Congregational leaders and pastors partner with Contemplative Interbeing on a journey to re-vision how community grows spiritually toward peace, service, and justice.

Given who we have become, one of the imperative needs of our time is a re-visioning of spiritual community. We deliberately hyphenate the word “re-vision” in order to distinguish what we mean from a common meaning of “revision” (without a hyphen). We often use the latter word to describe the improvement of something that has been poorly done – for example, a manuscript or a term paper. But that is not what we mean.

Rather, to re-vision means “to see again.” The emphasis upon “seeing again” also reminds us that the older form of spiritual community is not “traditional community.” What is needed in our time is a way of seeing the Wisdom literature that takes seriously the importance and legitimate ways in which we differ from our ancestors.

The way of seeing and reading the Wisdom literature leads to a way of being in spiritual community that has very little to do with believing. Instead, what will emerge is a relational and sacramental understanding of the spiritual life. “Re-vision” is about a deepening relationship with the Divine (Spirit) that the Wisdom literature points, lived within a tradition as a sacrament of the sacred.

Shared Learning and your source for:

  • Executive Coaching
  • Leadership Development Training
  • Organizational Change Consulting
  • Resiliency Development for Individuals, Leaders and Organizations
  • Large-Scale Change Initiatives
  • Strategic Leadership Workshops
  • Keynote Presentations

People only support what they help create.

Creating life-giving, leaderful,and sustainable organizations and communities.

Facilitating the conversations that matter.

Services

We work with small, mid, and large size organizations.
Our projects consistently focus on building robust, sustainable leadership strategies and abilities. These initiatives can take one of several forms:

  • Executive coaching – working one-on-one with an executive to maximize leadership abilities in the context of his or her specific position and responsibilities
  • Leadership development – working with the leaders of an organization as a group to promote more effective personal performance as well as stronger teamwork and better execution of the organization’s strategy
  • System-wide initiatives – large scale transformation or alignment programs involving as many members of the organization as possible

Of course some of our projects combine activities in more than one of these areas. But a central theme of all of our work is helping our clients to create a “leaderful environment,” that is, one where every individual cultivates and applies leadership skills in his or her area of responsibility.

Executive Coaching
We apply a variety of proven models to help individual leaders assess their current abilities and improve performance. Our coaching work includes:

  • Developing the process for starting, sourcing and implementing executive coaching
  • Coaching senior executives and high-potential leaders to clarify and reach their goals in areas of learning, legacy and leadership
  • Developmental leadership coaching, and other research-based models

Leadership Development
Leadership is never an independent activity. Leadership is collaborative, adaptive and situational. We work with teams of leaders to build the cooperation, trust, coordination and learning necessary to achieve pressing organizational goals. Representative projects include:

  • Alignment of diverse parties and channels towards a shared direction, improved communication and collaborative action
  • Development of shared organizational identity, guiding principles and/or values
  • Integrating divergent cultures
  • Building leadership capabilities at all levels; assessing, developing and monitoring leadership skills and competencies for leaders
  • Coaching teams of leaders towards higher degrees of collaboration, generative thinking and coordinated action
  • Facilitating team learning, collaboration and conflict management
  • Designing and leading executive and strategic leadership retreats
  • Workshop design, material development and facilitation of experiential learning in areas including:
  • Shared leadership and leadership in an ever changing world
  • Self-organizing systems theory and practice
  • Learning organization principles and practice

System-wide Initiatives
We often work with organizations to introduce or implement a desired transformation or alignment program. Such projects may include:

  • Design, implementation and monitoring of large scale organizational transformation efforts
  • Facilitating rapid, large scale change initiatives such as Open Space and FutureSearch events

Approach

Several basic principles guide our work.

People support what they help to create. For centuries, the dominant management technique has been based on a top-down hierarchy where decisions made by a small number of leaders are imposed upon the rest of the organization. The serious flaw with this approach is the fundamental resistance of people to support and sustain something they’ve had no role in creating.

By contrast, we see again and again that when people from across the organization are involved in creating the solution, the solution is not only smarter, it is supported, fostered, and more likely to last. Participation and buy-in are central to all of our work – and not as vague platitudes. Every initiative we undertake will involve as much of the client organization as possible, from beginning to end. The results are dramatic – superior outcomes, supported by the people responsible for making them work.

Leadership liberates. Thriving living systems seek both order and chaos. It seems like a contradiction, but it’s not. The term “chaordic” describes the tendency for top performing organizations (from schools of fish to corporate task forces) to both work cohesively for a common goal and sometimes abandon the rules to explore new possibilities.
Most corporate and governmental organizations are perfectly built for control, and entirely unsuited for chaos. Likewise, conventional leadership is all about control, creating goals to meet and rigid boundaries within which to stay. Conventional leadership assumes that every action will generate the desired result; that change can occur in a straight, predictable line. There’s no room for chaos in this model.

We believe chaos is just as important as control. We believe the shortest path to change is a winding road of learning. We believe the role of leaders, therefore, is not to create boundaries that control, but environments that liberate. People and organizations that are free to look beyond the conventional wisdom produce greater results than those that are restrained. When we work to build leadership – whether in one executive or across an entire organization – we strive to capitalize on both order and chaos.

Change starts with thinking. Einstein tells us: “A problem can not be solved through the same thinking that created it.” It is a change in how we think that unleashes the potential for change. Collective, generative thinking is the art and practice that fosters conditions for the generation of new thinking. This technique is central to all we do, helping organizations find answers not purely by seeking new information, but in unlocking new ways to look at information already available.