Who will be there?

The Forum is designed for practitioners, leaders, consultants, researchers, and others for whom innovation is a critical component of organizational or community life. Approximately 400 participants representing a broad range of disciplines and over 30 countries are likely to attend. Each participant will be both a teacher and a learner, as we share the current issues facing us and our organizations. We will be joined by many SoL members and friends who are engaged in cutting-edge research and practice in their own work.

Confirmed thought leaders include:

Peter Senge
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 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. He is also coauthor of Presence, Human Purpose and the Field of the Future (2004), with colleagues C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. Peter is widely known as one of the most innovative thinkers about management and leadership in the world, translating the abstract ideas of systems theory into tools for better understanding economic and organizational change. His work today focuses on fostering collaboration among diverse business, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations in order to address long-term systemic change that is beyond the reach of individual organizations. He received a B.S. in engineering from Stanford University, a M.S. in social systems modeling, and a Ph.D. in management from MIT. He lives with his wife and children in central Massachusetts.

Arie de Geus
A "global statesman" of business change, Arie de Geus is widely recognised as the originator of many of the principles and practises underlying the "Learning Organisation" concept, and is one of the world's most effective business strategists. A master storyteller, he uses business parables to give audiences messages that stay with them long after the event. His extraordinary experience and his strategic thinking and research have given him a depth of content that matches his style, and has made him one of the most sought–after speakers in the world. Arie de Geus is president of SoL–UK, a retired Group Planning Coordinator for Royal Dutch Shell Group, and author ofThe Living Company

Adam Lomas
Adam Lomas is Director of Global Learning & Development for Shell Exploration & Production. His career to date with Shell International spans much of the Petroleum Engineering business starting as a Wellsite Petroleum Engineer in the North Sea, in 1975. He worked in the Middle East (Qatar) as a Petrophysicist and later to West Africa (Nigeria). Returning to Holland as a lecturer at the Shell Learning Centre in Noordwijkerhout and later Head of Technology Development in Shell's Central offices. In 1991 Adam was posted to the Far East (Brunei) as Head of Economics & Planning. In 1994 he moved to the Middle East again, this time to the Sultanate of Oman as Asset Manager for Southern Oman, Technology Manager and finally Corporate Affairs Director. In 1999 Adam returned to Holland where he was Portfolio Manager for Shell's Subsurface Software portfolio in the Research & Development organisation. He then implemented a new organisation to foster Technical & Operational Excellence in Shell. He took over his current role in August 2003, where he facilitates the Learning Network in Shell E&P, and is accountable for the implementation, quality and successful business application of Shell's E&P Learning & Leadership Development products, to existing and future partner's full satisfaction. Through a network of learning hubs, Shell provides learning and leadership development for Shell's technical professionals throughout the world. Adam is married and has two children, one at Durham University and the other at secondary school in the UK.

Alain de Vulpian
Alain de Vulpian is a social–anthropologist who has focused his field research for more than 50 years on the process of civilization in the western world. After graduating from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris he conducted ethnological research in Sweden and was recognized as a pioneer of social change. In 1954 he launched Cofremca, a research and consulting team designed to help companies and governments invent their future and cope with social change. In 1978 he cofounded the International Research Institute on Social Change (Risc) which he served as President until 1988. He is now Chairman of the Board of Sociovision, the organization which internationalized the work of Cofremca. He has been a member of the Global Business Network since its creation in 1984. In 2004 de Vulpian published "A l'écoute des gens ordinaires – Comment ils transforment le monde" (Listening to ordinary people – How they transform the world). In this book he observes how contemporary civilization is primarily shaped by the transformation of ordinary people as they interact with rapid technological innovation, and how the extreme complexity generated by the process of civilization at all levels of society presents huge governance challenges. Alain is now devoting much of his time to nonprofit activities contributing to the stimulation of adaptive governance.

Anne Murray Allen
Anne Murray Allen is currently HP's director for Knowledge and Intranet Management. She has been with HP for over 16 years and has been in roles and positions that include organization development, manufacturing management, worldwide IT manager, strategic planning manager, and implementation of strategic change initiatives across the corporation.

Juanita Brown
Juanita, with her partner, David Isaacs, is a co-originator of the World Café. She collaborates as a thinking partner and design advisor on key change initiatives with senior leaders across sectors, creating and hosting innovative forums for strategic dialogue on critical organizational and societal issues. Juanita’s keynotes and seminars have attracted a broad range of leaders, including members of Fortune 100 companies along with government, health, education and community based organizations in the U.S., Latin America, Europe and the Pacific Rim. As a Senior Affiliate with the MIT Sloan School’s Organizational Learning Center (now the Society for Organizational Learning), Juanita participated as a member of the core research team with the MIT Dialogue Project and as co-faculty with Peter Senge for SOL’s Executive Champions’ Program. She has served as a Research Affiliate with the Institute for the Future and is a Fellow of the World Business Academy. Her new book, The World Cafe: Shaping our Futures Though Conversations that Matter co-authored with David Isaacs and the World Cafe Community is now available from Berrett Koehler publishers, Amazon.com, and other leading booksellers.

David Snowden
Dave Snowden has been one of the leading figures in the movement towards integration of humanistic approaches to knowledge management with appropriate technology and process design. Well known for his work on the role of narrative and sense making, he is an entertaining speaker and a formidable realist, and one of the few thought leaders who can bring together the academic and practitioner perspectives into a single, comprehensible purview. He is Director of the Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity, an IBM spin–off which focuses on the development of the theory and practice of social complexity. The Cynefin framework which lies at the heart of the Centre's approach has been recognized by several commentators as one of the first practical application of complexity theory to management science and builds on earlier pioneering work in Knowledge Management. A native of Wales, Mr. Snowden was formerly a Director in the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management where he led programmes on complexity and narrative. He has an MBA from Middlesex University and a BA in Philosophy from Lancaster University.He teaches on various university programmes throughout the world. He regularly consults at the board level with some of the world's largest companies as well as to Government and NGOs and was recently appointed as an advisor on sense making to the Singaporean Ministry of Defence.