Executive Champions' Workshop

"We have come together to touch the web of learning. To move beyond the illusion we are separate... we are all connected and part of something larger."
- Peter Senge

Dates: August 17-20, 2010

Location: Trapp Family Lodge - Stowe, Vermont USA.

Hosted by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Sherry Immediato, Arawana Hayashi, and other SoL colleagues

For more information about the Executive Champions' Workshop please contact Frank Schneider at +1-617-300-9535.

Keep me informed about upcoming SoL workshops

The Executive Champions' Workshop is a special setting for nurturing new thinking and relationships among executive leaders in today's rapidly changing economic and social landscape. Through a series of strategic dialogues on issues of most concern to participants, our intent is to tap the wisdom that resides, often below the surface, in our collective experience. The format is designed to build capacity for conducting conversations that matter with potentially large numbers of people while applying organizational learning tools that foster reflection, systems thinking and strategic conversation.

Offered by invitation for executives who are champions of change, the ECW is a unique opportunity to reflect, refocus, and recharge, preciously rare activities in today's frenetic business world. The workshop is organized around in-depth strategic dialogues on a small number of key issues, and is a unique opportunity for deep conversation among like-minded executives focused on strategic issues that are shaping the future of institutions worldwide. Sessions utilize specific methods like "knowledge cafes", and "embodied presence" practices, that maximize the quality of attention and conversation among participants. This approach allows small groups to penetrate deeply into key issues, along with the cross-pollination of ideas.

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. Participants come from diverse organizations around the world, where they are in the top 2-3 levels of management responsibility. Indeed, more than anything, it is the diversity of the participants and their common commitment to foster fundamental management innovations that makes the ECW a powerful experience.

In addition to this annual event, sessions are also held periodically in Europe, Asia and South America. For more information, to register, or to request an invitation for a colleague, Frank Schneider at +1-617-300-9535.

The "meeting room" for the Executive Champions' Workshop.

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Facilitator Bios

Peter Senge is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Founding Chair of SoL, the Society for Organizational Learning. He is the author of the widely acclaimed book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), which has sold a million copies worldwide and was identified as one of the seminal management books of the last seventy-five years by Harvard Business Review in 1997. He has recently co-authored The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. He is coauthor of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (1994), with colleagues Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith, and Art Kleiner; a second fieldbook on sustaining change, The Dance of Change (1999), with George Roth as an additional coauthor; and the award-winning Schools That Learn (2000), coauthored with Nelda Cambron-McCabe, Timothy Lucas, Bryan Smith, Janis Dutton, and Art Kleiner.

Read Peter Senge's article on Systems Citizenship: The Leadership Mandate for this Millenium, published in Reflections: The SoL Journal. While this article refers to systems change in the context of sustainability, the leadership requirements are easily transferrable to (large) systems change in other areas.

Dr. C. Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founding chair of ELIAS (Emerging Leaders for Innovation Across Sectors), an initiative focused on developing profound system innovations for a more sustainable world. ELIAS links twenty leading global institutions across the three sectors of business, government, and civil society. He also is a visiting professor at the Center for Innovation and Knowledge Research, Helsinki School of Economics, and the founding chair of the Presencing Institute, a research initiative on developing and advancing social technologies for leading innovation and change. Scharmer has consulted with global companies, international institutions, and cross-sector change initiatives in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He has co-designed and delivered award-winning leadership programs for client organizations including DaimlerChrysler, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Fujitsu.

Scharmer holds a Ph.D. in economics and management from Witten-Herdecke University, Germany. His article "Strategic Leadership within the Triad Growth-Employment-Ecology" won the McKinsey Research Award in 1991. A synthesis of his most recent research has resulted in a theoretical framework and practice called presencing, which he elaborates in Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges, 2007) and in Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society (2005), co-authored with Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. With his colleagues, Scharmer has used presencing to facilitate profound innovation and change processes both within companies and across societal systems. He lives with his wife and their two children in Boston, Massachusetts. More information about Scharmer and his work can be found at: www.ottoscharmer.com.

Read Otto Scharmer's Executive Summary of Theory U: Leading From The Future As It Emerges, published by Berrett-Koheler. Using his experience working with some of the world's most accomplished leaders and innovators, Otto Scharmer shows in Theory U how groups and organizations can develop seven leadership capacities in order to create a future that would not otherwise be possible.

Sherry Immediato is President and Managing Director of founding SoL, the Society for Organizational Learning. She was a founding member of SoL in 1997 and served as co-chair of the Council of Trustees with Peter Senge, prior to assuming the role of Managing Director in 2001.

She is also Treasurer and former Chair of the Board of the Northeast Foundation for Children, originators of the "responsive classroom" and a member of the board of Seeing Things Whole. She was a member of the Consortium on Productivity in the Schools, sponsored by Columbia University Teachers College and co-author of Using what we have to get the schools we need: A productivity focus for American education. She is the co-author of Creating Integrated Care and Healthier Communities, a computer simulation and learning experience for health care leaders sponsored by the New England Healthcare Assembly, Innovation Associates and the American Hospital Association. She has been a lead faculty member many public health leadership institutes. She is a contributor to the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: The Dance of Change.

Sherry holds graduate degrees in Business Administration and Public Policy/Government from Harvard University. She is dedicated to building learning communities that increase our collective intelligence and wisdom to realize our highest aspirations.

Arawana Hayashi is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, with roots in Asian and Western arts. She began her dance training in classical ballet, culminating in studies with Nina Fonaroff in New York, and later trained in modern dance at the Merce Cunningham Studio. Throughout her career she has been involved in interdisciplinary, ensemble improvisation. Arawana was on the faculty of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School and the Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado.