Next Stage World: A Global Gathering of Organisation Reinventors

A reflection on Next Stage World: A Global Gathering of Organisation Reinventors by Dee Brooks, IACD Oceania Director

During the week of the 24 April, 2017 a global gathering for next-stage leadership was held in the picturesque village of Monolithos on the Greek island of Rhodes and was attended by approximately 50 participants from around the globe who were representing a diverse range of small to large organisations. As Frederic Laloux says, “Reinventing Organizations” comes from a different place. It is for people (founders of organizations, leaders, coaches, and advisors) who sense that something is broken in the way we run organizations today and who feel deeply that more must be possible… but wonder how to do it.

The Next Stage World gathering offered a place for practitioners and teams to bring questions and challenges to be responded to with creativity, wisdom, and intelligence of the whole. Rather than a conference of presentations, we brought real-world questions into the centre to work on them with deep inquiry and sense-making.

On Day One, George Por from Enlivening Edge offered the question, “What is the gift in our diversity?” Over the course of the week, some of the gifts and areas of inquiry and practice we explored together were:

  • Development of a self-management culture
  • Constructing next-stage tools and solutions
  • Engaging the whole system using self-managing meeting designs
  • Mentoring using the Art of Hosting processes and practices
  • Developing and building Teal mentoring practices
  • Developing a next-stage working structure
  • Responding to governance issues within a traditional structure

The Next Stage World gathering was a very rich week, full of unique connections and deep conversations, where we explored times when next stage organising made something possible that wouldn’t have been otherwise such as whole system gatherings, well hosted meetings, encouraging buy-in, discovering individual and organisational evolutionary purpose and ultimately, how we can courageously help build the right conditions for real change.

IACD members can find out more about Next Stage World from Dee dee_brooks@icloud.com