Join us — just a few simple steps
First Get familiar with the book SO FAR FROM HOME: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World by Margaret J. Wheatley
Then Look over the Method and Approach we plan to use.
Browse through Chapter by Chapter to see our work in progress
AND JOIN THE PARTICIPANTS in this So Far From Home STUDY GROUP for our weekly GoToMeeting session each Tuesday in February and March at 5 pm Seattle time. Just leave a comment below with your name, email address, and interest in the study.
or contact one of us directly:
Jim Wiegel: jfwiegel@yahoo.com
Gordon Harper: gharper@gmail.com
Helen Wythe: helenwythe@gmail.com
PLEASE ALSO Invite your friends and colleagues to join as well. Want to organize a face to face gathering? We are glad to help.
Before Kanyi Maquebela became an investment partner at the Collaborative Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on social enterprises, he was a typical Stanford student in need of career guidance. He was working with startups, studying philosophy, dating someone special—and feeling overwhelmed.
Enter “Designing Your Life,” a new and wildly popular course for Stanford juniors and seniors that is grounded in design thinking concepts and techniques. The course’s lessons gave him the perspective he needed to navigate decisions about life and work post graduation.
“It really helped me understand what the concept of vocation was,” he says. “I had thought of it either as a narrowly religious concept or for a specific job. But it’s this feeling that I have true agency over my work, because I know what I stand for and I have tools to fix the things that I encounter in my life.”
He felt liberated, he says, by how the course positioned the idea of career success: “Take your work personally, but it’s not your person.”
At the time, “Designing Your Life” was still an experiment, spearheaded by Bill Burnett, executive director of Stanford’s design program, and Dave Evans, who led the design of Apple’s first mouse and co-founded Electronic Arts before embarking on a second career in the classroom. They launched the course in spring 2010.
“It took off in just about a heartbeat,” says Evans, who oversees instruction with help from guest lecturers and a small army of student volunteers, who lead discussion groups. Today, 17% of seniors enroll in “Designing Your Life,” and many more vie for the limited seats in each section. “We’ve had students literally teach the class on the side to their friends who weren’t enrolled,” he says.
Evans divides the course into two parts: first, he says, “We reframe the problem. That’s where dysfunctional beliefs get blown-up. Then we give them a set of tools and ideas to take steps to start building the way forward.” Each course section convenes for one quarter, two hours per week.
Here’s what they learn: gratitude; generosity; self-awareness; adaptability. All reinforced by design thinking-based tools, from a daily gratitude journal to a deck of cards featuring problem-solving techniques. In lieu of a final exam—the class is pass/fail—students present three radically different five-year plans to their peers. Alumni say they still refer back their “odyssey plans”—a term that Evans coined—and revise them as their lives and careers progress.
We’ve had students literally teach the class on the side to their friends who weren’t enrolled.
Maquebela eventually found out that he had played a role in his now-wife’s odyssey plan—but at the time, “she wouldn’t show it to me.” Today, they still reference “Designing Your Life” when making decisions together. “Building your life around somebody else, and orienting around love as part of one’s career, is part of the class,” he says.
For years, students have resisted this kind of overlap between university-sponsored programs and their private lives. After the Civil War, mandatory chapel disappeared, academics rather than ministers became university presidents, and courses like “Evidences of Christianity” vanished from the required curriculum.
“Universities didn’t think they would necessarily be abandoning the moral aspects of students’ education,” says Julie Reuben, a Harvard professor who studies the history of American higher education. “Instead, they believed that freely chosen activities were more powerful than externally forced activities.”
But, to the chagrin of university leaders, many students abandoned religion and instead embraced extracurricular outlets like athletics and fraternities, which in their own way took on the function of character-formation. In the mid-20th century, the university’s role as authority figure became even more problematic and contested, as protesters dismantled the Ivory Tower’s paternalistic structures and paved the way for increasingly diverse and inclusive institutions. The success of “Designing Your Life” suggests that students may be ready to revisit that earlier university model, with conditions—conditions that design thinking is perhaps well-suited to address.
“In the early academy it was all about moral formation. These days you can’t do that,” Burnett says. “Design doesn’t speak to ethics and spirituality and all those things, but they work within its frameworks. Our only bias is, hey, we can make the future better.”
