This post is a reflection inspired by an active dialogue between Kathia Laszlo and me, as we co-design our upcoming retreat Unfolding Wisdom scheduled for April 16 th – 19 th at the Mercy Center in Burlingame, CA. It is adapted from the original post at our Unfolding Wisdom website, as a response to Kathia’s blog post “ Learning, Leadership and Spirituality .” Reading Kathia’s posting on the threads woven through her life gave me pause to consider my own. We are made up of

Note from the authors : We, Alan Briskin and Kathia Laszlo, have been in deep exploration on Unfolding Wisdom as part of the design process for an upcoming retreat on this topic. The retreat is meant for leaders, facilitators, consultants and change agents who are curious about the tension between intuitive knowing and its practical application in organizations and society. Our rich conversation has become fertile ground for our future time together. The following post will

From a systems perspective, emergence is a phenomenon in which something new arises from interactions among smaller or simpler components. The economist Jeffrey Goldstein describes emergence as " the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems ." My colleague, David Bradford, tells the story of the birth of National Training Labs, a pioneering center for the study of group behavior that began sh

Teilhard de Chardin’s Noosphere: A Field of Consciousness Surrounding Us The genesis of a great idea can lie dormant for a very long time before ascending into consciousness. For the philosopher, scientist, and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, it was germinated in the mud of Verdun, France, where, as a stretcher bearer in World War I, he carted the dead and wounded from the front lines. Like Edgar Mitchell, Teilhard had the ability to intuit a greater meaning from his i

Looking back on my earlier collaboration to articulate collective wisdom , I believe we all shared a faith in the centrality of spirit, the evolutionary potential of the human species, and the reality of our interconnectedness. We believed ourselves inextricably bound up with each other, enfolded within the larger forces of nature and subtle energies largely invisible to conscious awareness. Collective referred to a larger concept of wholeness and wisdom to its role in addre

As many of you know, I have been writing about the social and unconscious dynamics behind the U.S. Presidential election of 2016.  This final post before the election is more of a meditation and prayer. Please read and forward to as many people that might benefit from reading it. Read my latest Huffington Post article. A Prayer for Tuesday And please remember to LIKE, COMMENT, SHARE, and DISCUSS with friends.  It is through  generous acts of sharing the ideas you value that

(This post was also published on The Huffington Post ) Introduction / Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four In Parts I through III, I summarized how our educational system was designed to advance less than a third of our population toward a bachelor’s degree and that the economic consequences for those without a bachelor’s degree were significant. Beginning in the 1970s, not only were the economic opportunities for less educated citizens more scarce, but the wages

(This post was also published on The Huffington Post ) Introduction / Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four From Part II: Prosperity was not disappearing from the American landscape, but simply shifting. In roughly the same 30-year period when growth in workers’ wages was slowing down to a crawl, individual wealth became so concentrated that the 400 richest billionaires in the United States had an accumulated wealth equal to half that of the U.S. population (150 mi

(This post was also published on The Huffington Post ) Introduction / Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four Somehow we have arrived at a moment in time when the entrance of a perceived tough and cunning figure with no need to talk in full sentences has become the advent of a savior, or at least a version of one from the bowels of World Wide Wrestling. What kind of savior is this? What collective pain can account for something so bizarre that if someone told me this

(This post was also published on The Huffington Post ) Introduction / Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four If a man going down into a river, swollen and swiftly flowing, is carried away by the current, how can he help others across? — Buddha Racism, nativism, xenophobia — and Donald Trump, oh my! Novelist Richard North Patterson summarizes the current situation we face: “T rump personifies a fear and hatred of ‘the other’ embodied by some of our history’s more fri

(This post was also published on The Huffington Post ) Introduction / Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four Mathematician and visionary Arthur M. Young introduced his book The Geometry of Meaning with the enigmatic words “All meaning is an angle.” Does meaning emerge from the tension of varying angles of perception? And if this is true, what angle of inquiry might be worthwhile to pursue? In this new series of posts (in four parts over the next 12 days), I explo

Leading as Sacred Practice : A Retreat & Conference September 5-9, 2016 http://facilitation.kommunikationslotsen.de/training/leading-as-sacred-practice/ Please join me and my colleagues, David Sibbet, Gisela Wendling, and Holger Scholz for an extraordinary five days of learning, reflection, and collective discovery.  During our time together we will investigate how ritual, ceremony, and the natural world are central to remembering and recreating the sacred in contemporary ti

September 5-9, 2016 Registration and Brochure Please join me and my colleagues, David Sibbet, Gisela Wendling, and Holger Scholz for an extraordinary five days of learning, reflection, and collective discovery.  During our time together we will investigate how ritual, ceremony, and the natural world are central to remembering and recreating the sacred in contemporary times. Is the sacred purely a personal matter or a critical aspect of our group and collective evolution? Ha

The background to this new Huffington Post was a chance encounter between Carl Jung and the theologian and Chinese scholar, Richard Wilhelm.  Jung had been  struggling with early formulations of a collective unconscious when Wilhelm sent him the Taoist text, The Secret of the Golden Flower .  The manuscript helped crystallize Jung's thinking about both the collective unconscious and synchronicity.   The Taoist parable, in this post, captured for Jung the beauty and mysteriou

What is the role of the sacred in your life?  Have the sacred dimensions become marginalized, dismissed, or ignored in the organizational world?  Is the sacred purely a personal matter relevant only to the individual or is it part of our group and collective evolution toward social cohesion and resilience? Please join me during the week of September 5th for an extraordinary five days of learning, reflection, and collective discovery.  The first days of the conference will be

For those interested in applying mindfulness and emotional intelligence to larger social forces, read my latest Huffington Post article. The political fanning of flames, the surging up of anger, and the demonization of the other are all signals, at the collective level, of something deeply unsettled. We have reason to be cautious and alert to the dangers ahead.  However, our inner attitude matters a great deal.  If we succumb to despair or simply meet anger with anger, we wi

One of the core practices of collective wisdom is seeing whole systems . This requires us to step out of our particular bubble and ask essential questions, to diagnose critical relationships within a system, and to work in subtle realms, including what is not immediately apparent. Most significantly, seeing whole systems asks us to embrace both the light and shadow of human interactions, having faith that greater coherence and healthy functioning communities can be a result.

I just published an article on Huffington Post called The Politics of Intolerance . It's being appreciated by many and ... ruffling a few feathers. Have a look!

I'm a co-signer of the Fuji Declaration , an "international alliance of individuals and organizations who are united by a commitment to live and collaborate toward the advancement of a more harmonious and flourishing world".  I'm flying to Japan in a few days to participate in a ceremony, held at the base of Mt Fuji, to celebrate the inauguration of the Fuji Declaration. The Fuji Declaration is "a call to all global citizens to recognize and nurture the full human potential

Reb Zalman passed over today.  I've known he has been slowly slipping away and was preparing himself and others for this day.  Still, my spirit is heavy, and my gratitude overflowing. This is a photograph from a time we had together in Colorado. We were exploring ways to enter states of consciousness that would allow healing energies to be directed to what he called "hot spots" in the world. To do so required joining with other forms of spiritual intelligences and with perso