What I love about this photo is that it really captures the essence of from the four directions.  There are ten people in this photo; they are diverse by age and color and gender.   And actually there are 10 people in this photo and there are 10 nations represented.  Moving from left to right, we have South Africa, Senegal, Cameroon, Gabon, Denmark, Croatia, Columbia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Ukraine.  It is such an amazing variety of cultures.  It truly for me starts to represent the family of humans that we all so much want to share in, and I love the fact that people are joyful in there expression, they are having a good time, the planet is the center of their activity, and the source of joy is one another.

I would like to tell you about From the Four Directions, why we started it, what we think the need is, and what it is about.  From the Four Directions appeared last April at a time when I was experiencing extreme despair and depression over what I was seeing happening to leaders everywhere.  One of my great joys is that I get to travel and speak with people everywhere around the world in all types of organizations, and I started to see the same dilemmas and the same challenges showing up and it did not matter whether it was the cabinet in South Africa dealing with the AIDS pandemic, or a rural village in Mexico trying to create safety in their midst, or a school system in the United States, or a corporation in Denmark - the problems were starting to be the same and some of those problems as I interpret them are the fact that the whole world first of all is speeding up.  We live in a time when time itself is evaporating when there is less and less time to think, there is less and less time to be in relationship.  In some countries this is because of the advances of technology, where we are moving towards the belief that 24-7 having access to an employee every moment of the day is a good thing.  I think it is a crazy idea, but it is certainly one of the values out there now.  In other countries that are not yet so technologically affected it still is the complexity of the problems, the overwhelming simultaneity of many problems facing leaders at once that is depriving them of the time to think.  Now the other thing that we lose when we do not have time is we lose each other, we lose the ability to sit, to think together, to reflect on what is happening, and what we are learning.  So that evaporation of time is a huge problem for us in this culture and it is only speeding up; it is not getting any slower.

The second thing that I saw happening is that more and more leaders are being asked to give up what they know works, and only focus on how to work under very narrow measures of what is efficient - not what is effective - but what is efficient.  Can we make money?  Can we do it faster?  Can we do it with fewer people?  Can we use technology instead of people?  And that kind of drumbeat, that kind of insistence, that leaders only work towards values that are very small and narrow, this is something again that I see happening all over the world.

So I was in a position to notice that the problems facing leaders, some of the major challenges, are global, that it does not depend where you are, it does not depend on how experienced you are.  There is just this great movement across the face of the planet, and it is basically the American management model that has taken hold during this era of globalization.  Now the American management model, which focuses on very numeric measures of efficiency, and speed and growth, those three values, are not sustainable, even for American corporations.  When American corporations only base themselves on speed and growth and very narrow measures of what is profitable or not, they do not succeed.  And we actually have that evidence, but in spite of the evidence, this great management model is rolling across the Earth, and it is depriving leaders of what they know works, what they know works within their culture, within their tradition and within their experience.  So it was in the face of all that, that I realized there was something we could do for leaders and I want to pause here for a moment and stress that our definition of a leader as rather radical.  We define a leader as "anyone who feels called to help at this time."  It may be a mother in a village who wants clean water, it may be a parent in a school system who just needs it to be different, it may be the CEO of a major corporation who no longer wants to work in ways that deprive employees of quality of life, it may be a healthcare worker who just cannot go any faster and knows that he or she is failing to be a healer in that situation.  So it is anyone who wants to help, anyone who is thinking not in terms of greed and self-interest, but in fact is thinking about the rest of us. 

So that is our definition of a leader, and I really began to realize based on my experience with many colleagues is that we had a very simple process available to us.  I had learned from Christina Baldwin and Anne Lynnea that sitting in circle and having conversation is as ancient as our species.  As soon as we had fire, we sat around the fire and we began to tell stories to one another of our day, of our challenges, of our adventures.  We believe that conversation is the natural, normal way that human beings think together, and in the midst of this crazy culture, in the midst of this speedup, in this time when we do not have time to just sit and reflect, we are not only losing good thinking, we are losing this ancient process by which we connect and develop new ideas.  So, our primary methodology in From the Four Directions is to create circles of leaders, all those people who want to help in their local community, where they have time to think together, to reflect on their practice, to support one another, to act more courageously on behalf of those practices and those values that we all know give us greater creativity, illicit greater contribution from people, and just in general, serve the human spirit rather than any small, narrow value.  Now we create these circles in communities everywhere.  This needs to be a global project, because the global problems are in our face.  These are not local problems that we are faced with any longer.  So we set up these conversation circles among leaders in community by community, continent by continent.  That is the first thing that we do.

