Meet Katie Stubley
On anchoring the spirit of our time into the spirit of our place
Katie lives in Whadjuk Noongar country in the southwest of Australia. You may recognize Katie from her international and local work as a facilitator, design strategist, and process-designer. Her work with the Presencing Institute takes her around the globe at times, while in other moments she anchors her work in her local context. Katie is currently working at the Center for Social Impact at the University of Western Australia.
Katie thinks of her work with the Presencing Institute as a “really good partnership between global work and place-based work.” This balance between Katie’s global and local work “has a different combination every year.” For example, in 2018 multiple Presencing Institute programs were brought to Perth, Australia. “To have a lot of the Presencing Institute faculty actually come to Perth and to do those programs with them here was amazing,” Katie remembers. Some of those programs included the Presencing Foundation Program (PFP) and the ELIAS Tri Sector Leadership Program. Bringing these programs to Australia “really built this deep systems leadership knowledge within western Australia.”
Katie’s Journey to the Presencing Institute
In 2006, Katie read Theory U by Otto Scharmer. Katie remembers how, with “John, my husband and colleague, we were reading the book to each other and a lot of things just made sense to me.” In reading Theory U, Katie noticed how her “way of understanding the world was really expressed through that book and it gave great language for being in the world and for creating the change that I wanted to see.”
Then, in 2009, Katie was browsing online for courses and workshops and saw that Otto was travelling to Germany. At that time, Katie was living in Switzerland, and emailed Otto, asking if he would be traveling through Switzerland that summer. Then, “about five seconds later, I got this email saying that actually I won’t be there soon but I will be there in a couple of months, and it would be great to meet for lunch.”
When Katie and Otto met up a few months later, Katie remembers “what was so interesting was that I don’t know if I’ve ever met someone who asked so many questions or who listened so well.” What Katie took away from this meeting was that “Theory U isn’t just a book or an idea about something, it is really a way of being.” She noticed that Otto was “a person who really embodied this deep listening quality, and I found myself speaking about and answering things that I had never thought about before” In this way, “it was a very living experience of what I had read, so it intrigued me even further.”
After this initial meeting, Katie co-hosted a program called Mission U: 100 Change Makers in Europe, which took place in Berlin. Participants came from a variety of european social change making universities and alternative programs. Katie remembers, laughing, that “at that point, everyone else in the program was either a Dutch or German male. They said that they needed a woman who came from a different part of the world, so that was me.”
The Presencing Institute’s u.lab program also played a large role in Katie’s work. In “seeing u.lab really spark, it was this moment where I remember looking and thinking: oh, this is really interesting… this is the university of the future.” At that point, Katie was in a co-working space in Perth city. Here, Katie and John decided to host a hub, thinking that “only about 6 people would come… and about 50 people ended up coming, crammed in on a really hot evening, and they ended up coming every week.”
For Katie it was the u.lab program that felt like “something that was going to have a huge impact. It was creating a completely different future and possibility. At that point, no one else was doing the online-offline work in such interesting ways and for such an important purpose.”
After being a part of the u.lab journey, there was “invitation after invitation to just stay connected” with the Presencing Institute. Katie reflects that “it has been amazing to be a part of the Presencing Institute family and feel so connected to such an amazing and creative group of people.”
Creating the Change You Want to See in the World
Katie attended an alternative primary school, a “small school started by two guys who believed that you can learn by doing”, which gave her “questions about the world and how to make a difference.” After primary school however, Katie switched to a mainstream school, so “even from a young age, my whole world was this experience between two different paradigms.” After completing school, Katie very much realized that she liked the paradigm that her primary school had been based in.
Leaving school, Katie had a sense of “wanting to do something that was creating good in the world, but I really didn’t know how to do that.” In “looking at what others were doing, I just couldn’t see the thing that was me. I had this really strong belief that my job didn’t exist in the world.” Katie went on to study psychology, education and counselling and “did all these different things, trying to get into this place in which I want to work and be.”
