“Building Common Trust for our Common Future”
Reflections on systems transformation, local economy, relational methodologies and more from the Global Forum 2022.
[Read article translation in Italian.]
The Global Forum is a two-day virtual convening featuring sessions with community members, global and local leaders across civil society, the arts, business, government, and academia. The conversations grounded the work of awareness-based systems change in stories of impact and creativity, from systems transformation within international organizations, to local and regional economy in Latin America, discussions on indigenous language and relational methodologies, as well as scaling agricultural transformation projects for climate change adaptation.
Taiwanese artist Etan Pavavalung opened the session with a performance “Song of Gratitude,” inviting us to connect deeply with the earth and one another. This year’s Global Forum also highlighted the work of Pauline Tamesis, United Nations Resident Coordinator in Viet Nam, formerly in Cambodia; Mercedes Bidart, social entrepreneur working on informal economy in Colombia; Helmy Abouleish from the sustainable development SEKEM initiative in Egypt; Cherie Nursalim with United in Diversity in Indonesia and u-School Asia-Pacific; Melanie Goodchild, Indigenous Elder and systems thinker.
The second day of the convening held a panel conversation from Dr. Ben Chan (based in Singapore), Frans Sugiarta (Indonesia), Katie Stubley (Australia), and Dieter van den Broeck from Commonland in South Africa. The forum also featured team projects from u-lab 2x, social arts practices from Arawana Hayashi and John Stubley, and collectively looked toward the initiation of u-School. Community hosted sessions, like those hosted by Teoría U en Español team and others, began during the forum and continue through September.
Below we share moments from the forum with an invitation to learn further about these and other initiatives.
How do I foster integrated solutions? How can I make the UN deliver more than the sum of its parts? My answer was to embark on a journey of transformation through collaborative leadership.
— Pauline Tamesis, United Nations Resident Coordinator Viet Nam (formerly UN Resident Coordinator Cambodia)
Pauline Tamesis, UN Resident Coordinator in Viet Nam, discussed her personal experience with awareness-based systems change — an ongoing “journey of experimentation and learning, but also a journey of failure.” In failure, Otto Scharmer (faculty at Presencing Institute and MIT) noted: “the experience of failure, when we are really sucked into the old system… it is a great point of learning; it calls on us to support ourselves with continued learning infrastructures.”
While Pauline found that transformative leadership requires “a community, network, committed to the same purpose, who are willing to take risks together, find solutions,” she also recalled another piece in her experience: the change may begin with just one person, or one shift in relationship. In the case of the Cambodia Futures Lab, which formed the basis for later iterations of the SDG leadership labs across the globe, it was the feeling within one member of the Cambodian government following a lecture (given by Otto Scharmer on the future of multilateralism in a post-covid world) which engaged a spark to start a process of cross-sector learning, collaboration, and prototyping around social protections in Cambodia using theory U — moving from an ego to eco-system perspective.
Pauline: “ I had to let go of my assumptions that I could change systems without transforming myself in the process… I learned that vulnerability is not a weakness. The prototype really is all of us. How each of us are individually changing the way we lead, and the way we bring people together.”
Just Economies
“In creating an alternative credit score, we use this data to access their credit worthiness, looking at their future, not at their past.”
— Mercedes Bidart, Founder of Quipu, social entrepreneur helping build just economies at the grassroots level in Colombia
Mercedes Bidart and her team built Quipu as systemic change proposal for informal economy in Latin America. Quipu is in many ways an awareness based systems tool, to not only change consumption behavior but “change who has the power to access capital and decide rules of the game, show how people can collaborate and work together — help system see and sense itself — showcase local assets, grow thanks to trust, spark transformation, and put money at center point of discussion in acknowledging it as a main pain point of families.”
Currently in localities across Colombia, Quipu aims to be a digital decentralized bank for the informal economy in Latin America. Mercedes explains: informal micro-businesses make up the majority in Latin America. They are the economic engine, yet they often stay in the level of subsistence both unable to access many social and financial services or blacklisted because of something from their past. These businesses often end up relying on payday lenders, which charge a high percent of annual interest rate, getting people into a loop of loans they cannot get out of (getting a loan to pay another loan). To help the millions involved in informal economy (80% percent of Quipu’s user base are currently women) Mercedes and Quipu are committed to financial services that are easy, fair, and alternative. “We are looking to build a strong community,” Mercedes says. “This means that the community is the most important piece.”
