Jordan Luftig
The grant from Berrett-Koehler Foundation enabled my participation in, and delivery of NEXUS Lab on Purpose programming at, the NEXUS Global Summit in New York from July 26 – 29, 2018. More specifically, I participated via my role as co-chair of the NEXUS Lab on Purpose; along with my two fellow co-chairs and three additional core lab leaders, together we organized and facilitated three lab sessions at the summit:
- A 90-minute panel discussion at lunchtime on Friday titled “Seeing is Freeing: How A Shift in Perspective Can Change Everything”
- A 3-hour community dinner on Friday night with the theme “Soul Food: Nourishing Our Bodies, Our Hearts, and Our Purposes”
- A 4-hour workshop on Sunday on the subject of “Embracing Opportunities At the Edge of Crisis”
We designed these three sessions with the intent for them to be interrelated, as should become apparent from the descriptions of the sessions. First, the panel:
As stewards of ideas, resources, and emergent futures, the perspectives we carry and share with others have great impact in the world. How can subtle (yet fundamental) shifts in our perspectives and worldview enhance our service and purpose in the world? When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Join us in an experiential, inspirational, and insightful journey towards changing the world from the inside out.
As stewards of ideas, resources, and emergent futures, the perspectives we carry and share with others have great impact in the world. How can subtle (yet fundamental) shifts in our perspectives and worldview enhance our service and purpose in the world? When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Join us in an experiential, inspirational, and insightful journey towards changing the world from the inside out.
Next, the dinner:
You are invited to be fully yourself in an immersive and intentional community space. We will gift each other with presence and attention through the ritual of sharing food. As a participant, you will be responsible for our shared experience of authenticity, celebration and abundance as we break bread, and come together in a field of cooperation, trust and belonging. Our hope is for you to leave feeling nourished and inspired to live out your purposes in the world during this exciting and challenging transition.
Finally, the workshop:
Crisis is a time of intense difficulty and immense opportunity. Crisis is—or at least can be—a moment of truth that transforms individual lives and alters the course of history. This session is for you if you intuit—or perhaps know deep in your bones—that the future we desire for ourselves, others, and the world will require us to navigate crises and embrace the opportunities they present for positive and transformative change. Please join the NEXUS Lab on Purpose for a reflective and experiential journey to the edge of crisis, where we will explore the questions we ought to be asking, the perspectives we could be taking, the stories we need to be telling, and the projects we are creating to give us the courage and capacity to leap off the edge and land on new ground. Together we will engage with instructive models and powerful tools for working and living at the edge of human development and social change. Our invitation is for you to walk away with visionary insight, a compassionate heart, and outstretched hands—more ready than ever to realize your potential and change the world.
All of our sessions were well attended, and we consistently received feedback from NEXUS members that our sessions were meeting deep needs within them for self-reflection, belonging, individual and collective sense-making, authentic and transparent communication, and purpose-driven inquiry.
For the purposes of this fellowship and grant, a major focus of my time was on designing and delivering the Sunday workshop. Of note, during the design phase I had an extensive call with Berrett-Koehler author Peggy Holman, who proved a wise and gracious mentor and thought partner. We explored creative tensions having to do with the art of facilitation (e.g., opening the space by bringing forth the energy and ideas of the group versus setting the tone and frame as facilitators). And, Peggy offered facilitation methods and practices that my colleagues and I variously drew inspiration from and implemented in the workshop. I am deeply grateful for the connection we made and Peggy’s contribution to our workshop design.
As a result of delivering the workshop, which I co-facilitated with two fellow lab leaders, I would submit that we came away with a few key learnings. Each of these learnings helps to illuminate our lab’s gifts and our value proposition to NEXUS members and allies interested in purpose, emergence, and transformative change. The first is that we are committed to – and dare I say adept at – higher-order perspective seeking, taking, and coordination, which together are a vitally important competency for engaging with the complexity of life conditions (and crises) in the 21st century.
The second learning is intimately related to the first; namely, that skillful means with new conceptual frameworks is imperative for engaging emergence so as to facilitate evolution and transformation of human consciousness and culture – we (the workshop facilitators and participants) experienced a taste of this reality during the workshop’s second of three facilitated practices, a generative dialogue that at opportune times incorporated frameworks that gave us newfound explanatory power and, more importantly, enhanced capacity to share reality and tell a new story of humanity.
Thirdly, we learned that the aforementioned cognitive and practical-theoretical gifts go hand-in-hand with deep awakening and presencing of the human heart. In these kinds of high-stakes dialogues and “stretch” attempts at collaboration at the edge of crisis, we can go only so far as the depth and quality of the heart-space we co-create and share with one another. This recognition – that action-inquiry in human affairs is in important respects an affair of the heart – is crucial if we hope to secure our future and engender a flourishing of humanity and the planet.