We have two values that are extremely important to us.  The first is that we depend on diversity.  And by that, we mean that we realize that if we need new solutions, we must have new voices in the conversation.  Wherever I go, I see that people are fractured and fragmented and separated and fearful of one another, and that part of our work at this time is to reweave those broken bonds in all the different societies that are struggling with fragmentation.  So we ask that these circles be as diverse as is possible at the beginning and then work to include more and more new voices.  We want diversity of age, we want diversity of gender, we want diversity of organizational type, we want diversity of personality.  We say we depend on diversity, because we know without diversity, and without mending these broken bonds, that we cannot create a future that has any hope in it.  We cannot continue to be fragmented, and scape-goating and engage in these very divisive approaches to organizing right now.  So that is our first value.

The second value is just as important.  We rely on human goodness.  Now, that is a strong statement to make at this time, because we are confronted daily by human badness.  But if you think about the people that you know, if you think about who you are, you have a way of tuning in to what the Dalai Lama calls the "infinite altruism" that is characteristic of being human.  Most humans do not want to live alone, they want to be together, we have wanted to be together ever since we started walking on two legs, maybe before.  Most humans want to work for things beyond themselves.  Most humans want to make a difference with their life and most humans are most motivated by something that is meaningful and not meaningful in terms of self-gain, narrow self-interest, but meaningful in terms of us, of the others who are in our lives.  So we rely on that goodness and we are working to illicit it, because if we cannot rely on human goodness and we can only rely on human badness, then again there is no hope for the future.

So from the four directions convenes these circles in communities everywhere around the planet, and we use the very simple process of conversation; we teach a very elemental way to hold very good conversation.  So we do not get into frequent, bad behaviors and we do not exclude people in the conversation, but we treat one another as equals.  That is the first step of From the Four Directions, setting up we hope thousands of circles around the globe.

The second step of From the Four Directions is to create a global voice for those values and practices that are life-affirming rather then life-destroying.  And there is a theory of social change here and the theory of how change happens has been taught to us by other living systems.  It is how change happens in nature and in all forms of life, even in human life.  So I am going to illustrate that now . . .

What I am about to describe here is the way that life changes, and this is something that I have been studying for many years.  This is the first time that I have tried to apply it to a global change effort, but it is very well rooted in science.  The way that change happens in life is not from the top down, it is not from somebody writing out a strategic plan, developing the architecture, and then being the boss and delivering it.  Life does not use bosses.  Life uses a process called self-organization, which one way to think about this is that life organizes from the inside out; it organizes from lots of local actions that when they become connected to one another, great changes are possible. 

So this is what it looks like visually. . .

You have one group that decides to do something differently.  Again it could be a school, it could be a local municipality, it could be a part inside a corporation.

And then another group starts.  They do not know about each other.  And then another group starts, and still nobody knows that there are any other companions for them in the world.  And then another group and then another group and then another group . . .and when change is possible, is when these groups learn about each other.  So once you connect these local groups to each other, you have the possibility for very big change. 

The first thing that happens is that each of these local groups gains strength from knowing that they are not alone, that there are others out there who are doing similar work and who are feeling similar things.  But the other thing that happens is that once they connect is when we get into something that in science looks like this. . .

You have lots of local activities networked together and suddenly, and that word is important, suddenly they emerge into something very powerful, a global force rather than a collection of local initiatives.  This word "emergence" is very fundamental in the new science, and it has certain characteristics.  When something emerges, it emerges suddenly; it is always a surprise.  You can know that this is going on at the local level, but you did not know that it was suddenly going to emerge.  And it also is much more forceful, more powerful than the sum of these local parts that gave birth to it.  But there is something else that is really important.  When something emerges, it possesses characteristics and properties that are not only bigger than the sum of the parts, but  also different than the sum of the parts.  So this is what gives us hope.  This is also a description of the problem that we are dealing with in From the Four Directions, which is globalism.  Globalism did not  start from some master plan or start as somebody's strategy for how to take over the world.  Instead, it was the decisions of lots of local corporations operating in an international arena where there were no laws or policies to govern their behavior, so they could keep making up how they were going to be in this new global marketplace.   And each of them was making their own decisions.  When they got connected, and some of that was done through the web, the growth of the web, which is also another emergent phenomenon, but when they got connected, new things became possible and quite suddenly globalism appeared in all of its aspects, its positive and now its negative ones which are getting far more press. 

