10. ENCOUNTER IN THE
NETHERLANDS

THE ROLE OF THE FACILITATOR – AND THE STATE OF THE FACILITATOR’S CONSCIOUSNESS – IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT TO ENABLING CREATIVE DISCOVERY WHILE USING THE U-PROCESS.

In November 2007, I had a highly illuminating encounter with a participant in a master class I was delivering in the Netherlands, an encounter that ultimately helped confirm my core learning from all that had occurred since the salon and helped inform my work going forward.

I was delivering the workshop with Betty Sue Flowers at Nijenrode University near Amsterdam. When we finished, a number of the participants came up to talk with us, and I fell into a conversation about Baja with someone when suddenly a young woman interrupted us, with apologies, and said, “Have you heard of Bernard Lievegoed and the U-methodology he uses?”

Astonished, I said “No – but I can sense the connection.” At this point, Betty Sue told me that the taxi was waiting to take us to the airport, so I quickly wrote down the woman’s name, Annemieke Korte, and her email address.

For the next year, we emailed back and forth. Annemieke told me that she was in the process of writing a manuscript for a book to be published about the kind of organization that is required to create a truly healing climate for children with severe trauma, developmental disorders, or mental handicaps. She had read Synchronicity and Presence and had been drawn to the workshop to find inspiration for completing her book. She worked at Zonnehuizen, a highly regarded academy for children with the disabilities she had described, founded by Bernard Lievegoed, a distinguished physician, author, educator, and industrial psychologist.

Lievegoed had been director of Zonnehuizen from its founding until 1954, when he founded the Nederlands Pedagogisch Instituut (the Netherlands Pedagogical Institute, or NPI), which was an institute for organizational development. He led NPI for the next seventeen years, and it became his life’s work.

I discovered that the main feature the NPI “U-procedure” had in common with the U-theory we had developed using Brian Arthur’s insights was the figure of the U itself. The moment Otto drew the first U in the parking lot at Xerox PARC, I found the downward movement perfectly representative of the courage, the act of will it takes to reach for that “place of deeper knowing” and to act on it. We used the figure U to “envision and model one single process with seven distinct aspects or practices.”

One reason I hadn’t heard of the European version of the U-procedure was that it was better known in Europe as the “NPI Method” – which is why Annemieke thought Lievegoed had created it. In fact, Friedrich Glasl and Dirk Lemson developed the U-methodology, first presenting it in an internal NPI paper in 1969.

While learning that there was a European “U” was interesting, the deeper gift to me in the encounter with Annemieke was coming to know the other work of Glasl and of Lievegoed himself, who published more than thirty best-selling books, his last finished ten days before his death in 1992. Many of his books deeply inform the inner journey humans take toward releasing their full capacity.

In Man on the Threshold, Lievegoed describes how humanity is experiencing a fundamental change in consciousness. The perceived boundaries that surrounded consciousness for centuries are no longer fixed, and as we shall see, it is no longer only the physical world that implies reality. Phases – The Spiritual Rhythm of Adult Life charts the milestones humans pass through from adolescence through old age, milestones that are universal in nature. Regardless of background, everyone must pass through critical outer and inner stages, like those of the hero’s journey that the mythographer Joseph Campbell had described.

In The Developing Organization, Glasl and Lievegoed describe four phases of organizational development (the pioneer; the differentiated; the integrated; and the associative phases) and compare them to the evolution of human consciousness. Later, Glasl published The Enterprise of the Future: Moral Intuition in Leadership and the Organization’s Development. (In both these books, the authors refer to the “U-procedure” as a methodology of self-diagnosis, self-discovery, and planning.)

My conversations and correspondence with Annemieke confirmed my growing conviction that the role of the facilitator – and the state of the facilitator’s consciousness – is critically important to enabling creative discovery while using the U-process. During the Demonstration Projects, I had often seen the walls of separateness among the group dissolve and had seen the group tap into levels of creativity beyond their separate capacity.

An early example of this phenomenon was during the Food Lab Innovation Retreat. I had also seen projects and processes where the walls failed to dissolve. I determined to look more deeply into the “mystery” that occurs at the bottom of the U in order to develop a more precise theoretical understanding about what Rabbin had described as the “little doorway at the bottom of the U that is like a rabbit hole to non-being” and “set[s] fire to souls,” enabling leaders to tap their infinite capacity to “build arks, not for animals, but for love.”