Regrounding in Earth Wisdom
“How has all your traveling affected you?” Vanda asked in our coaching meeting this Monday afternoon. She was aware of how extensively I’ve been moving around this year, just back from Asia, in Europe much of the Fall, and now heading to the East coast.
The question stopped me a bit. It must be affecting me, I thought, but do I know how? I’ve come to trust the first things that arise when asked a question, and to simply let the answer come rather than trying to force it or “craft” it. Immediately I thought about how aware I’ve become of the dense, evolving network of globalized organizations and processes that carry me here and there—how interconnected Singapore and Hong Kong and San Francisco and Copenhagen and yes even Moscow have become for me.
As these urban ganglia are communicating and trading and aware of each other, increasingly The Grove is helping people communicate across boundaries using visual language and universal facilitation practices.
Since late 2004 The Grove has been supporting an ambitious RE-AMP project in the upper Midwest to clean up the energy system there. Its goal is to reduce global warming pollutants 80% by 2030 from a 1990 benchmark. When we started there were six foundations and 27 NGOs who wanted to approach the problem with systems thinking and collaboration, funded by the Garfield Foundation. Now in 2008 the project has 15 foundations and over 93 members organizations, expanded beyond environmental groups to faith and youth groups, and 140 were going to Ames, Iowa for the annual meeting.
I have a little distance on the amazing gathering that I facilitated recently with Gary Hamel and his MLab team called “Invent the Future of Management.” McKinsey, the strategy consulting firm, co-sponsored the event along with the London Business School, and MLab, Gary’s new non-profit venture focused on catalyzing collaboration and contribution to the field which has been his life— leadership and management of organizations, businesses in particular.