About us
We love that you are interested in who we are. One of many possible answers, is that we are a group of people that for whatever mysterious reasons feel drawn to the work of increasing our capacity to relate with each other, to practice and develop the arts of AR - and AR facilitation - and to build a no cost peer led practice platform, where we can support each other to heal and grow.
Alright, so we do realize that "you" are "supposed" to have this lovely page showing photos and bios of founders and staff and what not. This project does not have such a thing, and we would love to take a brief moment to try to explain why.
Rethinking leadership
In the organisational development world, there is this idea of 'heroic leadership'. Frederic Laloux (in his book Reinventing Organisations) best describes heroic leadership as a relic of earlier stages of organisational development.
In Amber (eg: military), and Orange (eg corporations) organisations, leadership tends to be seen as the strong, visionary individual - the CEO, founder, or "inspirational" leader (think, Steve Jobs, Ghandi, Martin Luther King) who sets the direction, embodies the culture, and motivates others to follow. This model assumes that the leader somehow sees more clearly than others. The organisation depends on their energy, insight, and charisma, and the collective's role is to execute or align around that vision.
It's heroic because it's rooted in the idea of one person holding the answers or being responsible for saving or guiding the system.
In Laloux's narrative, a new generation of organisation is now emerging (which he calls Teal) where leadership transcends this heroism. Where instead a space is held for self-management, evolutionary purpose, and for collective intelligence to unfold. In this frame, leadership:
- becomes distributed rather than hierarchical.
- shifts from leader-as-hero to leader-as-host, or leader-as-gardener.
- shifts from driving change to listening to what wants to emerge, (and we can only do that by including the juice of all the participants).
- moves from control, to trust and wholeness, to embodying the properties of living organisms.
- is about being able to hold uncertainty, and the work-in-progress-ness of things.
The journey of how we got here
The News page gives a bit of an idea about how we arrived at this place. Three people put the vision and early documentation on paper. But they are not special. Over recent months they were joined by a dozen more people, and more are coming. We are young, growing slowly but steadily, and here for the long game.
The shortest answer of all
So, our answer to "who we are", is: we are you. We believe that your voice and energy are an essential part of the solution. Want to come join us?
