1. Leadership and the New Science: 20 Years On
What’s going on?
How did we get here?
What is our role going forward?

2. 1992 2012

3. October
2012

5. You are the result of nearly
four billion years of evolution
Please act like it

6. Structure of Each Day
• Teaching from Meg
• Small group explorations
• Large group reflections
• Personal journaling or reflective time

7. Who showed up as ‘you’ this morning?
rate yourself on a Scale of 1 to 5
1 = barely here 5 = best day ever
• How present and undistracted am I?
• How open and curious do I feel?
• How brave do I feel—to inquire, take risks?
• How interested am I in others’ experiences?
• How willing am I to support others to learn?

8. We cannot change the way the world is
But by opening to the world as it is
we may discover that gentleness,
decency and bravery are available not only to
us but to all human beings.
Chögyam Trungpa
Buddhist Teacher

9. Ground: We cannot change the way the world is
Path: But by opening to the world as it is
Fruition: We may discover that gentleness,
decency and bravery are available not only to us
but to all human beings.
Chögyam Trungpa, Buddhist Teacher

10. • Mon: We cannot change the way the world is
This Brave New World has emerged
• Tues: Opening to the world as it is
New Maps for Lost People
• Wed: Distracted by Distraction
How technology and the Internet
are changing us
• Thur: We discover gentleness, decency, bravery
Restoring Human Capacities
• Fri: Right work, Right relationship

11. Describe something going on in your world
that you want us to know about.
Write a brief headline on your paper.
Write large and clear so we can read it.
You’ll have time to describe this in more
detail when we gather together.

12. Emergence
How life creates novelty and change
through increasing complexity
The creation of new & complex systems
through the interaction of multiple parts.
The new properties and capacities created
are properties of the system; they are not
found in the parts.
These properties exert control over the parts.

13. Emergence
ORIGIN mid 17th cent. (in the sense
‘unforeseen occurrence’):
from medieval Latin emergentia, from
Latin emergere ‘bring to light’

14. Properties, Behaviors, Characteristics
of an Emergent System
– never the sum of the parts, nor more than the
sum of the parts
– new and different than the parts
– do not exist until the system emerges
– system ‘supervenes’ on its parts—power over
– cannot be undone. You can’t work backwards
or in a reductionist way

15. Emergent Systems
Cannot be changed.
The only way to change what’s emerged
is to start over
"Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to
change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got."
~ Peter F. Drucker
“One cannot change an old system. Instead one must
create a new system that makes the old system obsolete.”
~ Buckminster Fuller

16. Who showed up as ‘you’ this morning?
rate yourself on a Scale of 1 to 5
1 = barely here 5 = best day ever
• How present and undistracted am I?
• How open and curious do I feel?
• How brave do I feel—to inquire, take risks?
• How interested am I in others’ experiences?
• How willing am I to support others to learn?

19. When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron
feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry

20. • Mon: We cannot change the way the world is
This Brave New World has emerged
• Tues: Opening to the world as it is
New Maps for Lost People
• Wed: Distracted by Distraction
How technology and the Internet
are changing us
• Thur: We discover gentleness, decency, bravery
Restoring Human Capacities
• Fri: Right work, Right relationship

21. Opening to the world as it is
New Maps for Lost People
Are we lost?

22. Sit down and be quiet. You are drunk, and this is
the edge of the roof.
Rumi, Sufi poet, 13th century
Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would
like to see you living in better conditions.
Hafiz, Sufi teacher, poet, 14th century

23. 5 stages of being lost
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales
• Deny you’re lost—press on with urgency
• You realize you’re lost—urgency becomes
panic
• Desperately seek anything that looks familiar
• Deteriorate rationally and emotionally
• Resigned to your fate, you admit you’re lost

24. “Not being lost is not a matter of getting back to
where you started from; it is a decision not to
be lost wherever you happen to find yourself.
It’s simply saying, ‘I’m not lost, I’m right here.’”
Laurence Gonzales
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

25. Being lost is a state of mind, not of geography
• It is outdated mental maps that keep us lost.
• We don’t have to change the situation.
We have to change our mind about the
situation.

26. • A world of emotions moving to extremes, where anger
becomes rage, opponents become enemies, dislike
becomes hatred, sorrow becomes despair.
• A world closing shut, where individuals, groups,
ethnicities, and governments fortify their positions
behind impermeable boundaries.
• A world where critical thinking scarcely exists, where
there is no distinction between facts and opinions,
between science and beliefs.
• A world where information no longer makes a
difference, where we hear only what we want to hear,
always confirmed and never contradicted.

27. A world desperate for certainty and safety, choosing
coercion and violence as the means to achieve this.
A world solving its crises by brinksmanship and last
minute deals, no matter how important or disastrous
the consequences may be.
A world growing more meaningless as the values of
consumption, greed, and self-interest take hold.
A world of people who formerly felt powerful and
constructive now feeling powerless and exhausted.

29. Global Warming
Jane Hirschfield
When his ship first came to Australia,
Cook wrote, the natives
Continued fishing, without looking up.
Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to
be comprehended.

30. Who showed up as ‘you’ this morning?
rate yourself on a Scale of 1 to 5
1 = barely here 5 = best day ever
• How present and undistracted am I?
• How open and curious do I feel?
• How brave do I feel—to inquire, take risks?
• How interested am I in others’ experiences?
• How willing am I to support others to learn?

