iEmerge – Ideas Worth Integrating

Bay Area Integral is thrilled to announce our second iEmerge event (our take on the hip, intelligent TED talks) – with three speakers presenting integral perspectives on the topic of Social Change!

Our community is bristling with brilliant minds (emerging voices, not just big name speakers) who are applying vision-logic to some of the most important issues in the world. It’s fantastic to hear from the well-known speakers and teachers we bring to our popular speaker event series, AND we also want to hear from and foster younger, more local, up-and-coming integral thinkers with something to say.

iEmerge is a forum not only for these vital emerging voices but also for the focused exchange of ideas, passion and cross-pollination among all of us in the integral-evolutionary community. To the TED-style talks we will add consistent Integral clarity and 2nd person engagement, and creating focused interactive, engaged We-Space too!

So please join us in welcoming our second slate of iEmerge speakers, and wish them luck — it will be a fast-moving evening with 18-minute talks and engaged dialogue. Don’t miss it!

Joshua Gorman:
Integral Activism and a New Generation of Social Change

In these times of global chaos and creativity, a new generation of young people and a new wave of social change are coming of age. At their heart is an emerging form of “integral activism” that offers holistic, systemic, and inclusive ways for changing our world. It rises up from the radical spirit of the Millennial Generation, from the movement toward integration in our time of widespread fragmentation, and from a clear recognition that as we learn to heal ourselves and make our world whole again, integral approaches to activism and social change will lead the way.

Joshua Gorman lives in Oakland and serves as the Co-Coordinator of Generation Waking Up, a global campaign to ignite a generation of young people to bring forth a thriving, just, sustainable world. He designed a major called “Global Youth and Social Change” at George Mason University, sits on the Board of the Global Youth Action Network/TakingITGlobal-US, and supports youth-led projects around the world. As a lifelong student of human development and transformational education, his passion is providing young people with the knowledge, skills, and learning opportunities they need to thrive in the twenty-first century. He is currently working on a book titled Generation Waking Up: How A New Generation Of Young People Is Coming Of Age And Changing Our World. Learn more at www.generationwakingup.org.

Lisa Chacon:
The ABC’s of Social Change: an Integral Change Model

How does change happen? My decade-long journey to answer this question led me from a deep concern about climate change and energy to Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and beyond in search of a change model. The ABC’S are derived from Integral Theory, and cover the four essential ingredients of social change – Awareness, Behavior, Culture and Systems. Each ingredient is critically important, but insufficient on its own to create lasting change. We’ll explore how we can apply these perspectives to diagnose “problems,” identify leverage points and weave together whole-system strategies for change.

Dr. Lisa Chacón is the managing director of Bay Area Integral & the co-founder of Innovive Group, an integral consulting firm specializing in innovation, strategy and sustainability. Lisa’s career spans two decades of inventorship and leadership in technology innovation, plus political activism, and ongoing experimentation with social processes to inspire, motivate and unleash the collective genius of groups. Her practice draws on integral theory, systems theory, and transformational approaches to culture and behavior change – see www.innovive.net to learn more.

Beatrice Benne:
Transformative Process for Generative Change

Social problems are adaptive challenges. In contrast to technical problems, adaptive challenges do not have technical solutions that can be provided by an expert. Adaptive work requires that we clarify a conflict in values, or bridge the gap between the values that we stand for and the current conditions under which we operate, in creative tension. Adaptive work calls for people to undertake a deep transformational journey by which they let go of their traditional values and mental models, embrace the whole of the complexity affecting the challenge they are addressing and learn to re-perceive the current reality with new fresh eyes, more able to see the subtle patterns that keep them and the system surrounding in the current state. Transformative work is a learning journey that taps emotional intelligence and calls for deep creativity; the outcome is the emergence of new possibilities and structures, increased sense of coherence, and greater wholeness for wellbeing at all levels in the system (individual and organizational). I will present the transformative generative model I developed based on living systems theory, and hope to inspire a conversation around the topics of personal and organizational change, creativity and learning.

Beatrice Benne brings a broad range of skills and expertise including systems thinking and a living systems approach to organizational management and change, to facilitate the resolution of adaptive challenges by transforming and designing purposeful and conscious organizations, while focusing on the wellbeing of social and environmental ecosystems. Beatrice holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Architecture at UC Berkeley, and in addition to consulting, is an instructor in the Bainbridge Graduate Institute MBA program, where she teaches on Strategy & Implementation and Systems Thinking in Action. Learn more about her work at Soma Integral Consulting.