by David Packer
In the language of system structure, there are two basic ideas: stocks and flows. Flows are like water in a pipe, measured in units per time intervals, like gallons per minute. Stocks are where the flows go and from whence they come, like bathtubs. Stocks are
accumulations of things, with inflows and outflows. The only way to change stocks--to fill them or drain them--is by changing flows in or out.
Because of the difficulty most people have seeing how stocks will behave given variations of inflows and outflows, stocks provide the biggest challenges in comprehending the behavior of our social and physical systems. They are hard to change, because they are often so large relative to the size of the flows. Think how long it takes to fully fill your bathtub, a swimming pool, an oil tanker. Think how long it takes for the CO2 in the atmosphere to drain away, even if the input is cut to nothing.
And think about the bathtub full of the unemployed in the U.S., which haunts us now. This is a very large stock of millions of people, about 10 percent of the workforce. Each month, a substantial inflow of new people join the stock, as individuals lose their jobs or come of working age; another substantial outflow of people get jobs, give up their job searches, compromise, die, and the like. As long as these flows are about the same, the stock of the unemployed remains unchanged, which it has for a while. Without going into numbers (which you can do as an exercise), it is clear that bringing down the stock, even assuming robust job creation, will take more than a handful of years.
Because people don't generally understand the length of time required to reduce a bloated stock, the political risk is also great. Beware, President Obama, of any rhetoric or commitments that make the task of draining this stock seem easy to do in the short run (like before the next elections).
Another question is how we got into this particular pickle so suddenly. One way to think of the situation is to look back a couple of years, when we were in seemingly happier times, and envision two bathtubs. One is the stock of unemployed then, a normal few percent of the workforce. The other is the stock of people employed in the bubble businesses--devising new financial instruments, marketing creative mortgages, designing and building houses and offices financed by those creative endeavors--and in businesses based on the added spending of those in the bubble industries.
Now visualize the burst of the bubble. When bubbles burst, explosive flows emerge, and the stocks into which they flow rise rapidly. Over a short time period, the bathtub of bubble employees flowed at amazing speed into the unemployed bathtub, more than doubling its count. As we know, unemployment soared.
So we are left with a dangerously out-of-balance system. Hoping for new bubbles to absorb the excess unemployed is absurd. The normal, responsible processes of increasing outflows and reducing inflows take real time. Just recognizing the structure in which we have trapped ourselves, by visualizing the stocks and flows, is a first step toward health.
It provides a perspective, a lens that increases the urgency for actions to change the flows and an anchor that protects us from false expectations of a quick-fix rosy future. And maybe, just maybe, there is also a flow into a stock of learning that will serve us well.
David W. Packer is founding partner of the Systems Thinking Collaborative, a veteran of the MIT System Dynamics Group and of Digital Equipment Corporation, and on a variety of boards. He and spouse Ginny have parented five and are now grandparents to twelve. And he is a Red Sox fan, among other things.
By Peggy Holman
What does it take to change a social system--and an industry like journalism?
A new story of journalism is being born as the old story is dying. At its heart, that new story stays true--and enlarges on--a purpose many journalists hold dear: "to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing" (Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel).
For nine years, Journalism That Matters (JTM) has:
- Engaged people from all aspects of journalism: print, broadcast, and new media; editors, reporters, bloggers, audience, reformers, educators, and others;
- Created space for conversations about what matters most;
- Worked with what's emerging for news and information in a democracy.
In Seattle this January, JTM hosted 240+ people from mass media and hyperlocal media, entrepreneurs, technologists, academics, students, nonprofit organizers, artists, activists, and others to consider the question:
What's possible for our region when journalists and the public come together?
The 3 1/2-day conference began with a "News and Information Commons," in which Northwest media organizations shared their work through informal displays and conversation. The evening program featured three "conversation catalysts." Each spoke for 10 minutes on journalism and civic engagement. Norman Rice, former Seattle mayor and president of the Seattle Foundation, spoke for the people. Tracy Record, former newspaper reporter and now publisher and editor of the West Seattle Blog, spoke for the press. Chris Jordan, a visual artist, provided a systems-oriented twist to storytelling that engaged the heart as well as the mind.
