Dancing at the Edge — Second Edition
Book review by Daniel C. Wahl
We are faced with converging crises that are forming a hyper wicked problem which has us at the brink of cataclysmic climate change, in the middle of a planetary extinction crises, with a degenerative economy driving obscene levels of inequalities, and political leaders and oligarchs that bring up images of Nero fiddling while Rome is burning.
Humanity is now clearly at the ‘edge of chaos’ — a place of danger and potential, where we are given the chance to grow up and unfold our highest potential and creativity to unleash a transformative response. I have been blessed to be nourished by the wisdom circle that is the International Futures Forum for over a decade now.
This 2nd edition of the insightful classic ‘Dancing at the Edge’ could not be released at a more timely moment. Read it, reflect on each chapter, start conversations about it with your neighbour, in your community or at work. It will be from such conversations and the actions that follow that we will prove C.G. Jung right: “we don’t solve our problems, we outgrow them.”
Humanity is now invited to step into mature membership of the community of life. Maureen and Graham have created a wonderful provocation that might help us to dance our way out of this mess and actively choose a regenerative future for all.
“In his 1969 essay, The World of Tomorrow and the Person of Tomorrow, the psychologist Carl Rogers looked ahead to the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world we inhabit today. He suggested that living in such a world would require a whole new set of competencies — demonstrated already by the ‘persons of tomorrow’ he saw around him even then.
In Dancing at the Edge, Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester pick up the thread fifty years on. Drawing on extensive research and their own wide experience, they map the ‘powerful times’ in which we live, the 21st-century competencies required to thrive in this complexity and how to discover and develop them in practice.
They identify:
• Three emergencies: real, conceptual and existential
• Three potential responses: denial, collapse and transformation
• Three literacies: psychological, cultural and epistemic …” — Book Summary by Triarchy Press
More about the book and the authors here.
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Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
