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We have gathered all your inputs about your 2x experience through the report below.
u-lab 2x is a four-month journey designed for teams to foster deep innovation. Teams are guided to use Theory U tools and methods to advance prototype initiatives that range from making healthcare more accessible to innovating across silos in education, from engaging communities through regional landscape restoration to making workplaces more generative, from building support systems for changemakers to designing artistic platforms of intercultural exchange between refugees and non-refugees- just to name a few. Regular “live session” gatherings hosted on Zoom help to foster a generative peer-learning community to further support teams and their initiatives.
Participating Teams
Countries
Individual Participants
Languages
New Teams
People Impacted
In u-lab 2x, and all Theory U initiatives we embrace different ways of knowing and making sense of experience. Here we share three avenues for gaining insight into understanding the 2x journey:
The data shared in each avenue is drawn from the three Live Sessions hosted that served as “touch points' on the journey.
Our intention in compiling the information below is to support our own sense making as a community while simultaneously surfacing an understanding of the conditions, processes, and structures that support awareness-based systems change and innovation so they can be replicated wherever helpful to support local change, globally.
We invite you to join us in this inquiry and share your observations, reflections and questions in the discussion thread at the bottom of the page.
Visual scribing is one of the key social arts developed and practiced in connection to Theory U. Live Sessions were accompanied by scribe Olaf Baldini, who sensed into our collective moment and experience and then represented it visually. At the end of each session, we engaged in a resonance exercise, taking in the visual in silence before being invited to share in the Zoom chat responses to three sentence stems, “I see, I sense, I feel called to”.
Gazing at the visuals across the three sessions is one avenue to seeing, sensing and making sense of the u-lab 2x journey.
You can click the link below each image to read the resonance statements.
Collective Resonance - Live Session III
What do you experience as you view these three images? Share in the chat at the bottom of this page.
Story is a powerful means of communicating and making sense of experience. In preparation for each live session, Stefan Day created a video representing the contributions of community members to either “Video Asks” (automated input process) or Story Sharing Sessions (hosted Zoom calls) reflecting themes and experiences at key moments in the process.
These videos, viewed across the timespan of the program, offers an avenue into u-lab 2x that provides insight into both the content and the felt-sense of the journey.
What do you notice as you view these videos marking different points in the u-lab 2x journey? Share in the chat at the bottom of this page.
During each live session, we engaged in a short survey using Mentimeter, generating immediate data that was then shared with the community for (brief) sense-making.
The same questions were asked each time, allowing for a comparison across time and, ideally, insights into the way people progress through the journey, the enabling conditions, challenges and impact. This quantitative and qualitative data offers a final avenue into the u-lab 2x journey.
The first two questions related to teams’ place in the u-lab 2x journey, were based on either the progress of the teams’ prototype or the aspects of the program they had completed.
What we see in these images is overall movement through the process as a cohort with a great deal of individuation, with some teams entering into the experience having already engaged in the practices and others slowing the process down.
What do you observe? Please share in the chat at the bottom of this page.
The next set of questions asks what percentage of a team’s time is spent at each of the four levels of listening described in Theory U. The question was asked in relation to the core team and in relation to the extended team and stakeholders.
While we see some shifts toward greater use of empathic and generative listening in the Core Teams, we were more struck by the degree of shift with the Extended Team and Stakeholders.
Does this reflect your team’s experience? Share in the chat at the bottom of the page.
In each survey, we asked the open questions: What has shifted or clarified for you/your team? What were the enabling conditions? What is the biggest challenge for you to be able to take the next steps? Responses tended to converge, for example, overcoming challenges to create enabling conditions. Together, responses to the open questions have allowed us to surface some initial findings about what it takes for a team to nurture and evolve a prototype over time.
Four enabling conditions that surfaced as significant to supporting the evolution of prototypes: clarity of intention, team cohesion, helpful structures, and new insights. We list them here in the order of frequency with which they were mentioned and illustrated with data from the open questions.
Clarity of intention: Until teams have established a shared intention, it is difficult to move forward. Often this takes time.
Team cohesion: Trust and cohesion amongst the team were seen as fundamental to innovation and the evolution of prototypes.
Structures, processes and agreements: As prototypes progress, teams increasingly establish ways of operating to support the process and their team coherence.
Insight and understanding: Gaining specific insights around the prototype, issue or system through the u-lab 2x practices was often a leverage point for moving initiatives forward.
Generating data as a community in real-time and then collectively making sense of our own data surfaces another enabling condition: collective experience. When asked what felt relevant or important about the data, responses in the chat reflected the role that collective experience—and awareness of collective experience—played in supporting the u-lab 2x process. Three themes surfaced:
Reassurance
Inspiration
Seeing the whole and one’s place in it
So the fifth enabling condition is connection to, and resonance with, a larger whole beyond the prototype team.
If you would like to review the full set of responses to the open questions you can find them at these links:
Please share your observations, reflections and questions that emerged for you in the discussion thread below.
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