HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

All of us at Pegasus want to thank you for your continued support of our work. We wish you the happiest holiday season, filled with good health, peace, and joyful spirits.

2004 PEGASUS CONFERENCE RECAP
Surmounting the Challenges to Sustainable Collaborations

"Each time I come to the Pegasus Conference, my personal learning edges are stretched."
—Christopher Abbey, Boeing Corp/OSR Northwest

"Wonderful people at the conference, accessible presenters—everyone is an active learner with the spirit of sharing."
—Alice Warner, W.K. Kellogg Foundation

There's a growing awareness in organizations and in the world at large that we must collaborate in order to tackle our most vexing challenges, but what does true collaboration really entail? How and where do we develop the skills necessary to produce meaningful change together? What are the true costs of failing to take into account all facets of the system? And how can we move from creating a shared vision of a brighter future to bringing it into being?

These are some of the compelling questions that more than 600 participants from the business, education, healthcare, nonprofit, and government sectors came together to explore at this year's Pegasus Conference, Building Collaborations to Change Our Organizations and the World: Systems Thinking in Action®." Through two-and-a-half days of keynote sessions, skill-building and case-study workshops, and opportunities to network with a unique community of learners, participants came away with insights into how to surmount the many challenges to sustainable collaborations. At the same time, they developed a deeper capacity to carry out personal and organizational change and a renewed sense of mission for building a better future for themselves, their organizations, and the world.

The program offered a continuum of change through collaboration, ranging from the personal to the global. In the opening session, bestselling author and management thought leader Danah Zohar centered on the idea that, in order to be effective together, we need to challenge ourselves as individuals. She offered a framework for developing our "spiritual intelligence" as a basis for building productive collaborative networks.

Other speakers reflected on the changes our organizations need to undergo in order to support effective collaboration, both internally and with outside partners. Educational leader Deborah Meier talked about the role that schools can play in helping people develop the critical skills needed to fully participate in society. In one of the provocative forum sessions, system dynamicist John Sterman and dialogic leader Bill Isaacs teamed up to develop a working hypothesis of how individuals can move their organizations from perpetual fire-fighting to ongoing generative change.

Caterpillar vice president Cristiano Schena illustrated how a powerful shared vision transformed a division of the company from one of the weakest to one of the strongest. In the process, workers realized that their continued success depended on their efforts to support the well-being of the larger community as well. Representatives from the Greyston Foundation and Greyston Bakery echoed the theme that you can't touch one part of a system without affecting the rest. In moving testimonials, they described how efforts to create jobs for those deemed unemployable evolved to providing daycare, healthcare, and continuing education to lift up all aspects of the lives of local residents.

Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, concluded the conference with a call to action on the looming social and environmental challenges we face. Circling back to the role of the individual, he pointed out, "My change is not sufficient but is necessary." He concluded, "We don't have to know how [large-scale change] is going to happen, we just have to get it started." For many attendees, this conference was the first step toward doing just that. View our web site in the coming month for resources from the conference, including mind-mapping graphics, slam poetry, and the opportunity to purchase recordings of some of the conference sessions. And watch for news about next year's conference, to be held November 14–16, 2005, in San Francisco, California!

LEARNING LINKS
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
by Jane Hilburt-Davis

Rather than strive to remove boundaries between people, I venture to suggest that only when we have "clear boundaries" can we appreciate the value of relationships. To illustrate, think about nature. If the boundary defining a living cell—the cell wall—disappeared, so too would the cell. In living systems, such as organizations, families, teams, or neighborhoods, "boundary" can be likened to the limits and identity of each individual within the system and of the system as a whole.

The ideal boundary, like a healthy cell membrane, is semi-permeable and regulates the exchange of substances (energy, information, emotions) between one system and another. Through this regulated exchange, the system can grow, change, adapt, and, paradoxically, maintain its identity. Rigid boundaries cut off contact with the external environment, starving and suffocating the system. Diffuse boundaries fail to maintain the system's identity, allowing information from the outside to engulf it. The ideal is a balance of the two extremes.

How do we create this balance? One way is by managing and working through our differences. Differences are what we experience when we come up against each other's boundaries. Again, nature is a good teacher. Differences in, for example, temperature, magnetic charges, and pressure stimulate a flow of energy between two systems. The greater the contrast, the more energetic the flow becomes.

In our social systems as well, we need to build in procedures for managing the energy released by our differences—not for minimizing those differences. It is the negotiation, compromises, and flow of collaboration forged through regulating our dissimilarities—not sameness—that create the strongest links and enable these connections to withstand the ever-changing, turbulent world in which sustainable social systems thrive.

Read the complete article, or see LEVERAGE, No. 48 (June 2000).