By Jackie Thoms for Enlivening Edge Magazine
Many people are wrestling with their version of “Our business models are broken beyond repair; how do we prepare for a different future of organisational life and work?”
Change agents, pioneers, and early adopters are realizing that the need for change within organisations goes beyond a new system for managing employees and the way the work is done.
If you are in an organizational context, or work with clients that remain in a model that’s broken, the Next Stage World Gathering is a chance for you to share with and learn from your peers in May in Greece.
The Gathering is not for easy questions: it’s for meaningful and alive questions that we are facing individually and collectively. Questions that meander through many contexts, considering: Where does this change start?
There is good news: there are new ways already in practice. Yes, they are fragmented and mostly small scale, but they are being tried, tested and developed. And the people who will participate in the Gathering come together as a global community, beginning to see more of these new practices and the new system emerging.
There will be space to share practices, and actually try out and develop new ones, as well as to look deeply into how to generate organisations and business models that serve our growing call for generative and meaningful life and work.
This practice that we’ll engage in together at the Gathering, with others from around the world, is also immensely freeing and joyful. It generates an aliveness not only in our questions but in ourselves. It offers us ways to connect into a human state that is available to all, that so many of us yearn for and know is extremely humanly possible. It is more in tune with a truer sense of our interdependent selves connected to nature and aligned with the earth.
As pioneers and change agents, we know we can’t do this alone. It takes courage to stretch beyond our edges–to sit in that unknown space and experience what is here and how to nudge ourselves and our systems forward, or how to midwife the birth of the new.
The gathering is designed to offer opportunities to observe and experience what happens inside of ourselves and within groups when its not known what will happen!
In organisational settings, much is put in place to avoid such moments as uncertainty and unknowns are not celebrated in many organisational cultures.
Practicing and learning approaches that align with our own organisational contexts to lead others into open space is part of our collective leadership in preparing the ground for the next stage.
Just as there are ways to create openness and open space, our Gathering will also include how to apply frameworks and models that most of us there will know and have used before.
The process architecture for the Gathering is:
- connecting people
- connecting questions
- talking, sharing and listening in different combinations
- witnessing and embodied experiencing as all the different elements come together
- expanding the worlds and contexts we are embracing to let the missing elements come in
- continuing to keep enlarging the bigger picture we are working with
- accepting that at times we simply don’t know, and potentially letting go of that which we think we know to make room for new perspectives and understandings to emerge
- getting clarity on where the leverage points with the most impact are in our, or our clients’ organisational systems so we can take steps to move forward
As a participant in the gathering, you are invited and encouraged to bring your questions, projects and organisational contexts so that together we can work with you and the group and explore how to find these new leverage points.
And if it resonates, bring colleagues so that you can work together to take the learnings, insights and new approaches back into your practice and the organisational systems you work with.
Halki is a beautiful island that will host us well as we meet like-minded and like-hearted people, nurture ourselves and strengthen our resilience to continue to bring the new ways and systems into the mainstream.
Join us so that we move further towards the turning point for our deeper aspirations to become our reality.
This article represents reflections from the hosting team’s shared space: Aftab Omar, Simone Rack, Rainer von Leoprechting, Sven Latzel, Jeroen Vermeer, Maria Bakari Markos Perrakis, Katrin Faensen, and Jackie Thoms
EE is happy to be an affiliate partner of this Next-stage World Gathering.
Featured Image credit: A boat called Zoe/Life at the little harbour of Halki… awaits for you joining its Next Stage …Sailing! Photo by Maria Bakari, from Next-stage World Gathering 2018 in Halki, Greece.
Jackie Thoms brings powerful intuition and clarity as an organisational consultant and executive coach. She is committed to bringing attention and care to the health of client systems and is on a journey herself of conscious and awake living and working. Some of her most profound learnings and insights come from day-to-day challenges, as well as the joy of motherhood. Contact Jackie via email “[email protected]” or via LinkedIn.