Attendees then participated in several rounds of World Café conversations, moving between groups of four, cross-pollinating ideas, and discovering new insights into the questions or issues that are important to them.
The rest of the conference used Open Space Technology, a process through which participants self-organize, setting the agenda based on individual passions and interests. Each day began with a plenary to organize the agenda. The day also ended with a plenary, to reflect on emerging themes. Captured eloquently by student participant Amy Rainey, the themes included:
- Passion. "At this time of transformation, we all need to connect with our feelings and care, and put that caring into our work," artist Chris Jordan told the audience during an opening night speech. "It's time to take the templates off and speak authentic human being to authentic human being." This idea of showing passion in our work--and showing love for the communities we cover--came up repeatedly.
- Community. We quickly learned that generations define communities differently. For younger people, our communities are online, not necessarily based on geography.
- Collaboration. On Saturday, I tweeted that the word of the day was "collaboratory." By Sunday, a group was working on plans for a JTMPNW collaboratory, a learning lab for entrepreneurial projects and nourishing connections, and tying the idea to the creation of a civic commons.
- Engagement. Journalists need to stop talking to their audience and instead engage in a conversation with them.
- Media Literacy. In an information-packed world in which everyone is a journalist, the public needs better training about evaluating news sources and information for accuracy and credibility.
- Hyperlocal. Several discussions focused on the need for collaboration between hyperlocal neighborhood bloggers and mass media. On the final day, a large group worked on building a roadmap for mass media and hyperlocal journalists to work together and find financial sustainability.
- Government Coverage. Many participants were concerned about the effect that cutbacks at traditional media outlets have had on state and local government coverage. But we also learned about new projects to solve this problem. One attendee, Trevor Griffey, is starting a nonprofit site called Olympia Newswire to cover this year's legislative session and revitalize statehouse reporting.
- Business Models. Creating new business models was, of course, a big part of the conversation. "It doesn't have to be one model. It can be lots of small revenue streams," I overheard someone say. Those revenue streams include memberships, foundations, grants, advertising, holding events, subscriptions, and so on.
If there's one thing we all learned, it's that the opportunities for collaboration and experimentation are endless in our new news ecology.
JTM did a great job using social media and aggregating that information. You can read notes from the various sessions on the JTM wiki, catch up on the tweets, view photos, and watch videos. If you're interested in joining this conversation and attending future events, join the LinkedIn group.
Moving Forward
On the final morning, the group identified its next steps. Session notes are posted, and the work continues.
Peggy Holman hosts conversations that matter, inviting people to gather around the issues most important to them and move their dreams into action. Her book, The Change Handbook, co-edited with Tom Devane and Steven Cady, has been warmly received by people wishing to increase resilience, connection, collaboration, and aliveness in their organizations and communities.
By Janice Molloy
For the past several months, we at Pegasus have been engaged in revisiting our organizational vision, mission, and core values. While we're all up to our eyeballs in tasks, making it challenging to carve out time for reflection, we agreed that going through this process now, together, would actually improve our effectiveness over the long run. By becoming clearer as a group about why we do what we do, what needs Pegasus could serve in the world, and how we're going to get there as a team, we will move forward with a stronger sense of direction and alignment.
We've gotten off to a good start--with a little help from our friends. A few weeks ago, systems change facilitator Tuesday Ryan-Hart led us through a day of visioning (capped off by dinner at our local Spanish restaurant, where we continued the conversation over many plates of tapas and some tasty sangria).
In addition to sparking lots of meaty conversation, both with the group as a whole and in smaller subsets, Tuesday engaged us in a physical modeling activity. In two teams, we used items from our offices--including a stuffed Kermit the frog, a plastic Hoberman 
sphere, a bottle of wine, a small globe, various plants, and assorted electronics--to create representations of Pegasus when it's working at its highest future potential. The two models, while very different visually, ended up with much overlap in themes. Some important "ahas" emerged from each that we're weaving into our vision statement.
One unexpected outcome of the session with Tuesday is that we realized our core values, as written, hold little meaning for those currently with the company. It's been stimulating to evaluate and refresh them, to bring them to life for today's workforce and today's challenges. We also continue to noodle with how we express our company's vision and mission. With changing technologies and major industry shifts for our core businesses, we want to craft something that reflects both immediate and timeless relevance, and that resonates with each member of our team and our other stakeholders.
As part of this process, we'll each articulate our personal purpose statements to feed into the organizational mission. Daniel Pink has an exercise in Drive for creating one sentence that summarizes your life's purpose; for example, "He raised four kids who became happy and healthy adults." Or "She invented a device that made people's lives easier." We're also using as inspiration the "six-word memoir" meme initiated by the online storytelling magazine SMITH.
At the end of the journey, we'll share our outcomes and reflections. In the meantime, here's a video that our president Mark Alpert showed to inspire our efforts. I hope it'll spark new ideas for you, too.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference
At the 2009 Pegasus Conference in Seattle, Washington, John Seely Brown spoke on the topic of "Rethinking the Organization: From Scalable Efficiency to Scalable Learning." In this clip, he explains why he's optimistic about the future: The impulse by today's youth to use social technologies to collaborate and build on each other's creativity. JSB believes that the blogosphere and other web-based tools provide a powerful means for people to express provisional ideas, receive honest feedback, and evolve their thinking.
by Janice Molloy
As we reported in a previous blog post, the MacArthur Foundation is funding a research project on the development of systems thinking in middle-school students called "Grinding New Lenses: A Design Project to Support a Systems View of the World
." Indiana University professor Kylie Peppler, one of the principal investigators along with colleague Melissa Gresalfi, generously took time from her whirlwind schedule to answer questions about the project by email.
JM: How did you become interested in systems thinking?
KP: I became interested in systems thinking because of my interest in design, games, and learning, and particularly the work of Katie Salen and Mitchel Resnick. Systems thinking appeals to me because I'm interested in the interconnectedness of ideas, building bridges between seemingly different domains, and finding ways to be a vehicle of change in a time when it's badly needed. Systems thinking prepares us to see and act on the world around us.
JM: Why do you think it is an important area for students to learn about and experience?
KP: The 21st century requires youth to think across the disciplines. While schools are set up to teach disciplines as separate and distinct, as adults we are asked to think across and apply these skills, knowledge, and dispositions in our everyday activities. Schooling is increasingly fragmented and doesn't allow young people to develop the type of interdisciplinary thinking necessary for today's workforce. Systems thinking then becomes one way to unify the curriculum and to encourage youth to see patterns in all disciplines but especially science, mathematics, history, literature, and the arts. Additionally, as youth come to understand systems and how they operate, they are well positioned to act on them for change.
JM: Can you talk a little about the idea of having kids create their own simulations? How do you see this developing and why do you think it's important for students to learn through "play"? What do you think they will take away from the process?
KP: Much of the prior work on complex systems has focused on kids playing with variables on a pre-designed system, including termites, traffic jams, or other systems that are of interest to kids but with which they have little first-hand experience. As we move into new media and begin to use some of the latest tools available, we can now allow kids to create their own systems and teach them the language of systems thinking. This is an important distinction, mostly because kids can build simulations of systems that are important to them, but they can also "play" with the entire system, which is the case in game design. Games are really systems that kids have deep experiences with in their entirety. With these other systems, kids have little to no experience. I'm hoping that this is a generative distinction in our upcoming research. We're very interested in understanding the contribution of games and design to the development of a systems thinking disposition in young people.
JM: I notice from your website that you are a visual artist. What do you see as the connections between art and systems?