Katie has now found her calling at the intersection of social impact and education. Working at the Center for Social Impact at the University of Western Australia, Katie “gets to be in that space between driving impact but also sharing that knowledge with others, or facilitating them to learn how they can do more to change the world.”
For Katie, driving social impact is “creating the change that you want to see.” This can be from the “really tiny things that we can all do to the much bigger, structural pieces.” A lot of Katie’s work now centers around social finance, policy design, social design and social innovation.
Anchoring the Spirit of Our Time Into the Spirit of Our Place
In the past years, Katie’s work has taken her all over the world from Germany, where she co-hosted the Ecosystems Leadership Program to Cambodia, where Katie and her colleagues Manish Srivastava and Becky Buell worked with youth around the United Nations SDG Labs.
This year on the other hand, has “really been one of coming back to and spending more time in my hometown of Perth, Western Australia.” In returning to her local context, Katie has been “really listening to this place and to the culture and wisdom that is here, as well as building spaces for that wisdom and knowledge to flow back into the global community.”
Katie noticed how “the indigenous wisdom of our places can really bring a lot of depth.” When we look at the Theory U work, we can see it “connecting so much with the spirit of our time. And then to anchor it to the spirit of our place, and to see those two things connecting is really where I love my work to be.”
2029 marks 200 years of colonization in Western Australia. Katie and John are currently working with Aboriginal Elders and leaders on a project called Danjoo Koorliny which is a hard concept to translate from Noongar into English. One translation could be “Going together to the future” or simply translated as Walking Together.
For Katie, this work is “using all my Theory U skills to the max.” She smiles, saying: “when I think that I am a good listener, I’ve really come to realize how out of practice I actually am, because the level of listening that’s needed to hear what needs to be done and what needs to be practised here is so different from what I am used to hearing.” Katie finds herself “having to listen in a wholly different way.” What Katie noticed through this work is that “you’re always downloading so much because of all the things you’ve grown up with and all your usual habits or all your usual ways of seeing and understanding information.” In noticing this, Katie became aware of “how present I have to be and how much I actually have to get through to remove that unconscious bias and to really be able to hear and see what it is that I need to do.”
In anchoring the global work of the Presencing Institute in her specific context, Katie realized that though “ideas and relationships can exist on a global level, if things want to create an impact, then really where things change or take shape are in place.” Because “there’s never a point in time when we’re not in a place… we’re always somewhere. So I think it’s that deep understanding of how those global ideas can grow in a place.”
Learning from the Rose
It is from looking at a rose that we can learn more about anchoring large ideas and the global spirit of our time in a specific place. Katie described how if we take a rose as an example, “a rose as a concept is this beautiful and perfect thing, but we all know that, actually, if you want to see a real rose grow, you’re going to have to find the right soil, the right conditions and that it’s going to grow really differently depending on where you are in the world.”
Katie believes it is the same with creating change. Even if we think of ourselves as global citizens, “often our work is still connected to a couple of different places where we’re actually driving and creating change.” For Katie, “it is about those small scratches of real change in a place.” It is in real places where we test our ideas and where we can get a sense of how a concept can look in action.
Looking Into the Future
When Katie and John returned to Australia, after having lived and worked in Switzerland, they asked themselves what it would look like to “do a Theory U process in our place… what does it mean to listen to our place to understand our place, to sense into it over years and see what it itself wants to become.” Now, about 8 years later, they have incorporated Theory U practices “in a really long term way on this place where we were born and we have the most responsibility to, because this is the place that knows us best.”
Looking into the future, Katie sees herself “continuing to listen into this place, to listen into what makes it healthy and then be able to allow others to also listen in, and to create that health together in this place.” And, in anchoring her work in her local context, seeing how “that is a gift to other places, and how this work makes us even more connected to the rest of the world.”
Video of the interview:
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