Executive Champions Workshop | ECW 2023

The Executive Champions’ Workshop (ECW) has thrived over the years because of a growing desire amongst senior leaders from diverse organizations around the world to engage in deeper dialogue with peers who share their aspirations and face similar challenges. With its distinguished participants, this program has consistently created a distinctive space for deep reflection and conversation around questions that matter. The ECW is not a training session. Nor is it a typical conference. It is both personal and substantive in the way that only deep conversation among peers can be. The Executive Champions’ Workshop (ECW) is a special setting for nurturing new thinking and relationships among executive leaders in today’s rapidly changing economic and social landscape. Offered by invitation for executives who are champions of change, the ECW is a unique opportunity to reflect, refocus, and recharge.

• What can we do to nurture hope that real change is possible?
• How do we identify and strengthen local, regional and global commons?
• What is required at a personal and collective level to extend leadership networks?
• What do we need to do to increase our ability for reflection on the level of system and self?

The program is organized around different practices in our common work on awareness-based systems change: systems thinking and organizational learning, Theory U, Social Presencing Theatre, and indigenous methods of holding sacred space. Over the years, the potent combination of these tools and practices in concert with the energy of this special place have shaped spaces for deep conversations amongst peers around questions that have heart and meaning.

The ECW offers a highly interactive program that builds on a variety of tools, concepts and processes (and even a few short presentations) such as:  

• Starting off “in a good way:” Ritual ways of arriving, grounding and checking in with one another and the social-ecological field
• Personal and collective contemplative practices
• Social Presencing Theatre to connect us more intimately with the three fields within which we always operate: the individual mind-heart body, the “social body,” and the larger “earth body”  
• “World Cafes” that hold and weave small group conversations
• “Case clinics” to cultivate collective creativity around tangible leadership challenges 
• Diving into ideas and concepts of thought leadership

Through it all, we will explore how we  

• sense and cultivate a more generative social field,
• appreciate and practice the basics of what it means to think and act systemically, and
• understand together the deeper dynamics of social evolution unfolding all around us and how they are shaping the stresses and possibilities for institutions today.

All this is guided by our conviction that the changes needed in the world unfold at multiple levels, from the individual to the team, to the organization, cross-organization, and community and industry levels.   

The range of participants is diverse, encompassing leaders from a variety of sectors and contexts and operating at many levels of formal authority, from CEOs to community organizers.  

We also aspire to a mix of ages. Iconic challenges like climate change and poverty are naturally seen and felt very differently by people in their twenties versus sixties. While formal authority still may often be correlated with chronological age, genuine leadership in this Age of profoundly emergent and unprecedented challenges is not – as the global youth climate movement has shown.

That said, one criterion we have maintained in the ECW is that the program is primarily for “practitioners,” people who have to build teams to accomplish tangible results. We ask individuals who see themselves as primarily consultants or helpers to others to come with their key ‘clients” or practitioner partners, so as to maintain the focus on practical outcomes.  

Last, the ECW is not an introductory program, and we strongly recommend that all participants have come to a prior capacity building program such as those offered by the u-school for Transformation by Presencing Institute. For those who have not, there are several on-line options available prior to this summer:

• https://www.u-school.org/offerings/ulab-0x 
• https://www.u-school.org/programs#open-programs 

The ECW is more retreat than training, and it helps for people to come with a basic familiarity with tools of awareness-based systems change. In the end, the quality of the program depends on the quality of people’s participation, since so much of the learning arises with and from one another. 

The ECW will be facilitated by a diverse team of four facilitators who each bring an individual perspective and experience: 

• Melanie Goodchild, Anishinaabe, the Presencing Institute & the Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning
• Arawana Hayashi, the Presencing Institute and The Art of a True Move
• Otto Scharmer, MIT Sloan School of Management & the Presencing Institute
• Peter Senge, MIT Sloan School of Management & The Center for Systems Awareness

Credit: Trapp Family Lodge | https://www.trappfamily.com/

Many years ago, a vice president from the World Bank, famous for her work around global sustainability, commented near the end of our time together in Vermont, “If we had signed the Kyoto protocols in a tent like this, the outcomes would have been very different.” It is time to re-learn that genuine intention comes not from human will but from nature’s voice – and how to listen to that voice.