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Workshops & seminars

Change Below the Water Line: Social Fields as a Key Leverage Point for Change


Date & time
Tuesday, May 3, 2022
5 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.
Speaker(s)

Eva Pomeroy

Cost

This event is free

Where

Online

The key leadership challenge of our times is to cultivate creativity, innovation and leadership capacity at all levels of the system. What makes the difference between an organization where people regularly step into new action and one where people play it safe and ‘keep their heads down’? It likely has much to do with the quality of the social field. 

The social field is the relational space of a social system – the embodied, felt, lived experience of ‘us’. It is the less visible dimension of the system and its influence it pervasive and powerful. We know the social field. Walk into any office, classroom or social gathering and we feel the atmosphere of the social space. Whether we are aware of it or not, that atmosphere – the social field – shapes our thinking, feeling and acting. What’s more, we shape the quality of the social field in turn with our own thinking, feeling and action. 

That makes the social field a potent leverage point for change. 

When the quality of the social field improves, so do the visible results created by the system. We have greater agency to co-shape the field than we may believe. Bringing greater awareness, attention and intentionality to the social field – the relational space – has a transformative effect on relationships within a system. Transformed relationships transform systems. In this session, we work with the social field, providing a framework to move social systems toward greater generativity, co-creativity and innovation. 

In this session you will: 

  • Be introduced to a social field framework around which concrete interventions can be designed
  • Explore the social field through experiential exercises including contemplative practice, journaling and dialogue 
  • Gain insight into your own agency shaping the social fields that matter to you.

Facilitator

Eva Pomeroy

Eva pomeroy is Research Lead and u.lab Faculty at the Presencing Institute, an awareness-based action research organization at the intersection of science, consciousness, and profound social and organizational change. U.lab is an online-to-offline transformative change process offered by MITx which has served over 200,000 participants across 184 countries in the past 7 years. Eva is a Co-Founder and Managing Editor of the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, a trans- and multidisciplinary open access journal providing a platform for creative scholarship that brings a first- and second-person lens to the field of systems thinking and systems change. From 2017-2020, she held the Social Innovator in Residence post at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and is currently 

Affiliate Faculty of the Department of Applied Human Sciences. Her work with participative processes integrates systems thinking, participative action research, contemplative practices, community engagement and transformative learning. Her action research focuses on the cultivation of the social field as a key leverage point for individual and collective transformation, as well as the examination of the theoretical foundations and practices shaping social field work from a decolonization lens. She lives in Montreal with her husband and two sons.

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