KP: In my view, the arts, design, and systems are interrelated in important ways. Artists and designers tend to have a good sense of the "way things work" precisely because they have built, tested, and evaluated their ideas many times over. In a sense, they are constantly building models of the world around them and finding ways to communicate their ideas to large numbers of people in a visual language. I am also interested in environmental art, media art, and other artistic forms that have addressed the notion of "systems" in their work directly, whether that be an environmental system or in highlighting digital media as a complex system.
JM: What kind of response have you received from colleagues and others about this project?
KP: There has been an overwhelming amount of excitement and enthusiasm for the work. There is a clear need; many teachers, schools, and after-school centers are anxious to be beta-testers of the curriculum.
JM: What is your hope for this project over the longer run, in terms of the implementation of the curriculum standards and beyond?
KP: We have pretty modest goals at the moment but are hoping that our designed curriculum modules will connect to a variety of curriculum standards, particularly in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines, language arts, and the arts. In the longer run, we're hoping that the curriculum modules will be taken up in classrooms and after-school centers across the country, leading to a greater understanding of systems at an early age in this next generation of youth. We're also hoping that teachers are inspired to adapt the curriculum modules to their local context, incorporate new tools and platforms as they become available, and share these ideas with others in the teacher wiki that we will be setting up.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference.
Photo of Kylie Peppler courtesy of Indiana University
by Vicky Schubert
It was at an Astoria, Oregon inn, under a massive bridge that crosses the Columbia River, that Ruth Stiehl and Marilyn Lane first decided to teach people about systems by taking them on a raft trip. "As we talked," explains Ruth, "the imagery of the river was
right there, shaping our conversation. In its own emergent way, the river presented itself as an experiential tool to help people see the systems they were part of."
In her work with community college curriculum developers, and in her book The Assessment Primer, Ruth had frequently used the river as a metaphor for illustrating useful systems concepts. Recently hired by Clatsop Community College to support its accreditation initiative, she impressed Marilyn--a 12-year board member for the college--with her deep, yet simple, approach to defining institutional outcomes. As the curriculum director for a K-12 school district, Marilyn saw an opportunity to expand the impact of their work to include a broader system.
The two brought together a group of faculty and administrators from pre-K through community college for an experiential training pilot. After an exciting run on the Deschutes River--a Columbia tributary 100 miles to the north--the rafters returned to a classroom for some reflection. Ruth laid down a rope and put segments across it to illustrate how the group related to each phase of the education process as separate and distinct--early childhood, elementary, middle school, high school, community college.
Ruth asked the group to show what it would look like if the learning were more systemic. The participants drew the rope into a circle, a perfect segue for talking about the river. "If you ask most people to draw a picture of a river," notes Ruth, "they will draw a line. It might squiggle a little bit or have some bands, but it will just be a line. And when you actually look at a river system, it's not a line at all. It's a matter of streams and tributaries--a complex basin."
Additionally, a river is dynamic; it goes someplace. Unlike a pond, it has energy, it has engagement, and it recreates itself. When you stand way back and take a macro view, the whole hydraulic system keeps the earth alive. "We invited the group to think about education in those terms," Ruth explains. "Education is a vital, dynamic resource that keeps our communities alive. If you have a nursing program at a community college, the educational basin includes all the feeder schools, hospitals, doctors' offices, social service agencies, and people who contribute to the education, while the college provides that primary stream that connects it all together."
The successful pilot led Ruth and Marilyn to establish the White Water Institute, a nonprofit organization that brings a river-based experiential systems thinking curriculum to community college administrators, community groups, and individuals seeking deeper connections between their personal and professional lives. The Institute uses professional guides to help groups navigate a twelve-mile stretch of the Deschutes, through rapids rated from class two to class four. In the process, participants learn about teamwork and gain awareness of the nature of organic systems, particularly in terms of flow and change.