The goal of “Designing Your Life,” he says, is to change higher education—not by returning to religion, but by reintroducing methods of “forming you into the person that will go out into the world, effect change, and be a leader.”
That message resonates with Stanford students. They are filled with a sense of purpose and determined to solve the world’s problems—but ill-equipped, in our secular society, to make sense of what they value.
Our only bias is, hey, we can make the future better.
Karen Wright, a management science major with a wry sense of humor, says the odyssey plan exercise better prepared her to live out her commitment to making a difference in the world. “I felt a lot of pressure before the odyssey plan: I need to pick a career,” says the California native. At the course end, she presented three starkly divergent scenarios to Evans and her classmates: working in health care and going to business school; joining the Peace Corps; and competing on American Ninja Warrior (surely an odyssey-plan first). “Your eyes light up when you talk about the Peace Corps,” her classmates said—so for now, she’s focused on door number 2.
What’s more, her parents are more supportive than they were before; Wright presented her odyssey plan to them, too. “My family is all from one area,” she says. “Ultimately, after graduation, I plan on not being around. I think I was able to convey to my parents more effectively why I want to travel and what I want to get out of it.”
As Burnett sees it, the course is also a neat fit for the mercurial economy that students are graduating into. “The thing that’s true about design problems is that you don’t know what the solution is going to look like. You don’t start with the problem; you start with people,” he says. “You create a point of view about what a better consumer experience would be. Then you prototype, you test, and you constantly change your point of view. That’s perfect for your ‘Designing Your Life.’ You can’t know the future, but you can know what’s available and you can prototype different versions of the you that you might become.”
Photo: Flickr user Esparta Palma
That approach stands in contrast to the habit of “accumulating accolades” that Burnett sees many students exhibiting at Stanford. Indeed, pressure to succeed is very much top of mind for Stanford students like Nick Xu, an architecture major from Sydney, Australia. He pauses for a moment from his Aussie-accented praise of Evans’s course (“freaking awesome!”) to reflect in a more serious way on the campus climate he and his peers inhabit. “Here, you’ve got to be viewed as successful,” he says. “There’s a very empty pursuit of money—money’s a big part of it—but also fame and perception, how other people view you.” “Duck syndrome” is a common malady: “You look like you’re floating on the surface, but you’re paddling furiously underneath.”
“I was a total duck,” he adds. “I really needed this class.”
Stanford administrators have taken notice of reactions like Xu’s. “It’s a model, as an administrator, that is not cheap, because it’s hands-on and requires small groups,” says Harry Elam, vice provost of undergraduate education. Nonetheless, he has asked Evans to develop a pared-down version of “Designing Your Life” for freshmen and sophomores as a complement to their academic advising. The resulting program, “Designing Your Stanford,” launched with its first cohort last fall.
Elam views both offerings as an answer to the prominent skeptics, like Peter Thiel, who question whether the traditional four-year college experience is worth the investment. “It’s very important that we reclaim what it means to get a liberal arts education,” he says. “College is not just a means to an end, but an end in itself.”
Buttressing that philosophy has taken on new urgency as “college” migrates online; in 2013, over 5 million U.S. college students, out of roughly 20 million, enrolled in at least one web-based course, according to the Babson Survey Research Group. American universities—today an unwieldy mix of liberal arts, professional training, and research—may have to focus in order to compete, education writer Kevin Carey argues in his new book, The End Of College. At a recent New America Foundation event, he pointed to the University of Minnesota-Rochester, located near the Mayo Clinic, as emblematic of the new model; the school offers only two majors, health sciences and health sciences administration, resulting in a cost structure that is is “a million times better than that of a typical second-tier institution.”
Stanford is very much a first-tier institution. Last year, it admitted just 5.7% of the students who applied. But as a residential college, it’s not immune from the vagaries of the shifting digital landscape.
“As online education becomes more appealing, residential colleges are thinking, what are the things you can only do face to face?” Reuben says. “Colleges never dropped the ‘we’re about the whole person, we’re about character’ from their rhetoric. In reality, it’s been easy for them to talk about that but do academic content and skills. That’s what they spend big resources on, and that’s how they select students.”
