WHAT WE TEACH
It is clear that we are facing a moment of great change that is calling for new ways of learning. All of our traditions for educating leaders and managers have been focused on the acquisition of knowledge and the application of concepts, but as knowledge becomes a universal commodity, it is increasingly evident that this is not what we need to cope and thrive in today’s world. Instead, we need new practices that are not trivial — practices that allow us to cope with an increasingly global, constantly changing world, where communication is instant, and our identities and offers are examined and in play at all times.
Practices are new ways of being that evolve over time. To configure and master them requires somatic transformation, social mastery and spiritual strength. If people only study and read about what we are talking about, they will ‘understand it’, but they will not learn to act. In the end, learning happens in the body. A person is said to ‘know’ once he or she is able to do something they were not able to do before. As such, immersion in a space and process where action is required is critical for embodied learning to take place.
Technology today, combined with our solid body of knowledge, opens up the possibility to move people quickly from theory to practice, allowing us to produce a significant breakthrough in the embodied learning of skills and practices that are critical for the 21st century. We call this collection of skills Commitment Based Management. Using our methods we have been able to create processes and practices for embodied learning where people learn:
• Authentic leadership
• New practices for management that are effective with todays workforce
• To build world class teams
• To generate trust
• To think strategically
• A process for consistently producing innovation
• To work with other cultures
• To work across distances
• To mobilize action and generate results in a focused coherent manner
• To manage the mood in an organization
• To develop “mastery of network mobilization,” a new term that we’ve coined to capture the idea of being able to mobilize many resources in a network, external to an individual or to the organization he or she belongs to
• To build organizational systems and processes that are consistent and coherent with the new practices