Liminal Pathways Blog
Recovering An Indigenous View of the World: Reflections on A Cree Sundance
* How can a person immersed in western society recover an indigenous worldview? What are the ways that indigenous and non-indigenous people can build bridges of mutual appreciation and understanding? Can building such bridges help create shifts and a transformation toward a more holistic, ecological, spiritual, resilient and life affirming approach?
In this and the next posts, I share about my experience of participating in a Cree Sundance near Calgary, Canada. Rather than going right into describing the experience, in this post, I reflect on the challenges and opportunities of crossing cultural boundaries and world views and why it is important to explore them.
RECOVERING AN INDIGENOUS VIEW OF THE WORLD
Inclusion: A Necessary Step toward Collaboration
A few weeks ago, I participated in my first Sundance ceremony with the Cree people, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains near Calgary, Canada. It is not a regular practice for Native people to invite non-Natives. This group’s openness to share their ceremony with people from across cultures makes me hopeful for our future. For those who participate from other cultures or traditions, the ceremonies open the door to experiencing the Cree’s cultural practices and worldview and the deep wisdom in this spiritual healing tradition. Of course, like the others coming from the outside, I will never be indigenous and will never grasp the totality of a Native worldview and the subtleties of this spiritual orientation. We can, however, be open to appreciating and experiencing their ways and explore how these can help address the calamities of our western way of life and a worldview that feels so out of balance.
More and more indigenous people are stepping forward to share in this way. They KNOW that deep down inside—below the color of our skin, and beyond diverse […]
A Year of Leading Change with The Metropolitan Council – An Invitation
Gisela & David introduce the Grove’s facilitation model.
Recently as part of my role at The Grove Consultants International, I had the opportunity to work with the Metropolitan Council in the twin city of Minnesota to them help them develop their internal process and change leadership capability. I partnered with David Sibbet and together we designed and co-led a one-year Leading Change Program for 20 of their emerging leaders. The program was successful all around and we feel encouraged to offer it again.
Below is a look inside the program and what we did to embed it into the organization in order to build capacity by addressing existing change challenges the organization was already facing. If this approach, learning by doing and doing by learning, resonates with you, and you would like to support such a program within your organization or are interested in participating in a public offering of this program, we invite you to write to us.
Our Client
The Metropolitan Council is a regional body, overseeing all of Minneapolis-St. Paul’s wastewater, transit system, housing projects, and regional planning efforts. One of the major goals of the council is to work increasingly more systemically and collaboratively not only within the organization but also regionally and with the communities they serve. The council also has come to understand that the amount and magnitude of change that they will be facing is only increasing. The general manager of Environmental Services, one of the council’s divisions, for example, has the vision to facilitate creating an integrated and environmentally sustainable water management approach by 2050. This vision is called, One Water.
It is within the context of our client recognizing that […]
Harvesting Liminal Songlines – Honoring the Aboriginal Tradition of Australia
Uluru at Dusk, Central Desert, Australia
This past fall I went live with my new website giselawendling.com and blog Liminal Pathways. Liminal Pathways is also the title of a framework I have developed based on my evolving understanding of rites of passages as an archetypal framework for understanding human systems change. The word liminal comes from the Latin and means threshold or margin. It alludes to the in-between period in a change process where we are no longer the old and not yet the new, when the transformative process is the most active. The Liminal Pathways blog features essays on this topic.
In this post I introduce 13 essays that are very special to me and which I originally wrote for my Liminal Songlines blog. I these essays I reflect on my experiences exploring the spiritual healing tradition of the Aboriginal people of Australia while I was living there from 2009 to 2012. I write about the timeless wisdom of the Aboriginal people, their ceremonial practices and art, what they can teach us about relating to the land, and how to care for ourselves and each other during a time of change and challenge. You can find links to these essays at the bottom of this post.
Learning About Ceremonies: The Peruvian Andes and The Kalahari
My prior immersion into the shamanic/mystical tradition of the indigenous people of the Peruvian Andes, specifically the Q’eros, together with my participation in the healing dances of Kalahari Bushman in Africa, had instilled in me a deep desire to go deeper.
My field trips to these remote places helped me understand how traditional people live their lives in a world in which spirit is present all around […]
The Challenge of Changing Culture: Promise and Perils
I have been thinking a lot about how organizational cultures change and the challenges that are part of adopting and developing new cultural practices and norms. It is clear to me that culture change requires attention over time, reflecting on what is working and what is not, and a co-creative approach to help make it stick. But I have a cautionary tale about imposing processes that we believe in on people who aren’t ready.
This is a story from my years teaching at Sonoma State University, when I first began teaching a core curriculum course in humanistic psychology to undergraduate students. This was when I encountered an interesting culture change challenge, symbolized by moving chairs. […]
Creating a Culture of Collaboration and Change at a College of Business Administration
Recently I teamed up with Laurie Durnell, The Grove’s co-president, to design and facilitate a visioning and culture development process with the College of Business Administration at Cal Poly Pomona. The college of six academic departments and more than 5,000 students needed to move beyond a culture of silos, update some of its administrative processes, and address what seemed to be a lack of opportunities for innovation. As the college was getting ready to celebrate its 50th anniversary and was shifting from a quarter-based to two-semester-based system, the timing was ripe for a major renewal process.
This is a story of how change methodology, dialogic practice, and visual facilitation combined to achieve a successful result, symbolized by the completed Grove Storymap® (see above).
Launching the Project
Our first step in the process was getting clear on the specific objectives. The dean of the college, Dr. Erik Rolland, asked us to:
- Support the college to move beyond a culture of silos to become a culture that more fully embraces change, collaboration and innovation;
- Develop a strategic vision and associated initiatives that inspire new and bold actions to stay competitive in the marketplace while working with very real resource constraints;
- Strengthen the momentum for several major procedural changes, including moving from an academic quarter system to a two-semester system.
To begin building relationships, we held initial interviews with representatives from the various academic departments and staff units to learn about the challenges and opportunities facing the college and to assess the college’s readiness for change. Erik was interested in activating organization-wide support for change, and he knew of The Grove’s high-engagement processes and how they support alignment around change and […]
Facilitating a Vision & Change Alignment Process for the University of California – Merced
Here is a case study written for The Grove Journal about one of several whole-systems change projects I have been co-leading with David Sibbet and other Grove consultants.
Driven by economics and demand, the University of California’s newest campus in Merced is expected to double in size by 2020. No fewer than 72 change projects faced Michael Reese, vice chancellor of Business Administration, in 2016 when he engaged The Grove’s Gisela Wendling, Ph.D., and David Sibbet to facilitate a campus-wide 2020 Visioning and Change Alignment Process.
The process combined large-scale strategic-change consulting, visual facilitation, Grove Storymapping®, and interactive-network technology in a series of large summit meetings with faculty, staff and students. The meetings were guided by a Change Alignment Team (CAT) of top project managers led by Reese and the former dean of the School of Engineering, Erik Roland.
At Chancellor Dorothy Leland’s insistence, the process streamed real-time to students, staff and faculty who couldn’t attend the face-to-face meetings. An interactive platform provided by Grove partner Covision allowed virtual and in-person table groups to share the same visioning, goal-setting, and insight-sharing activities.