In the weeks after the global summit, we of the NEXUS Lab on Purpose have found ourselves thinking deeply about how to actualize our commitment to facilitating emergent change in this time of transition from one world system to another. We know that emergent political-economic and social systems change at the edge of crisis requires each one of us (whosoever is committed to such change) to pay equal attention to changing our respective self-system. And so, we continue to engage our own practices of personal transformation, even as we set our sights on the intra- and inter-organizational partners that inspire us, and the social acupuncture points that summon us – like redefining wealth and reimagining and recreating the field of wealth management – to make our unique contributions to the healing, integration, regeneration, and evolutionary transformation of living systems.
You are invited to be fully yourself in an immersive and intentional community space. We will gift each other with presence and attention through the ritual of sharing food. As a participant, you will be responsible for our shared experience of authenticity, celebration and abundance as we break bread, and come together in a field of cooperation, trust and belonging. Our hope is for you to leave feeling nourished and inspired to live out your purposes in the world during this exciting and challenging transition.
Finally, the workshop:
Crisis is a time of intense difficulty and immense opportunity. Crisis is—or at least can be—a moment of truth that transforms individual lives and alters the course of history. This session is for you if you intuit—or perhaps know deep in your bones—that the future we desire for ourselves, others, and the world will require us to navigate crises and embrace the opportunities they present for positive and transformative change. Please join the NEXUS Lab on Purpose for a reflective and experiential journey to the edge of crisis, where we will explore the questions we ought to be asking, the perspectives we could be taking, the stories we need to be telling, and the projects we are creating to give us the courage and capacity to leap off the edge and land on new ground. Together we will engage with instructive models and powerful tools for working and living at the edge of human development and social change. Our invitation is for you to walk away with visionary insight, a compassionate heart, and outstretched hands—more ready than ever to realize your potential and change the world.
All of our sessions were well attended, and we consistently received feedback from NEXUS members that our sessions were meeting deep needs within them for self-reflection, belonging, individual and collective sense-making, authentic and transparent communication, and purpose-driven inquiry.
For the purposes of this fellowship and grant, a major focus of my time was on designing and delivering the Sunday workshop. Of note, during the design phase I had an extensive call with Berrett-Koehler author Peggy Holman, who proved a wise and gracious mentor and thought partner. We explored creative tensions having to do with the art of facilitation (e.g., opening the space by bringing forth the energy and ideas of the group versus setting the tone and frame as facilitators). And, Peggy offered facilitation methods and practices that my colleagues and I variously drew inspiration from and implemented in the workshop. I am deeply grateful for the connection we made and Peggy’s contribution to our workshop design.
As a result of delivering the workshop, which I co-facilitated with two fellow lab leaders, I would submit that we came away with a few key learnings. Each of these learnings helps to illuminate our lab’s gifts and our value proposition to NEXUS members and allies interested in purpose, emergence, and transformative change. The first is that we are committed to – and dare I say adept at – higher-order perspective seeking, taking, and coordination, which together are a vitally important competency for engaging with the complexity of life conditions (and crises) in the 21st century.
The second learning is intimately related to the first; namely, that skillful means with new conceptual frameworks is imperative for engaging emergence so as to facilitate evolution and transformation of human consciousness and culture – we (the workshop facilitators and participants) experienced a taste of this reality during the workshop’s second of three facilitated practices, a generative dialogue that at opportune times incorporated frameworks that gave us newfound explanatory power and, more importantly, enhanced capacity to share reality and tell a new story of humanity.
Thirdly, we learned that the aforementioned cognitive and practical-theoretical gifts go hand-in-hand with deep awakening and presencing of the human heart. In these kinds of high-stakes dialogues and “stretch” attempts at collaboration at the edge of crisis, we can go only so far as the depth and quality of the heart-space we co-create and share with one another. This recognition – that action-inquiry in human affairs is in important respects an affair of the heart – is crucial if we hope to secure our future and engender a flourishing of humanity and the planet.
In the weeks after the global summit, we of the NEXUS Lab on Purpose have found ourselves thinking deeply about how to actualize our commitment to facilitating emergent change in this time of transition from one world system to another. We know that emergent political-economic and social systems change at the edge of crisis requires each one of us (whosoever is committed to such change) to pay equal attention to changing our respective self-system. And so, we continue to engage our own practices of personal transformation, even as we set our sights on the intra- and inter-organizational partners that inspire us, and the social acupuncture points that summon us – like redefining wealth and reimagining and recreating the field of wealth management – to make our unique contributions to the healing, integration, regeneration, and evolutionary transformation of living systems.