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ELIAS 2.0

The Presencing Institute, the Society for Organizational Learning, the MIT Leadership Center, and the MIT Center for Reflective Community Practice are launching the second year of the program “Emerging Leaders Innovate Across Sectors” (ELIAS). ELIAS is a global cross-sector network of high-potential leaders and their institutions working collectively to generate new ideas, prototypes, and ventures. The purpose of ELIAS is to contribute to the evolution of sustainable global market systems that build human, social, and natural capital as well as financial and industrial capital.

Concrete outcomes of this 12-month leadership journey are:

• Prototypes for cross-sector innovation that address the shared challenges of creating value for the triple bottom line— the economy, society, and the environment— with the ultimate goal of advancing global sustainability.
• A steadily growing network of leaders in the public, private, and civic sectors that will enhance and accelerate the benefits to individual members.
• A growing capacity among participating organizations to develop sustainable solutions across the three sectors.
• Useful information and ideas for innovative solutions to individual members’ challenges.
• An enhanced capacity among leaders to respond to the challenges of globalization and sustainable development by pioneering practical innovations.

Co-founders of ELIAS include, BASF, BP, Nissan, Oxfam Great Britain, the UN Global Compact, Unilever, the World Bank Institute, and the World Wildlife Fund.

Why ELIAS?

Leaders in institutions around the world face unprecedented economic, social, ecological, and political challenges locally and globally. These challenges will only multiply in the next decades; leaders must confront them. In doing so, they can create opportunities for innovation by reinventing business models and identities, transforming social change protocols, and working more collaboratively with governments.

Community Value will become the guiding term as successful companies of this century purposefully connect to communities, NGOs, and governments to co-create more transparent and generative economic, social, and ecological processes/relationships. The result will be productive, healthy and sound business, social, and environmental relationships.

Future sources of value will stem from leveraging these four areas of innovation. But for that to happen, leaders and institutions must reach out to other stakeholders to create new patterns that weave together business, government, and civil society.

To meet major global challenges, crosssector engagement demands new skills, networks, and fields of practice. ELIAS provides both the stimulating context or practice field and active methodologies.

Approach:

Using a methodology called “presencing” to achieve profound innovations, ELIAS provides participants with a core set of practical skills:

• Immersion in cross-sector peer-shadowing experiences and “deep-dive learning journeys” in different regions offer a fresh view into another aspect of the global economy and some of its core issues.
• Deep listening and dialogue tools help participants operate more powerfully and effectively as part of rapidly changing systems of value creation.
• Deep reflection practices help participants convert experiential input into improved leadership practices and to communicate with more authentic leadership presence.
• Hands-on prototyping allows participants to create experimental microcosms in order to explore the future by doing.
• Participants experience innovation processes from concept creation to fastcycle experimentation; teams build, test, refine, and improve prototype ideas through multiple iterations in various contexts with multiple feedback loops.
• Participants learn how to leverage their institutional and personal networks in order to move their systems toward more effective ways of operating.
• Regular interaction among participants and institutional stakeholders helps embed innovation within participating institutions.

How does it work?

From 2008, ELIAS will operate on four levels:

1. The Global ELIAS Platform
   Emerging highest-potential leaders nominated by the CEOs of their institutions to participate in a global innovation program will receive intensive training in core presencing skills, participate in deep dives, and learn to develop and guide prototyping experiences. A proposed curriculum is attached.
2. An Evolving Network of Regional ELIAS Platforms
   Country-level and regional programs will continue to be organized by ELIAS participants. Currently, these are being planned for Indonesia, southern Africa, Europe, and China, with a possible fifth country-level program in Brazil. In each of these places, ELIAS alumni have committed to being core leaders and faculty in country-level and regional ELIAS efforts. These efforts will also create opportunities for high-potential leaders from ELIAS member institutions to join ELIAS programs at any level.
   • Indonesia and Southern Africa: Each ELIAS microcosm will take on a key challenge facing each country (e.g., flooding in Jakarta; social protection for children orphaned by AIDS in Namibia). It will also bring together young and future leaders from global ELIAS companies/institutions. Jointly these teams will put their skills and strategic networks into the service of solving pressing problems in the local community.
   • Europe: The Summer School project led by ELIAS alums from BASF, InWEnt, UNICEF, and WWF is currently experimenting with using cross-institutional ELIAS platforms and younger leaders to address leadership challenges related to water issues in Africa and China.
   • China: The Learning Lab is focused on the critical issue of sustainable mobility, with obvious implications for the country and region, but also the global community.
3. In-House Platform
   Participating ELIAS institutions are pursuing innovations that integrate social innovation, business innovation, institutional (or brand) identity transformation, and “leadership DNA” transformation (connecting to your authentic Self). This ELIAS effort is undertaken by participants in order to advance core innovation principles in their own fields of practice. The goal is to harness institutional energy and maintain the push toward transformation in participants’ everyday efforts. This can be accomplished, for example, by taking on board an innovative project or through short workshops focused on the core principles. While ELIAS fellows, as faculty members, continue to enhance their learning as they teach presencing practices, the impact of the course is spread to other members of the organization and the capacity of the organization to use this knowledge and skills is enhanced. For in-house workshops and projects, ELIAS fellows can draw on the ELIAS alumni network.
4. ELIAS Alumni
   The global network of ELIAS fellows continues to build and implement prototypes, as well as to create space for innovation in their institutions based on their greater capacity to sense the needs and aspirations of their communities. These leaders serve as coaches and as co-creators of an evolving innovation ecology that serves our economic, social, and ecological well-being.

For further information, please contact:

C. Otto Scharmer
MIT Sloan School of Management
Phone: (+1) 617-253-0486
Email: scharmer@mit.edu

Dayna L. Cunningham
MIT Ctr for Reflective Community Practice
Phone: (+1) 646 327-3770
Email: dayna@mit.edu

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