALIA West Modules

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Embodied Leadership – Empowered Life with Wendy Palmer
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Leadership in Networked, Emergent Systems: Practical Challenges and Opportunities with Thomas J. Hurley and Keith Webb