u.lab: Leading From the Emerging Future

We live in a time of disruptive change. How to activate our capacity to lean into the emerging future may well be the most important leadership challenge of our time. How do you cultivate curiosity, compassion and courage in the face of prejudice, anger and fear?

This course is an introduction to a method called Theory U, developed at MIT, for leading such change in business, government, and civil society contexts worldwide. u.lab will guide you in applying Theory U to an issue that matters to you. You will do so with fellow change makers locally and around the world. Join us as we co-pioneer new approaches to today’s most important social and environmental challenges.

• The leadership knowledge that matters most: self-knowledge
• Capacities of deep listening, precise observation, and dialogue
• Practices for creating institutional innovations that generate wellbeing in society

The Orientation Modules will be made available on September 12th. All other Modules will be made available September 19th. While you can complete the course at your own pace, the instructors will facilitate Live Sessions on a monthly basis -- as indicated below.

Orientation Modules:

Introduction to u.lab. How to use and navigate the social and community elements of the course.

Module 1: Co-Initiating

Introduction to the deeper sources of our current global challenges. The art and practice of deep listening. Forming a core team for your U journey. There will be a Live Session on September 19th that corresponds to Module 1.

Module 2: Co-Sensing

Gathering data by suspending and listening. Go on learning journeys and conduct stakeholder interviews. Make sense of the data you generate using Social Presencing Theater.

Module 3: Presencing

Retreat and reflect. How to allow deeper sources of knowledge to emerge; connecting with a future possibility that’s in need of us to bring it into reality. There will be a Live Session on October 17th that corresponds to Module 3.

Module 4: Co-Creating

Staying connected to your deeper sources of inspiration. Paying attention in a way that will enable you to move from idea to action. Learning by doing. Engage in prototyping activities that generate feedback that will help you evolve your inspiration / idea. Principles to support the evolution from an idea, to prototype, to an initiative with the potential to scale.

Module 5: Co-Evolving

We all know about many episodes and stories of great transformational change and breakthrough. But at the end of the day they remain merely that: episodes. Sooner or later the larger system snaps back into the old way of operating. Unless the deeper root issues are addressed, transformational episodes may lack the conditions to spread across the remaining system. How to attend to these root issues while prototyping is the question we will explore in this Module. There will be a Live Session on November 14th that corresponds to Module 5.

Module 6: The Journey Ahead

What is emerging globally from u.lab 1x, and what is needed to carry momentum forward? The next steps in the u.lab journey. There will be a final Live Session on December 12th that corresponds to Module 6.