Mercedes references a section from Katrin Kaeufer and Otto Scharmer on moving from ego-system to eco-system economies, which inspired her when she first encountered Theory U:
“The blind spot of our time is that we take mainstream economic thought for granted, as if it were a natural law. But in reality, all so-called economic laws being to melt and morph into something else the moment you begin to change the most important variable: the quality of awareness of the participants in the system.”
SEKEM, from the intention, is a holistic development initiative: economic development, ecological development, societal development, cultural development — they are all integrated. There isn’t one development step which we don’t try to balance with the other three dimensions.
— Helmy Abouleish, SEKEM initiative, sustainable development for Egypt
Since 1977, SEKEM in Egypt has worked as a sustainable community and biodynamic agricultural example in Egypt, and is now an umbrella group of companies and NGOs, including educational institutions and a Medical Center — as well as a diversity of artistic and spiritual practices. SEKEM’s remarkable story reached a crossroads when it became time for those involved to undergo a process in planning for SEKEM’s future. Using a Theory U approach, Helmy remembered the process took a year. The question became not what did SEKEM want from the future, but “what does the future want from us? What is it that is needed from us… The question is how can we contribute to the systems change?”
SEKEM designed pathways to mainstreaming, so that their ideas could be applied elsewhere. Helmy remembers the group asking: “How can our ideas be disseminated so that they touch the millions of farmers, not just thousands. How can we effect more people with the ideas we have achieved?” One important piece involves true-cost accounting: organic agriculture in reality is cheaper if we include externalized costs (such as the environmental and social impact). Helmy acknowledged that reports and analyses are good knowledge but do not necessarily change anything. What did: agriculture carbon credits in action. Prototyping this on SEKEM’s own farms, they realized that Egyptian farmers can sequester large amounts of carbon each year, the credits for which can offset costs of becoming organic. SEKEM piloted with 2000 farmers, and have tens of thousands more waiting in the pipeline. “I have a feeling we are at the point where we are at a paradigm shift. We believe we can reach a tipping point and leave it to the world in mainstreaming this concept.”
In discussing one of many projects, Helmy says: “For those who don’t believe reports, they are invited to visit us.” A term Helmy uses to describe SEKEM’s economic vision: an economy of love.
Relational methodologies are really at the heart of any process, including a change process
— Melanie Goodchild, bringing together Indigenous knowledge with systems thinking
Melanie’s article on Relational Systems thinking is a top downloaded piece in the Journal of Awareness based systems change. In her offering to the Global Forum, Melanie continued to encourage participants to embrace a complexity mindset informed by Indigenous wisdom. In this session, she explored the power of language and the limitations of English in expressing multi-concept living words which allow for sentience in descriptions of nature and spirit; the “noun-ification” in English often turns the natural world into one-word concepts: for example, “river,” rather than describing the river as a flowing body. Languages encode different world views, different cosmologies. Holofrasis — characteristic of indigenous language — means to declare or tell whole. Accessing this, via a complexity or metaphoric mindset and tapping into intelligences inside and outside ourselves perhaps improves the quality of our awareness,” suggests Melanie, as she invited Global Forum participants into an exercise around the complexity mindset.
“Maybe our diversity would be our strength, unite in our diversity, build common trust for our common future.”
— Cherie Nursalim, on United in Diversity Indonesia
Cherie Nursalim joined the forum from the tallest bamboo structure built in Indonesia (where the government and parliament have incorporated Theory U into its internal methodology and training), and where among other projects Cherie is special advisor to the Indonesian government on sustainable development and climate change and cochair of a forum on blending finance and innovation. Cherie looked back on the United in Diversity programs, the IDEAS Asia-Pacific, and the future of a Bali campus where the work will continue, with faculty and fellows across government, business and civil society. Cherie also sees inclusive expansion as a necessity: “In order to shift the system, we need to be in the system. This means expansion to youth, grassroots, indigenous communities.”
Cherie references “Tri Hita Karana,” three ways to happiness, three harmonies. She aligns Tri Hita Karana with Theory U and many religious and spiritual values, and also aligned to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. While Tri Hita Karana grows toward happiness, Cherie reflects that despair and failure are part of the process.
Cherie: “It came to me at the time I was really giving up on a lot of things. Even when you feel theres no hope, on climate, war, other challenges. I do believe that universe is there, and can speak to us, but you have to allow it to come in. The way you allow it to come in is to connect with others, these bridges, these relationships. I am so awed by the people we have met along the journey. Connect with the ones who are willing and open to join you.”