Key to teaching about systems, Ruth believes, is helping people shift their perspective to look for patterns. "When you look at a river, you're looking at processes. In processes there are patterns that you can learn to observe. We're terribly deficient, particularly in our educational systems, in recognizing patterns, because we don't make the effort to get far enough away from things to see the patterns that exist." The river experience gives participants the distance they need to recognize how prevailing educational and organizational paradigms prevent schools from operating as healthy, living systems.
Neither easy nor quick, the lessons of the river can take a long time to implement. Participants come to recognize that real transformation requires patience and persistence. As one rafter observed, "Patterns of behavior are difficult to alter. Ways of thinking after years of practice are not as flexible as I may wish. I feel supported by systems thinking skills. However, when I'm under stress I fail to remember them, so I need to go and remember what I learned on the river."
Vicky Schubert is marketing director at Pegasus Communications.
By Janice Molloy
At our 2008 conference in Boston, keynote speaker Dr. Atul Gawande kept us on the edge of our seats as he spoke about a tool shown to significantly reduce surgical complications: the checklist. Like many other participants, I had tears in my eyes as he recounted the story of a three-year-old Austrian girl who was 
brought back from the brink of death after being submerged in an icy fishpond--all because the rescue team followed a checklist to guide and streamline their response.
Not surprising, Dr. Gawande garnered stellar reviews from participants. But in the feedback on his talk, while praising the presentation, a handful of people commented that the checklist concept seemed simplistic or not applicable to their industry. Anyone who runs events learns not to take isolated comments too much to heart, but I did wonder, had we been off base in thinking that Atul's work would be relevant to the complex challenges of our cross-sectoral audience?
Gawande's recently released book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, puts to rest any concerns I might have had about the general applicability of this approach. In the book, he shows how people in occupations as diverse and complex as building skyscrapers to flying jumbo jets to evaluating multi-million dollar investments use checklists to make "the reliable management of complexity a routine." As he states, "Even the most expert among us [in virtually any endeavor] can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place."
How often do we identify "patterns of mistakes," come up with fixes, and then fail to change our behavior? According to Gawande, the checklist provides both a discipline and a structure for capturing those learnings, embedding new routines, and continually evaluating their effectiveness. Far beyond a static collection of "to dos," at its best, this kind of resource reflects ongoing, systemic learning.
It also, interestingly, supports open communication and collaboration. Through examples from many different industries, Gawande shows how, rather than being a set of instructions dictated from above, a well-constructed checklist "pushes power out of the center" and gives professionals room to adapt and respond, based on their experience and expertise. Through trial and error in his own operating room, he found that having the circulating nurse, not the surgeon, kick off the checklist sends the message that every member of the team is responsible for the success of the surgery and has the power--and the obligation--to question the process at any point.
It's easy to see the checklist as something "other people" should use--people in other professions or with other job requirements. But Atul argues that, by using checklists, we can improve our outcomes without improving our skill, without "working harder and harder to catch the problems and clean up after them." He observes, "The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines your brain shouldn't have to occupy itself with . . . and lets it rise above to focus on the hard stuff."
Obviously, a checklist isn't a silver bullet--it can't solve deep-seated structural issues in an organization or an industry. Unless users regard it as a living, evolving tool, it runs the risk of becoming just another task. But taken as a way to identify and potentially eliminate failures before they happen, the checklist shows a lot of untapped promise. We're working on ours here at Pegasus; what about you?
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference.
photo of Atul Gawande by Sarah Viera
by Janice Molloy
What separates outstanding leaders from merely good ones? The Work Foundation, a British think tank, recently released a report on the beliefs and practices of exceptional leaders, Exceeding Expectation: The Principles of Outstanding Leadership. Based on a two-year study, authors Penny Tamkin, Gemma Pearson, Wendy Hirsh, and Susannah Constable concluded that the b
est leaders do three things:
1. They Think and Act Systemically. These leaders see things as a whole rather than compartmentalize. They connect the parts based on a guiding sense of purpose. According to the report, "Outstanding leaders achieve through a combination of systemic thinking and acting for the long-term benefit of their organisation. They recognise the interconnected nature of the organisation and therefore act carefully."