Now there is only one other thing that I want to draw attention to.  Once you get a force that has emerged, you cannot change it by going back and tinkering with the local units that gave birth to it; you cannot fix an emergent property.  I believe the only thing you can do is create a counter-force, something of greater strength than something like globalism.  And the way you create that greater strength, that countervailing force is by going back and starting with local efforts again.  This is the theory behind From the Four Directions.  We create local circles, we connect them to one another, and these local circles are talking about the values and practices of leadership that give us life, rather than destroy life.   And once we connect them up, once you start talking to people on the other side of the globe - you do not even know where their country is located - but once you start talking to them, what is possible then is the emergence of a very powerful global voice on behalf of those values and those practices that will restore hope to the future, and end this very self-destructive path that has emerged in our midst.

I assume that every one of you watching this is a life-affirming leader, but I would like to explain what I mean by that term because it puzzles some people. I describe a life-affirming leader as someone who knows how to bring out the best in us, who knows how to nourish and sustain us for our great human creativity, our great human hearts, our great human desire to do good in the world.  I would like to specify what I think are some of the behaviors of that type of leader, but in general, a life-affirming leader is someone who believes in people, who knows that he or she cannot do it alone, who admits that she or he does not know the answers to all of the problems.  In fact, in this day and age, when problems are increasingly complex, and there simply are not simple answers, and there is no simple cause and effect any longer, I cannot imagine how stressful it is to be the leader and to pretend that you have the answer.  So, what I see in life-affirming leaders is that they are willing to say to people "I do not know the answer, but together we will figure it out."  So, they are also leaders who rely on other people's intelligence.  One of my colleagues once said that 'the rule for organizational intelligence is very simple, it's one brain per person.'  And a life-affirming leader is one who knows how to rely on and use the intelligence that exists everywhere in the community, or the school or the organization.  And so these leaders act as hosts, as stewards of other people's creativity and other people's intelligence.  And when I say host, I mean a leader these days needs to be one who convenes people, who convenes diversity, who convenes all viewpoints in processes where our intelligence can come forth.  So these kind of leaders do not give us the answers, but they help gather us together so that together we can discover the answers.  They of course are leaders who know the value of diversity, and they are leaders who actually do know that what motivates all human beings, are things that are far more noble than greed and self-interest.  What motivates most human beings is the desire to help, the desire to learn, the desire to make a contribution, and desire to be able to find something meaningful to which you can contribute your own enthusiasm, commitment and intelligence.

The other aspect of a life-affirming leader besides this wonderful trust in us, is that often these days I find that a leader needs to be someone who has more faith in us than we do in ourselves, because we have been pretty battered around in all of our communities and organizations these days.  We have been told that we do not have any value, we have been fired, we have been made redundant, we have been excluded from decision making, we have been told  'We will tell you what to do,' and now an awful lot of people that I meet everywhere around the planet have just given up on themselves.  They have just become cynical about leadership, and they have also lost faith with their own capacity.  So I see a really important need for a leader these days to affirm for people their value and their worth and to have more faith in people than they do in themselves and to hold open opportunities for those people to contribute to the organization, so that they will rediscover their creativity and those things that they car passionately about.

We have a great need for life-affirming leaders right now.  We cannot continue to lead using these narrow and very foolish measures of what is efficient.  Fewer people rather than greater ideas.  More numbers, more growth, rather than developing sustainability.  We just cannot continue in that way, and so your leadership is really necessary right now.  And a way to help you lend some of your experience to the qualities of a life-affirming leader that I have just described, I would like you to think about times when you worked for such a person, a person who brought out the best in you, who had faith in you, that you trusted.  Someone that showed you that you were better than you thought you were.  Someone that came to rely on your judgement and intelligence.  Now think about that person, and honor them with talking about who they were and what they really contributed to you.

And the other question that I would ask you is about yourself.  Where have been in your experience as a leader, where have been the times when you had to rely on people?  I mean sometimes these were not choices.  It may have been a crisis.  It may have been the fact that you were so confused that you did not know what to do and so you turned to the people in the organization.  But think about a time when you had to rely on other people, and what you got as a response, because if you think about those experiences together, you will realize that you already know how to be a life-affirming leader.  This is a strange sounding word, but it is not a concept that is far into your experience, and as you talk together you will be able to encourage one another to stand up for those practices and those values that nourish other people's creativity, that create commitment, that lead to good trusting relationships, and that in general just bring more life into our communities and organizations rather than destroying life.  You already know how to do this and I hope you will reflect together on the times when you learned how to be a life affirming leader

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