As online education becomes more appealing, residential colleges are thinking, what are the things you can only do face to face?
If online learning provides one backdrop for “Designing Your Life,” new research on the role of character in students’ long-term success provides another. Qualities like grit and curiosity are as important as spelling and long division, according to research conducted by two professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work has inspired organizations as varied as KIPP, a network of public charter schools, and Riverdale, one of New York’s most prestigious private schools, to take on the challenge of defining and evaluating “good character,” an undertaking detailed by Paul Tough in The New York Times Magazine.
On the surface, it’s hard to object to these initiatives, or to the very idea of designing your life. “We’re an invitation to have more and different ideas,” Evans says. “There’s more than one person running around in you, and they’re all you. Creating multiple solutions empowers the one you ultimately decide on.” He views the course as a continuation of Thomas Jefferson’s description of the University of Virginia as a “learning community to form citizen leaders.”
Photo: Flickr user Southern Arkansas University
But in my conversations with “DYL” students, both past and present, I was sometimes struck by how exhausting their pursuit of “flow,” “leadership,” and “positivity” had the potential to become. It was as if Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism had been re-staged in Palo Alto, California, circa 2015. Self-improvement, after all, can serve as a stand-in for salvation.
One phrase in particular—”being intentional”—was what caught my ear. I’d only ever heard it in church, where pastors often talk about “intentionality” in prayer, giving, or other behaviors.
“I’m now thinking about how to live my life with an intentionality that I didn’t have before. It’s in my hands,” Wright, the aspiring Peace Corps volunteer/American Ninja Warrior, told me.
I asked Nadia Mufti, a social entrepreneur who graduated from Stanford in 2011, what the phrase meant to her, after she used it several times. In all of her odyssey plans, she says, there was one common theme: “I wanted to take care of myself.”
She went on to describe how she has followed through on that goal: each morning she meditates for 30 minutes; she eats lots of green smoothies and vegetables; she has gone gluten-free. “I’ve done experiments on my body, and that’s when I feel best.” She tries to work out everyday, rotating between swimming, running, and yoga. She invests in relationships. “I have been really intentional in cultivating and maintaining close friendships, even when I’m really stressed.” She tries to read at least a book a month. “At one point, this is kind of taking it to an extreme, but I had this chart on my wall with habits that I wanted to create. Did you eat healthy today? Did you not drink today? Did you see friends outside of work today? How do you feel, on a scale on 1-10? I try to track if the things that I thought would make me happy really worked, at the end of the day.” She recognizes the importance of gratitude. “My boyfriend and I, before we go to bed, say at least three things that we’re grateful for.” For her 25th birthday, she spent 25 days in the service of friends and family. It went so well, she extended the project to 50 days. “I’d read a lot about servant leadership,” she says. “I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do that if I hadn’t taken the ‘Designing Your Life’ course.”
Her example left me feeling both inadequate and exhausted by association. I began mentally calculating whether I had time after work to bring a green smoothie to a friend I hadn’t seen in months—relationships, service, and nutrients, all accomplished in one efficient calendar block. Maybe I could bike there, for some added exercise.
But at the same time, it was hard to argue with Mufti’s choices. In her case, “Designing Your Life” had truly fulfilled its mission: she was happy, healthy, and making the world a better place.
This fall Mufti is returning to Stanford, where she’ll begin working toward her MBA at the Graduate School of Business. “Designing Your Life” has found a warm welcome there, too.
Photo: Flickr user VFS Digital Design
Carly Janson, a director in the business school’s career management center, has been been adapting the course for incoming students. “It’s not always easy to connect the dots between the legacy you want to leave on the world and the career decisions you need to make today,” she says. Design thinking, values-based but practical, provides a bridge.
“Career services, as a field, could totally change the way that we think about careers by applying design thinking,” she says. Students today are doing “careers design, plural,” and schools need to catch up to that reality.
We invite people to live intentionally, in a generative, thoughtful way, and we give them a bunch of tools.
The course’s success stories have started to attract attention outside of Stanford’s lush campus, and now plans to expand are in the works. Evans and Burnett are raising funds from Stanford donors, expanding their team, talking with other universities, and even working with Google to develop a new version of the program for working professionals. A book based on the course is due to hit shelves next spring.
Finding a way to replicate the avuncular Evans, the charismatic heart of the course, will be one of their primary challenges. Students gush about his intelligence and warmth. “An amazing, amazing, amazing human,” says one. “He is just the man,” says another.
“We started this as a thing on the side, and now we’ve got some stuff we have to build,” says Evans. But at the core, the program remains the same: “We invite people to live intentionally, in a generative, thoughtful way, and we give them a bunch of tools.” What happens next is up to the students.
Shirley and I are excited about the book study. We have a meeting across town on Feb 24th, but can listen/participate for the first hour. We have the book and will spend time this week trying to get up to speed. In March we have scheduled for the entire month.
Would love to join in on the next call!
Stacey
As a 1st timer, I went to the study event for Meg Wheatley’s book “So Far from Home”
It was fun!
For me,
a CONTENT HIGHLIGHT of this study event:
LEAH Early showed a smart-phone snapshot of an & artful “scratch chart” of a chapter – and we did a 20 minute “museum guide” tour to surface some of the root questions of that chapter.
a STUDY METHOD HIGHLIGHT of our study method:
HELEN Whythe gets it how to host near-zero stress video conferencing of both people & study documents on my web browser
a STUDY GROUP METHOD IMPROVEMENT:
GORDON Harper has created a Google Document to pull-together the individual particles of our study into a “study journal”. The benefit of seeing the study not as a series of 1 time events but as an organized study is obvious.
The Google Doc link to share so people can read, comment and edit the study journal is not accurate. GORDON: please provide the link address via the “SHARE” button not the display url. Please give study group members comment and edit functions, and please give non-study group members “read only” access.
A CONTENT IMPROVEMENT for Engaging Meg’s Book
JO NELSON suggested moving the dialogue with the author to “deeper level” learning by improving the “scratch charts” with propositional functional & existential insights. If I understand her suggestion this means improving each chapter’s scratch chart by writing simple “provocative propositions or questions” that might opoen-up courageous and fresh engagement personally, organizationally and more broadly in the culture of our current time.
I’d like to look into this with JO if she is available
Note from STEVE
PS THANKS for getting this study together!
2 bookstores in St. Paul have no copies.
Anyone know an online e-book purchase source with no DRM (digital rights management) strings attached?
What happens to old Change Agents, don’t you wonder?
====
Rosa Parks Birthday is tomorrow a new collection of Rosa Parks materials opens tomorrow.
See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/artifacts-show-a-rosa-parks-steeped-in-freedom-struggle-from-childhood/2015/02/02/90ee01f4-a7de-11e4-a7c2-03d37af98440_story.html?hpid=z4
“But Parks, in a way, was trapped by history — “frozen in the bus seat,” Battle said. She was the heroic, fed-up seamstress.
It seemed like her life started and stopped with the bus,” Battle said.
But that was not the case. “She didn’t stop there,” Battle said. “She continued. She worked with organizations. She started her own institute to honor her late husband. She worked with kids all over the world.”
Quote from the article
Think she’s right on as usual, will be online tomorrow at the beginning. What phone numbers do we use to call in?
Dick
I’ll do my “homework” in the morning and hope to be with you for the beginning tomorrow. Have a local meeting at 5:30, but can slip in a little late.
James I like your reference to Margaret Wheatley’s notion of “distracted ness” as aspect of our current cultural mood . . . I was wondering who else is in conversation with this book and if “distrated-ness might be a suitable study question to drive inquiry…
Just for fun I Googled “meg wheatley” and “distracted ness” here: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=Meg+Wheatley%2C+%22distracted+ness%22 and read some of the current conversations about her book. Pretty interesting reviews.
Then I did a google “allert” and found more conversations:
BLOGS
Meg Wheatley’s 12 principles for supporting healthy community
Chris Corrigan
 And of course, I’m a sucker for my friend Meg Wheatley. Today, in our Art of Hosting workshop in central Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa …
A Poem: “TURNING TO ONE ANOTHER” by Margaret Wheatley
Slow Money Maine
There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about. Ask: “What’s possible?” not “What’s wrong?” Keep asking. Notice what …
Her Simpler Way: Margaret Wheatley’s
Complexified’s Blog – WordPress.com
Her Simpler Way A review of “Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future,” byMargaret J. Wheatley (Berrett-Kohler, …
Walk Out Walk On – Meg Wheatley and Deborah Frieze
Metcalf & Associates
I attended a discussion this morning led by Meg Wheatley and Deborah Frieze about their latest book about leaders who walked out of limiting beliefs …
Peter Block and Meg Wheatley webinar
ALIA Institute
Join authors Peter Block, Margaret Wheatley and Berrett-Koehler president Steve Piersanti for a discussion of the 20th anniversary edition of Peter …
Wheatley, Nietzsche & the Blues
Cognitive Edge
I needed a book that would fit into a coat pocket and Margaret Wheatley’s So Far from Home had arrived in the post while I was away and it fitted the …
Meg Wheatley
Kimbra White
I am fantastically pleased to be hosting a one day workshop on ‘Engaging Communities in Challenging Times’ with Meg Wheatley in Melbourne on 21 …
New book by Meg Wheatley: So Far from Home
ALIA Institute
Meg Wheatley’s latest book So Far From Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World was published October 2012 by Berrett-Koehler. In her words …
“Walk Out Walk On” by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze
York Blog
“Walk Out Walk On (A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now)” by Margaret Wheatleyand Deborah Frieze. Overall, I loved …
Meg Wheatley – The Power of Chaos
Transition Culture
**Meg Wheatley** spoke at Dartington’s Barn Cinema on Wednesday 14th June as part of Dartington Arts’ Arts and Ecology Lecture series. I attempted …
I will look for Wheatley’s book, “So Far From Home”, today and will intend to be online tomorrow.
Charles, this from Steve Harrington
Wow! Charles Lingo, Great to be in a study group with you. Not since Academy 1973 when I learned the proper southern accent for “Boreswah” in DH Lawrence’s poem. Made me open a door to poetry for a lifetime. Steve Harrington.
I’ll try to be present for the first session, 8 PM for me.
I got an error message for the “Suggested Method and Approach” page. I would like to have a little advance idea of the method you’ll be using.
https://wedgeblade.net/wordpress/studies/suggested-method-and-approach/
try this link, Jo . . .
Would love to participate. Would work much better for me if it could be a little earlier in the day. Very interested in exploring Wheatley’s change theory as an alternative to interventionist approaches.
Recommend this talk given by tony Judt -his last talk before he died of ALS: Ill Fares Land. It think he is a sharper historian and philosopher than Meg Wheatley. I’ve been reading tim Snyder’s book thinking the 20 t Century tony Judt – which tries to pu t tony’s big ideas in to a workable framework, for example much of Existentialism and Sartre’s work and the notion of 20th century cultural revolution was an attempt to find a place to stand & away forward after Germany war and Holocoust.
It seems Meg Wheatley is trying to find a way forward from our strange and reactionary times.
Video clip of tony’s talk:
A quote: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/29/ill-fares-the-land/
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.
The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.
We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.
And yet we seem unable to conceive of alternatives. This too is something new.
Wonderful to see, Steve. Thanks for oaring in. I want to slow down, keep a focus and actually study in depth SO FAR FROM HOME. Your connection looks worth pursuing, I, however have done lots of web searching and following intriguing links, which I see as a different approach than a study. Personally, I am only starting to digest section two.
your meeting times may or may not be possible as they are during paid employment day.
I have not looked at the book yet but sound valuable.
5 pm Seattle would be 7 pm where you are? We can easily set up some additional times to provide opportunity, also some not the same time, not the same place opportunities.
A useful distinction Meg Wheatley drew several years ago about how social innovation occurs that Randy Williams found: ” the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships [that] form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible.
This is good news for those of us intent on changing the world and creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections.”
See
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13vuBV7280KvDf0s9KCqACSNDAFixvFDVszGVmUfnT5Y/edit?usp=sharing
I wonder if she reinforces this here. We should probably enlist Randy as well. Can you send him the link?