We invite you to join us on Friday, February 28th at 9:30 am Pacific, 12:30pm Eastern, 6:30pm CET) for this month’s Real World Co-Intelligence (RWCI) interactive learning call. 

As we mentioned in our recent bulletin, our featured guest will be Scott Spann. We’ll be exploring how his work with organizations, communities, and networks supports participants to “become more fully human” while “solving for the impossible” and evolving into greater wholeness together. Earlier, we wrote about how Scott's career as a Rolfer and trauma psychotherapist (as well as his time in nature as a cowboy, hunter and sailor) evolved into decades of consulting work with leaders in business, government and the environment. Working with the lenses of trauma and human development, Scott seeks to address the whole of a situation, while nurturing individual, team, and organizational blossoming. His inquiries have led him to numerous learning experiences related to wholeness, complexity and systems thinking, and evolved into the methods he practices today.  

Here’s a bit more about how he works:

Scott Spann starts by engaging a representative set of “360 degree stakeholders” in individually mapping the system dynamics that each of them sees from their unique perspective. He then invites allied subgroups of stakeholders to explore their integrated maps together through the lens of their aligned purposes. As they do so, they practice making sense of their interconnections and their larger shared reality.  Finally, the whole 360 degree network works together to integrate all of their system maps into a shared whole.  As participants begin to see the larger picture of their shared challenge, an awakening emerges of what this all adds up to - what is “trying to happen” here that is healthy and desirable for all.  Then, via a rigorous collective analysis, Scott helps participants distill their understanding into a much more concise map of key leverage points for actualizing the changes they want to see. Soon participants are working together with energy and enthusiasm to make those changes happen.

At the same time, participants realize that what they’ve achieved so far is not so much an arrival as a stepping stone. They know that the complex whole they’ve come to know together will continue to evolve, and that they, too, will continue to evolve.  Now that they know and value each other and are becoming adept at systems thinking, they are also becoming individuals and teams who can see and dance with the Big Picture. They are doing so in ways that contribute to the larger systems they’re part of, while also bringing out more of the fullness of their humanity.  In the language of co-intelligence, they are “learning to appreciate, evoke and engage the wisdom and resourcefulness of both each individual and of the whole, on behalf of the whole.”

Among many examples of Scott’s work, we find a project he did in Guatemala particularly intriguing. His 360 degree stakeholders there included former guerrilla leaders and the government’s military, Catholic priests and Mayan philosophers and shamans, and the President’s commission on local economic development along with the leaders of local villages. This highly diverse group journeyed through the process we have just described here, as a way to begin working together.

You can hear more about this, and the relevance of this approach to today’s context, on Feb 28th.