2007 Year of Formulation

2007, our first full year of work on the School for Leadership, was a year of formulation. Formulation is a somewhat turbulent period of exploring and testing, a time that invites our boldest and most creative ideas.

Click here to read the Principles of Formulation we identified and What We Learned during the year. Below are some of our major accomplishments in 2007.

• Created the conditions for the ongoing emergence of the school. That is, we put in place the conditions that will be encountered by designers, faculty, and participants as they develop and run the school. These conditions include the school’s structures, processes, rules, and procedures. A design intention for the school is that it emerge successfully over time. For that to happen requires structures that foster discovery, learning, adaptation, and evolution. Examples of conditions for emergence are versioning the school with releases 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, etc.; and creating a curriculum that enables infinite variety in offerings by identifying the body of distinctions to be transferred rather than defining a “course catalogue” with requirements.


• Distinguished the organizational framework of the Mastery Foundation to include the School for Leadership as well as its other ongoing programs and initiatives.


• Identified the body of distinctions to be transferred in the curriculum, including in version 1.0. Organized those distinctions inside a framework that will allow for their development and transfer within the school’s offerings.


• Collaborated successfully with another organization, the Ariel Group, in offering leadership training. In October, 11 participants worked with two professional Ariel Group facilitators over two days and produced dramatic changes in their presentation skills and presence.


• Created and aligned on the criteria for adding new members to each element.


• Created a pilot program for distinguishing, practicing, and transferring the skill of enrollment to grassroots leaders. The group participating in the pilot successfully sourced a full Making a Difference workshop in April in Ireland.


• Created a number of structures for communication and coordinating our activities. In addition to regular conference calls, we also created a wiki for the Stewards and elements. A wiki is a website that allows for collaboration by letting members store, access, and edit information, conversations, and documents.


• Committed to documenting the process of building the school and created the structures that allowed us to do this throughout the year.


• Completed a basic, detailed document that can be customized for requesting grants from funding organizations.


• Distinguished what we mean by transformational leader and created a faculty profile.