LCI Session by Session Descriptions

Session 1: Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together

Session 1 serves as an introduction to the power of “thinking together,” collective leadership, and the nature of systemic change. It focuses on the individual, acknowledging that genuine transformation always begins there. Participants cultivate a deep quality of personal presence that enables them to hold their ‘center’ as the stakes of situations may rise. Specific principles and practices are explored with the intent of increasing participants' capacity to lead. Participants learn about the creative cycle of profound change, and how it applies to their own life experience.

• The Inner Spiral and personal foundations for leadership
  
• Systemic change: working on yourself and “working on the work”
  
• Introduction to methods and tools for inquiry, reflection, and dialogue
  
• Engaging the Leadership Journey by exploring your “life's inquiry” and life's purpose
  
• Initiating Action Projects that link learning with concrete results in organizational contexts
  

Session 2: Systems Thinking and System Design

Session 2 emphasizes the dynamic power of living systems to enable or impede creative action. Its focus is both on the interpersonal nature of systems and the policy or structural aspects of systems. Participants learn how to perceive systemic structures in high and low stakes settings, in themselves and in others. This session places emphasis on the ways system structures create unintended results, and teaches a logical means of untangling complexity and allowing clear design to emerge.

• Interpersonal system structures: Boundary Profile
  
• Setting a personal container for learning and change
  
• Deepening the capacity to reflect on-line through Action Inquiry Skills
  
• System Design: Untangling complex systems
  
• Systems Thinking: mapping structures in a system

Session 3: Leadership and Group Intelligence: Facilitation Skills

In Session 3, Leadership is explored in more depth, expanding on the individual and interpersonal building blocks put in place during the initial sessions. Participants explore the “voices” and “shadows” of their leadership. Participants also build the capacity to access group intelligence through dialogic facilitation. They develop specific face-to-face skills, including the ability to create group-level containers for change, to work with dissonance that arises, and to actively engage with group dynamics. Participants explore the tacit rules that govern knowledge creation and change in groups.

• Engaging the Leadership Journey
  
• Group-level containers
  
• Shadows of Leadership and Groups
  
• Accessing Group Intelligence through dialogic facilitation
• Developing “in-the-moment” reflection Skills
  

Session 4: Collective Leadership and the Architecture of Large Systems Change

In Session 4, participants begin to address ways of designing interventions at the organizational level. The centerpiece of this session is the application of the “Spiral Model” to the design and architecture of large systems change. Participants learn how to assess readiness for change and to understand the kind of system that they are functioning within. They learn how to enter different systems differently, how to structure an initial inquiry, how to elicit the deeper dream of the people concerned, and how to set containers for change. The group acquires tools for confronting the inevitable “backlash” that transformations encounter, identifying high-leverage cultural “hot points,” and bringing key groups together. Participants reflect on their action projects and give each other feedback.

• Understanding the way complex systems react to change efforts
  
• Identifying organizational paradigms and the readiness for transformation
  
• Practicing intervention in living systems
  
• Spiral Model and design of large systems change: transformation of microcultures
• Setting and holding containers for large-scale change
  

Session 5: Identity and Building Models for Practice

In Session 5 participants begin to cultivate their personal approach to bringing about change at multiple levels by developing their own theories of practice and theories of change. Participants focus in this session on the principles for sustaining change based on the transformations of identity, individual and collective. They learn skills for bridging between disparate world-views and the art of “cross-model” conversation. They begin to consider the broader implications of dialogic change in terms of governance, sustainability, and the new century.

• Learning a Method for Model Building
  
• Cross-Model Conversation
  
• Individual and Collective Identity and the Transformation of Memory
  
• Broadening the Inquiry
• Collective Leadership as a Field Phenomenon