News > 2004 GLN Meeting Report

Mark Gerzon, President, Mediators Foundation

OVERVIEW

The Global Leadership Network met this August at the Commonweal Retreat Center in Bolinas, CA for our 2nd meeting as a whole network and achieved our three obectives: (1) to strengthen the GLN, (2) to explore several critical global issues and joint projects, and (3) to work with a client foundation that requested our consulting services.

Day 1 – Looking inside: Reconnecting and Exploring
Our first day together was an opportunity for us to reconnect with each other and to further explore our joint sense of purpose. Many of us arrived the evening before and spent some time in council sharing on a personal level what are the commitments that are inspiring us currently in our lives. This first day we began to explore how these commitments are manifesting in our professional lives and where they might connect with the GLN.

Day 2 – Looking outside: Global Issues and Consulting
Bill Ury and Peter Goldmark began our day with some reflection and inquiry into the issues of global governance and the need for global dialogues that is arising with the current movement towards the planet’s first regime of formal carbon limits in 2005. Each offers a great opportunity and face many challenges without the structures currently in place to support such possibilities. This introduction brought us to our conversation/consulting with The Secure World Foundation. The Foundation’s mission is to is to “help humankind abolish war by the end of this century.” Their initial focus is to prevent the militarization of space. The Foundation hired the GLN to help refine their strategic plan and to identify people and organizations with whom to work to achieve our mission.

Day 3 – Synergizing
Bringing together our experience working together and our personal reflections we began to identify the direction we need to take next as a network. We further defined our purpose and explored organizational issues including membership, projects, funding and structure. We completed our time together with good-byes and some initial vision for our next meeting in 2006.

TANGIBLE OUTCOMES

The recently completed meeting of the Global Leadership Network in the Bay Area had numerous tangible outcomes. The following is a preliminary accounting of these outcomes.

• Engaged new network members from Ireland, Zimbabwe and Brazil.

• Reached consensus to add Muslim, Indian, Chinese and Japanese members while maintaining network membership at under 25.

• Began the planning process for the Global New Leaders Workshop, our regionally anchored leadership “training” for which we have just received our first planning grant and identified possible regional anchors (Manila, Hong Kong, Rio De Janiero, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Nairobi).

• Met with potential workshop partners including Outward Bound International, Partners for Democratic Change, Open Society Institute, and others with whom we may partner in developing the Workshop.

• Gained more clarity around our shared sense of purpose includes functioning as a co-learning community in action.

• Agreed to co-author a book on global leadership that would, for the first time, include an unprecedented microcosm of global voices.

• Completed second phase of our consulting assignment for The Secure World Foundation, our second major consulting client.

• After experiencing our joint consulting with The Secure World Foundation we committed ourselves to developing a “consulting” practice that the network members preferred to call a “co-learning” practice to emphasize the mutual learning that took place with our client.

• Identified and discussed several potential new client organizations whom we want to support in the future.

• Decided that each time we meet as a whole for a 3 day GLN meeting/retreat we will work with at least 1 or 2 clients but no more within this structure. Other “consulting” will be outside of these meetings.

• Agreed to continue to meet as a community every 9/12 months for a three-day meeting.

• Forged relationship with Commonweal, a conference center that offered to host our North America based meetings again for the next two years.

• Deepened relationship with the Shinnyo-en Foundation, the Japanese Buddhist Philanthropy that hosted our closing reception

• Received invitations from Cape Town and Rio De Janiero for our next non-US based meeting.

• Assisted our sister organization, the Global Leadership Initiative, in interviewing several of our network members as part of its global research project on generative dialogue.

• Accepted GLN member Adam Kahane’s request to explore GLN support and staffing for his series of ten global dialogues over the next five years.

• Accepted William Ury’s request to form an E-Parliament design group to help develop ground rules and deliberative processes for the emerging “Earth Parliament.”

• Developed an overall budget and a plan to raise the funds for three different kinds of activities: 1) as an independent global learning community, 2) as a global consulting collaborative and 3) as an incubator of projects (such as the workshop) and products (such as the global leadership book).

• Composed (with the help of our Brazilian colleague, Helio Mattar) the following tagline for the network: Learn, Share, and Serve.

• Identified a need for a global resource for globalizing individual work and linking resources around the world doing common work.

INTANGIBLE OUTCOMES

These and other tangible results were gratifying. But they rested on deeper, intangible outcomes that, while hard to describe in words, was central to our experience. “Alignment” was the world our Japanese colleague at the Shinnyo-en Foundation used to describe this aspect of our work: alignment of mind, heart, and action.

The tangible outcomes outlined above did not grow out of tension, strain or conflict. They grew out of an exceptional collective alignment, which for me was an unprecedented experience. I have never before been privileged to be part of a global team that was so flowing, synergistic, and catalytic. Our diversity did not divide us, but instead seemed to make us aware of our wholeness.

This other, “invisible” level of outcomes was reflected in the following lyrical statement by Helio Mattar: “to support the world shifting from a focus on wealth to a focus on well-being; from the love of power to the power of love; from I’m an alone individual to I’m an individual and part of the whole; from scarcity to abundance; and from militarization to evolution.”