JEAN HOUSTON ON THE NEW WAYS OF LEADERSHIP THAT OUR TIMES DEMAND
As we find the world in the most tumultuous and promising time of human history, it is abundantly clear that sufficient leadership training and education are sorely lacking. Few, if any, leadership training programs in the world today embrace their task with a whole-human, whole-system approach, engaging the many capacities of the individual while at the same time providing adequate insight and understanding and training to engage the challenges that currently confront humankind. Thus, many are in need of such training and exploration if they are to have the skills and cross-cultural capacities to successfully meet the enormous issues of our time.

Social ArtistryTM is the vital synergy between inner and outer realities necessary to transform organizations and institutions, and to serve paths of possibility and visionary endeavor. Social ArtistryTM unleashes the human spirit of both those who initiate and implement the endeavor and those who are served by it. Social ArtistryTM acts as the catalyzing agent to take an idea or project to a place of optimal value for our planet and our time.

What I discover in my work in many countries, cultures, organizations, and systems is that there is no particular vision about what this world and its people could be. Yes, of course, there are plenty of programs with regard to specific challenges—ecology, social justice, human rights. But the vision of a planetary civilization that offers equity, education, sufficiency, and the ability to live on this beautiful planet in a way that encourages the possible human and the possible world--sadly there is little in the way of an interdependent vision of the Whole. There is, therefore, no lure of becoming, almost nothing that calls us to work together to transform our failing world into the magnificent, munificent civilization that we are challenged to create.

The field of Social ArtistryTM prepares us to respond to this extraordinary challenge by giving us skills and tools as well as an understanding of the ways of whole system transition. Through the methods of Social Artistry, we become experts in transition initiatives, both visionaries and pragmatists in the great work of making a difference. When we began our training programs in Social Artistry we would not have believed how widespread and effective our work would become, now reaching hundreds of thousands of people in many countries.

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