I'm not going to be a professor. I'm not providing answers. I'm providing questions we can explore together. - This is a terrible year for "the leaders"... - We have a glorious opportunity... only in recognizing our own hubris can we do something new. - The lesson in systems theory is that the planning of a great future will be a journey of despair. - There's no such thing as a closed system. "Management science" took the notion of a closed system and tried to apply it in our organizations... But, you can't do it. There's no such thing as a closed system. In an open system, things change... In search of deeper meaning, things come and go and re-organize into a new order. It's all happening all the time. There's no such thing as a non self-organizing system. To the extent that our purpose is to design a new perfect system for humanity, you are whistling Dixie... This is a path to trouble, management science won't work. Self-organization will always be more effective than you. It's truth time: we are not in charge, we cannot begin to understand the complexity of things or keep up with the change. - Open Space was discovered over two martinis and a cocktail napkin 25 years ago. I didn't create it. Here's how it works: sit in a circle around some issue you care about, have a bulletin board where you can organize the time and place of meetings, open the marketplace, then go to work. - How do we effectively lead in this environment? Who's in charge here... Nobody or everybody... Leadership is there and there's no leader. What is a leader in this environment? It's a person being who they truly are, not learning about or being something else. This is what I call "Wave Riders." - Curious people possessed with an innate capacity to go with the flow... Their level of performance is consistently high, projects completed in a short amount of time, with a degree of excellence that is unusually high. This sets them apart, yet never alone. They create essential community bonds. Through invitation and appreciation, the efforts of many coalesce as one. We are ALL Wave Riders...