2. They See People as the Route to Performance. They are deeply people- and relationship-centered rather than just people-oriented. They not only like and care about people, but have come to understand that people are the key to exceptional performance.
3. They Are Self-Confident Without Being Arrogant. One of the fundamental attributes of outstanding leaders is self-awareness. They understand they cannot create results themselves, but must do so by influencing others.
In the project, a team of eight researchers conducted 262 in-depth interviews with leaders, their managers, and their direct reports in six of the UK's most well-known and stable organizations: BAE Systems, EDF Energy, Guardian Media Group, Serco, Tesco, and Unilever. The investigators found that outstanding leaders see some of their primary roles as creating purpose, maintaining a sense of how the organization's people and systems fit together, and articulating a vision that "extends from the past, through the present, and into the future." The most successful leaders don't simple fall back on "empowering others" to deliver results; they facilitate and nurture empowerment through a conscious philosophy and practice.
The team concluded "that the emphasis on people-centred leadership is particularly critical while the world is still experiencing tough economic conditions." In difficult times, people tend to turn to controlling, target-driven leaders. Yet the research indicates that the opposite approach can be the most effective route to high performance.
The second phase of the research will focus on questions such as: How do organizations identify people with potential to become outstanding leaders? To what extent can the required behavior be developed? And, assuming it can be, what kind of management development will work best? Many of us will be eagerly waiting the next report-out of this fascinating study.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference.
Thanks to Sharon Eakes for contributing this story idea, which she found on LeadershipNow's Leading blog.
Photo of winter forest by Böhringer Friedrich.
By H. Thomas Johnson
Toyota's current quality crisis is not a sign that its longstanding reputation for excellence was a mirage, that its fundamental management system was never really superior to the systems in competing organizations. Rather, it reflects disastrous policies adopted after 2000, when top management's thinking changed 
sharply in a direction that, while consistent with that of most other Western companies, would never have been tolerated at Toyota in the past.
In a bid to surpass General Motors as the world's largest automaker, after 2000, Toyota's top managers became ensnared in a destructive mode of thinking--thinking that focused their decisions and actions on achieving immediate financial targets, no matter the long-run consequences to the company's welfare. Popularly known as "management by results," or MBR, this approach dominated American businesses after 1970 and remains the prevailing business philosophy today.
Before 2000, however, Toyota followed an alternative mode of operating that I refer to as "management by means," or MBM. A company employing MBM succeeds by building and continuously improving the system of relationships among customers, managers, workers, suppliers, owners, and the larger community. The system's purpose is to enhance human well-being by providing safe and useful products and services, meaningful livelihoods, and sustainable financial returns.
One of the first things I learned when I began observing Toyota's operations almost 20 years ago was that accounting-based financial tools, such as cost targets, standard cost variances, performance budgets, and compensation incentives, are not needed in a Toyota plant. Indeed, the company's legendary industrial engineering genius, Taiichi Ohno, reportedly said that he was able to achieve the changes in plant operations that led to what became known as the Toyota Production System because "my boss, Mr. Toyoda, kept the accountants off my back."
While creating and refining its unique MBM management system from the 1950s through the 1990s, Toyota rose to become the most successful and trusted manufacturer in the world. So it was surprising that the company embarked on a "management by results" strategy after 2000. With financial executives gaining control of top leadership positions, Toyota's management grew less attuned to operations than to the demand for steady growth in shareholder wealth and share prices. The current engineering and design failures that have caused unprecedented recalls are classic symptoms of pushing to achieve short-run financial and growth targets beyond the company's current capacity to integrate new plants, new suppliers, new workers, and especially new managers into a coherent whole.