31. • Mon: We cannot change the way the world is
This Brave New World has emerged
• Tues: Opening to the world as it is
New Maps for Lost People
• Wed: Distracted by Distraction
How technology and the Internet
are changing us
• Thur: We discover gentleness, decency, bravery
Restoring Human Capacities
• Fri: Right work, Right relationship

32. We are distracted from distraction by distraction.”
T. S. Eliot

33. The Internet is
“a system of interruption technologies”

34. Neuroplasticity
Brains change continually to support our
needs and activities.
There is no such thing as being “hard
wired” if you’re a living system not a
machine.

35. The brains of Internet addicts (more than 38 hours/week)
resemble the brains of cocaine addicts and alcoholics.
“Every time your device pings with a new text, tweet, or email,
it triggers a pleasure response in the brain. You get a squirt
of dopamine. The brain grows new neurons receptive to
speedy processing and instant gratification.
Other structures shrink, e.g. concentration, empathy,
impulse control, memory, pattern recognition, thinking,
critical analysis, and more.

36. Epigenetics
Discovered in The Human Genome Project
• Genes are not switches
• Genes are players in an ensemble cast
of other elements (proteins and other biochemicals)
• DNA is composed of these elements
• DNA s affected by the lives we live
• Heredity emerges from the interaction of these
many elements. It is an emergent phenomenon.

37. Technological Determinism
Jaques Ellul
• Technology, once introduced, always takes over.
• It feeds on itself. Users demand more and more from it.
• Social structures--values, behaviors, politics—become
organized around technology's values
• Existing cultural values and traditions disappear--a new
culture emerges.
• Gutenberg's printing press put information into the
hands of everyday people, credited with:
• enabling the rise of individualism,
• literacy,
• complex language,
• private contemplation,
• the literary tradition
• the advent of Protestantism

38. Marshall McLuhan: the content of a medium is
just "the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar
to distract the watchdog of the mind."
How are we being affected by the process of text,
post, connect, search, scan?

39. “in growing, technique requires that human
values be in exact accordance with technical
development and that social structures develop
purely in terms of technique. This, I believe,
shows that nothing in a society remains intact
once technique begins to penetrate.”
Jacques Ellul

40. “In 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) will list in
its appendix:
“Internet Use Disorder”
“It’s this basic cultural recognition that
people have a pathological relationship with
their devices. People feel not just addicted,
but trapped.”
Kelly McGonigal, Stanford U.

41. Sociologist James Evan reviewed citations in
more than 34 million articles published in
academic journals and noted that the number of
different citations declined after the advent of
search engines.
These information-filtering tools, he observed,
"serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly
establishing and then continually reinforcing a
consensus about what information is important
and what isn't."

42. The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing Our
Brains
Nicholas Carr
Perspectives on Our Age: Jacques Ellul Speaks on
His Life and Work
Jacques Ellul with William H.
Vanderburg
Alone Together: How We Expect More from
Technology and Less From Each Other
Sherry Turkel

43. "Something that is worthwhile, wholesome
and healthy exists in all of us.”
Chogyam Trungpa, Buddhist Teacher

44. Ground: We cannot change the way the
world is
Path: But by opening to the world as it is
Fruition: We may discover that gentleness,
decency and bravery are available not only to
us but to all human beings.

45. Warriorship
'warrior' in Tibetan pawo
literally means 'one who is brave.’
Warriorship in this context is the tradition of human
bravery, or the tradition of fearlessness.
A warrior is one who does not accept the invitation
or challenge.

46. There comes a time when all life on Earth is in
danger. Great barbarian powers have arisen.
Although these powers spend their wealth in
preparations to annihilate one another, they have
much in common: weapons of unfathomable
destructive power, and technologies that lay waste
our world. In this era, when the future of sentient
life hangs by the frailest of threads ....the Shambhala
warriors go into training.
They are armed with two “weapons”—
compassion and insight.

47. The basic wisdom of Shambhala is that
in this world, as it is,
we can find a good and meaningful human life
that will also serve others.
That is our richness.
Chögyam Trungpa

48. I stand among you as one who
offers a small message of hope. . .
there are always people who dare
to seek on the margin of society,
who are not dependent
on social acceptance,
not dependent on social routine,
and prefer a kind of free-floating
existence under a state of risk.
Thomas Merton

49. Again and again,
some people in the crowd
wake up.
They have no ground in the crowd
and they emerge according to
broader laws. They carry
strange customs with them,
and demand room for bold gestures.
The future speaks ruthlessly
through them.
Ranier Maria Rilke

50. The warrior who is fearless
is not caught in the ambush of hope

51. Beyond Hope and Fear
Do not depend on the hope of results. When
you are doing the sort of work you have
taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you
may have to face the fact that your work
will be apparently worthless and even
achieve no result at all, if not perhaps
results opposite to what you expect.

52. Beyond Hope and Fear
As you get used to this idea, you start more
and more to concentrate not on the results,
but on the value, the rightness, the truth of
the work itself. And there too a great deal
has to be gone through, as gradually you
struggle less and less for an idea and more
and more for specific people.

53. Beyond Hope and Fear
The range tends to narrow down, but it gets
much more real. In the end, it is the reality
of personal relationships that saves
everything.
Thomas Merton

54. Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a
lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be
accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes
complete sense in any immediate context of history;
therefore we must be saved by faith.
Reinhold Niebuhr

55. I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the
dancing.
T. S. Eliot

56. “As the warrior proceeds on the path, he or
she may go through phases of intense fear.
Frequently, such fear comes out of nowhere.
It just happens; it just hits you.
It may cause you to question everything in
yourself: everything you have studied,
everything you have learned and understood,
as well as your general life situation.
You feel the wretchedness of the world
around you, as well as within yourself.”
in Smile at Fear Chögyam Trungpa