DoTS - Dialogues on Transforming Society & Self
Jun 16, 2020
10 episodes of conversation
What is DoTS?
The Presencing Institute hosted 10 episodes of Dialogues on Transforming Society & Self between April 2019 and March 2020, hosted by Otto Scharmer and co-produced by Rachel Hentsch. These monthly interactive Dialogues online each centered around one of the key acupuncture points of societal transformation.
With a variety of guests, stories and breakout sessions, these Dialogues provided a space for coming together and sensing into inspiring examples of societal renewal.
|
DoTS 1 - Otto Scharmer on Societal Transformation: 3 Narratives, 3 Shifts
The session addressed three important areas in which major shifts are happening: politics, economy and education. Otto Scharmer: "The cracks in the old system are opening up. It's an art form that we need to develop to not waste our time on stuff that isn't changeable, but really find those openings, the cracks where they are open, and to begin to work with them."
|
||
|
DoTS 2 - Eva Pomeroy & James Martin on Reinventing the 21st Century University
This dialogue session centered on how to rethink the university of the present and future, and is part of a larger and ongoing conversation on deep axial shifts
|
||
|
DoTS 3 - Kenneth Hogg on Systems Collapse & The Rise of People
This session focused on the new political coordinates of our time and what it might mean to reframe leading change and navigate transition as people need to re-orient, adjust, and often also deal with resistance.
|
||
|
DoTS 4 - Shoshana Zuboff on Surveillance Capitalism
Shoshana’s work has focused on helping people accelerate their grasp on the unprecedented, as this has been unfolding in technology. She says: “the forces that drive the unprecedented have the advantage of time. They have the first mover advantage. They can shape the landscape before we have woken up to what is happening.”
|
||
|
DoTS 5 - Chad Frischmann on Drawdown: How to reverse Global Warming
We have so many brilliant solutions, it is mainly a matter of putting them into action. Instead of focusing on the problem, which is what commonly happens in public discourse, Chad advocates for highlighting the solutions and getting on with them. Referring to "touchable solutions", he presented the Top 20 climate solutions as a tapestry of possibilities.
|
||
|
DoTS 6 - Melanie Goodchild on Indigenous Wisdom and the Civilizational Shift from Ego to Eco
Melanie shares about her journey of integrating Indigenous knowledge with her academic training as she founded the Turtle Island Institute, which "in English we call a think and do tank, but the elders call it a teaching lodge". Before the institute could be created, Melanie first had to go through a process "of decolonizing her own practice" to move away from a "business as usual" approach.
|
||
|
DoTS 7 - Kelvy Bird on Generative Scribing: the Power of Social Arts
Kelvy explains that in Generative Scribing you're “holding the whole system”, which includes “what’s not in the room. You’re holding what’s in between the people.” This requires “understanding that this moment in time that you’re helping to represent" is not the only dimension you tap into; "you’re actually sensing into what came before that moment and what might emerge from that moment.”
|
||
|
DoTS 8 - Arawana Hayashi - Reshaping Systems Change: Inventing New Social Arts and Awareness-Based Social Technologies
Arawana shares how embodiment through "heart intelligence" helps us to make systems visible: “the Presencing part is bringing this sense of mindfulness and awareness to this moment of our experience, which can be fresh and doesn’t have to be dictated by our habitual patterns.”
|
||
|
DoTS 9 - Angel Acosta - Collective Healing: Facing 400 Years of Structural Inequality
“The question that I’ve been asking myself for last several years, is: What is the connection between social justice and mindfulness?" Having explored deep structural social justice issues on the one hand, but also "this power of the mind and body to create ease and peace and mindfulness" on the other, he says that "what I’ve come to learn is that at the center of all of that is healing. This idea of providing a space for healing, restoration, and reconciliation.”
|
||
|
DoTS 10 - Drew Jones - Climate Interactive: from Opinion, to Fact, to Grounded Action
Drew speaks about his life’s work to develop a climate simulation model, and invites participants on a journey taking them from opinion, to facts, towards proposals for grounded action. “There is no silver bullet,” says Drew. “We need to think of it as a ‘silver buckshot."
|