Can Toyota regain the reputation for excellence that it enjoyed until recently? It depends on top management's commitment to restoring and nurturing the disciplined pattern of continuous improvement in operations that originated with the company's founders. Toyota's new CEO Akio Toyoda would be well advised to reflect on how the current MBR thinking espoused by the architects of Toyota's disastrous growth policy of the past decade differs from the MBM thinking that led to its previous record of sustained success.
H.Thomas Johnson is professor of business at Portland State University and Distinguished Consulting Professor of Sustainable Business at Bainbridge Graduate Institute. In 1997, Harvard Business Review named his book Relevance Lost one of the most influential management books of the 20th century, and in 2003, Harvard Business School Press listed Tom among today's 200 leading management thinkers. In 2001, Tom's book Profit Beyond Measure received the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing Research, and in 2007, the American Society for Quality awarded him its prestigious Deming Medal.
Photo of country road supplied by freefoto.com
by Bob Stilger
Tadaima! ただいま. That's what is said in Japan when one returns home. "I'm back, I've been out in the world and I am back." And that is exactly how I felt last week during a trip to Japan. I'm a little embarrassed--はずかし--to be writing about what is happening in another country and culture. So just let me be clear--my story is as a foreigner, a visitor, and I speak only from my outsider perspective.
My relationship with Japan started 40 years ago, when I escaped there during my senior year in college. My life and learning in Japan have been a central part of who I am. It is my spiritual home. But I've never been inclined to take my work there until recently.
Last November, at the Pegasus Systems Thinking in Action Conference, I was presenting on behalf of The Berkana Institute. I was amazed to see 25 or so people from Japan. Normally there are just several. I wondered, "What's happening?" and learned that the answer is "a lot." Over the last couple of years in Japan, there has been a tremendous surge of interest in and work with systems thinking, Presencing, World Café, Appreciative Inquiry, and a host of other processes. The people I met have not only embraced these methodologies, they have created a huge opening for new ways of thinking and being. And in Japan, when something begins, it moves quickly!
Conversations soon evolved into an invitation to give a workshop and to participate in an evening Dialogue Bar. The weekend workshop with 20 participants was a combination of my work on Resilient Communities, Enspirited Leadership, Art of Hosting 
sampler, and Art of Change sampler all rolled into one. We met in circle and Open Space and World Café. We walked in silent pairs and in dialogue pairs. We modeled with clay, and the clay was so loved that it became a part of the rest of the World Café sessions. We designed the second day together, and much of the hosting was done by the participants.
Monday night was the "Dialogue Bar." More than 100 people from all walks of life and all ages came. I presented an opening keynote, in which I shared a bit of my life story as well as some of my findings about Enspirited Leadership. But they really came for conversation. Lively, animated, intense conversation about what it takes for social innovation to make enough of a difference to make a difference.
What did I learn from this amazing experience? I learned that World Café is being used extensively in business in Japan these days. People seem comfortable with the World Café format; it is intimate, yet with some protections. It is well documented and not just some "flakey" way of doing things. Heck, the prime minister even has the book The World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter! And the hunger for conversations that matter is inspiring. People know things need to change. And they know they need to be part of that change.
Japanese know how to listen to each other with their whole bodies and to hear far beyond the words. They know how to be silent with each other. They know how to be respectful. They know how to find questions. AND, there is an expression in Japan, "The nail that sticks up is pounded down."
How does one continue to listen with one's whole being AND stick up, stand up, find courage and clarity to offer one's leadership in a time of immense change? This is the question that Japan is ready for and it has been cracking wide open for more than two years. This is why there were 25 people from Japan at the Systems Thinking in Action Conference this past November where there have been four or five in the past. And this is why I'll be back for some work in May and suspect I will be returning more frequently!
Bob Stilger has been engaged in community change work since the mid-1970s. In recent years, much of his work has been in places like South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, and Brazil, where new forms of engagement are being created. He has a PhD in Learning and Change in Human Systems from CIIS and was the co-president of The Berkana Institute from 2005-2009.