Meet five teams moving from prototypes to ecosystem impact
These u.lab 2x teams are off to a running start
The u.lab 2x annual cycle is underway! Together, Presencing Institute and network of global changemakers are designing and building a global eco-system for profound societal and civilizational transformation via the Societal Transformation Lab.
If you are new to this work, we invite you to GAIA, an impromptu global infrastructure for sensemaking, leaning into our current moment of disruption and letting this moment move us toward civilizational renewal. In September 2020, we invite you to join u.lab 1x, a massive open online course (MOOC) that will run from September to December 2020 and takes participants on a journey from sensing and connecting to deeper sources of knowing to generate powerful prototype ideas.
Team Chances to Change
Antwerp, Flanders
Team “Chances to Change | Awareness Marathon” uses a board game as a channel for a consciousness that is all-encompassing and all-inclusive; it is a bridge between all that exists and all that is waiting to emerge. The board game is based on Theory U and helps people open their minds, heart, and will in a playful way. During the game, participants practice listening to each other, deepening their awareness, and sharing what is important during this time. Join their Thursday game circles via LinkedIn or on Facebook. During the marathon on Thursdays, the team plays a creative and condensed version of the game that is geared specifically toward larger groups or people not familiar with the board game.
Team University of Wageningen
Wageningen, Netherlands
‘It feels like spring!’ On a rainy day in Wageningen, that’s the sensation that remained after an intensive morning of working together with over 20 teachers, educators and students from Wageningen University and outside.
During this introductory session of the U.lab 2x project ‘Building Vertical Literacy in Higher Education,’ Team Wageningen explored how to work towards integrating head, heart, and hands in higher education. Through reflective journaling, mini-coaching circles, mindfulness, and scribing, they connected to their deeper intentions and wishes and explored what future wants to emerge. Some seeds of that future included: connection, empathy, intuition, slowing down and beauty. In the rest of the U.lab journey, they will explore how we can nurture these seeds into seedlings.
One member shared, “I do not know exactly what we are doing here but I know it feels right!” Read more about their work here.
Team Transforming Philippine Legal Education
Manila, Philippines
The Philippine law curriculum has remained largely unchanged for almost a century. This team aims to reimagine the law curriculum to make it responsive to the current needs of the Filipino nation, and in so doing, create a new generation of lawyers who will be committed leaders, agents of social justice, and catalysts of societal transformation.
Team World HappinessXChange
Vienna, Austria — and the world
Combining her substantial experience and professional career in management systems with her passion for happiness,
initiated the HappyXChange prototype in Vienna together with Happiness Coach Nigel Stonham. At the occasion of International Day of Happiness, a connection was quickly made with Luis Gallardo, founder of World Happiness Fest. With a shared vision and higher purpose of realising a world with freedom, consciousness, and happiness for all, they joined forces.“We are thrilled to be part of u.lab 2x prototyping; we live in a beta world and moving quickly from observation to sensing, and from embodiment to action is fundamental to generate profound change and transformation.”
The growing team dedicates themselves to bringing together present-day leaders working on fostering happiness in and through social systems. This means co-creating a knowledge hub and a sustainable platform for exchange and mutual support of professionals, offering open space as well as organized subgroups in different languages. In short, the right balance between structure and self-organisation opportunities. Goal? To bring happiness through their outer work in every layer of society.
If this resonates, you are invited to join, connect with the community and help our joint vision of a world with freedom, consciousness, and happiness for all come into being.
Team Cambia Festival
São Paulo, Brazil
The Cambia Festival is an open source festival for societal transformation to boost the transition to a sustainable future.
, a core member of the team, shared an inspiring story about a creative approach to building the skills we need to deal with our complex and changing world.Monica: “Late last year I met Camilla Cardoso, co-founder of a web series investigating emerging narratives for systemic change called This is Not the Truth. She invited me to collaborate with a new project called “Vunja”, which she has been envisioning with Carolina Coutinho, Keyna Eleyson and Bayo Akomolafe, Nigerian author, renegade academic and co-founder of The Emergence Network. Bayo is globally recognized for his counter-intuitive take on the global crisis and social change.
Unlike Cambia Festival, where love, gifts, generosity, and joy are central elements in the transformation of society, in Vunja, there will also be spaces to attend to our unresolved ancestral issues and more circles for grieving to share our brokenness and for sanctuary. I had the honor of spending a week with Bayo and the Vunja team in February during his recent trip to Brazil in a fascinating unlearning journey and deep dive into the decolonization perspectives.
We participated in a series of events in São Paulo and Rio with a variety of stakeholders and around different topics and I would like to share here one of these meetings, related to reimagining education, which took place at ISERJ — Instituto Superior de Educação do Rio de Janeiro — a traditional public institution by the state of Rio de Janeiro located in a very impressive neocolonial building. ISERJ provides vocational training for professionals in the field of education and also offers primary education (preschool, high school, and technical programs).
In India, Bayo’s current home, the suicide rate amongst students is the highest in the world. Unable to handle academic exams stress or cope with the pressures to achieve the success standards or high salaries society demands, many students feel pushed beyond their limits and with a sense of personal failure chose to take the drastic step of taking their own lives.
Reimagining the educational system was the central topic of the session at ISERJ and here is the video I recorded of the group exercise I describe below:
Bayo asked the class to split up in groups of three, and everyone was invited to share a story and intimate truths while responding to the question — “What is broken and what is missing?” Later, they were asked to come up with a new subject for their own classroom. “In our lives we learn about philosophy, sociology, mathematics, writing, but there are other things that we can learn together”. This is a very important moment, so he asked the participants to stand up and share their new classroom ideas:
(1) “Nature contemplation” said the first professor. Bayo: Start inviting people to your own classroom, start generating your own questions. What does nature mean? It doesn’t’ even need to be here, go for ice cream, go for a movie, go for a graviola juice.
(2) “Search for Happiness” said the second professor. Bayo: Are you going to start inviting people to your own house? Professor 2: No, to the streets!
(3) “Patience.” My subject doesn’t even need any contact with me. Just slow down, make this experiment. One day, when you are running for public transport, start paying attention to secondary things and then you will begin to notice you don’t need to run as much as you are told to run.
(4) “Smiling.” Everywhere is a classroom; everywhere is a place to smile, because smiling can make your day better.
(5) “Listening and seeing others.” When you pass by someone in the streets, you are circulating and you don’t even notice the others. The other day I passed by a street sweeper and I heard him saying he was invisible. From that moment on every time I pass by a street sweeper I greet him. I feel this is something that is missing.
(6) “Respect and Empathy.” I invite everyone to join me during rush hour in the public transport to practice this discipline with me.
Bayo ended the exercise by saying that none of that was a joke. “This is not a thing that we should push aside. The university system is dying. Our cities are dying. I work with UNESCO, they don’t know what to do. We really don’t know what to do with our world problems. So we need other ways of being in knowledge with the world. You never know what might happen when you invite people to learn together, you are creating a different paradigm of education. Inviting people to your classroom doesn’t need to be only about what you know, it can also be about what you don’t know and you want to learn about. Learn to see confusion as a gift. Because when you don’t know something, you can find the means to know it”.
We saw Vunja happening right there at ISERJ. In doing Vunja, it’s okay to experiment, it’s okay to celebrate what we don’t know and it’s okay to fail. Vunja is an ongoing inquiry and may disappoint the university’s curriculum. At Vunja there will be no graduation, but perhaps there we can find emerging potentialities and wiser ways of being alive.”
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