“If we want to move forward with transformational activity collectively, we need the soil — the lab.”
A panel of Dr. Ben Chan, Frans Sugiarta, Dieter van den Broeck, and Katie Stubley looked at their change processes in two anchor points in the Asia Pacific region, through U-School Asia Pacific — “we are not building it, it is building us,” and the Commonland work in Australia on landscape and ecosystem restoration. In Indonesia, Dr. Ben and Frans explain the importance of embedding change across sectors. “How can we build new learning infrastructures, that can hold and also have confidence to do the action and do the spaces around that?”
Dr Ben: “Seeds are little tiny things. Frans and I have learned about seeds. If a seed remains on the table, it remains there for the next 100 years. A seed needs to be planted into a soil. It is the soil that needs to be taken care of the seed. And the stewardship is important. Frans and I feel we have been giving the stewardship of the seeds we planted more than 15 years ago. And the fourth S we remember: the seed will germinate in its own time, in its own season.
To the “4 S’” above, Frans adds: “Trust, Courage, Compassion, Love,” as the nutritional elements to make sure the soil is ready. Dieter suggests adding a fifth S: Soul. “I always confuse them when I am writing them —soil and soul. Each thing we plant has its own soul.”
In remembering his own change process, Dieter recalls that his organization — which sought to help farmers restore their land and environment — shifted approach after his own personal process: “the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener,” he quotes Bill O’Brian.
“I changed everything. We just listened for six months, listened to the farmers, sensed into the land, sensed into the people, really had the confidence to put all our assumptions and ideas aside, really dive in. And that shifted our relationship with the farmers; they started engaging with us, having conversations with us, and really being vulnerable where they were challenged and where they didn’t see hope anymore for the futures of our children.” The NGO is now 17 years old, and has restored thousands of hectares of land.
“The playful wind sowed the seeds of forests and valleys with native and diverse plants that generated clean air to breathe.”
— Abuela Alejandrina Ayala
Among the community sessions was a session with Coral and the Abuelas, organized by Fundación Cuidemos Paraísos, an NGO that protects native forests and original cultures in the south of Chile. The songs and offerings during the session reminded participants to “listen to the call of mother earth.”
“We must take care of her as they took care of us in the great Tahuantinsuyu, where everything was sacred, like the respect for the rivers, where even the animals walked close to the hills for fear of causing dirt or stones to fall into their waters. The seas, where life evolved, were teeming with fish of all kinds. The farmlands were always healthy with the energy of the sun, as they were left to rest for a while to recover. The playful wind sowed the seeds of forests and valleys with native and diverse plants that generated clean air to breathe. We have to resume respect for everything that has life on the planet.”
— Abuela Alejandrina Ayala
“What ends up resulting in big change, actually starts very small. And where does it start? It starts here. We feel something.”
— Otto Scharmer
John Stubley, Arawana Hayashi, Olaf Baldini and Etan Pavavalung shared practices and reflections with all those present for the forum. “The world is a mystery with different languages and culture. We need to create a friendly environment that everyone can live in,” said Etan Pavavalung, who opened the Global Forum with his performance of “Song of Gratitude.”
In her reflections and mindfulness practice, Arawana shared: “There is so much resonance and feeling on our social field. We can feel one another, and what it is to be with one another. And we recognize that we are co-creating social reality. We — together, there isn’t anybody out there doing that. We are. Our living process is incredibly creative. And it’s us, here, on the planet, all of us. That are co-living into, co-listening, co-attending to all of the wisdom and courage and goodness on this planet. It is everywhere. Wisdom is everywhere. Courage is everywhere. Strength, love, is everywhere. In every tree, in every glass of water. In every conversation. In every little zoom square. So, to some extent, our job is to notice.”
“We can do this together/With the right intention,” narrated John Stubley, ecosystem innovator and narrative designer, in a social Poetics practice. In social poetics, John weaves words spoken by participants to create a poetic resonance that chronologically mirrors the two days of the forum.
Otto Scharmer and Pauline Tamesis reflected on the stories at the start of the Cambodia Futures lab, and what it could mean for any person in the room. “The beginning — you are sitting in a session, and you feel something. And you attend to it. Even though it is very remote, when you look around you. Let’s not forget, it’s one person. And that person can be any of us. You feel something. You bring in people close to you. And you take the next steps. What ends up resulting in big change, actually starts very small. And where does it start? It starts here. We feel something.”
The third live session of the Global Forum, a global resonance session, will be held on September 7th at 9 a.m. EST.
