The Proteus Initiative

http://proteusinitiative.org/PProgrammes.aspx

Working With Social Complexity

The Proteus Initiative is directed towards all those who are engaged in, or responsible for, complex social situations:

• leaders, managers, facilitators
• social development practitioners, consultants and activists
• those interested in holistic approaches to the helping professions
• all those organisations concerned with any aspect of social transformation and renewal.

We help practitioners facilitate:

• accurate and responsive readings of social situations
• intuitive and rigorous understanding out of seeming chaos and intractability
• interventions that may restore wholeness to fragmenting parts.

The Proteus Initiative has been founded by social practitioners with many years experience of development practice. Employing an understanding and practices first developed for seeing into living processes within the world of nature, we seek to enable a new way of engaging with social and developmental phenomena: a way which may work effectively with social complexity. So that we gain the capacity to move beyond social and ecological complexities as problems to be solved, and view them instead as emergent situations that we relate to in participatory ways.

We often think our problems come to us from without, but we have become trapped within a way of thinking that contributes to these problems: social, economic and ecological fragmentation is a function of our own construction of the world. We create the world we inhabit through who we are and how we approach it. A new kind of engagement, a new way of thinking, is called for.

1. Towards a Thinking which is Alive as its Subject Matter

August, Springtime at Towerland, southern Cape, South Africa
The Proteus Initiative is privileged to host Craig and Henrike Holdrege of The Nature Institute to participate and teach in three separate processes. While each process is different, each will attempt to bring our social and ecological strivings together within the broad framing of a Goethean phenomenology, deepening our practice and our thinking towards a genuinely holistic and living response to our world. This time at Towerland and in Cape Town promises to be a rare gift for all who participate.

Click here to download the brochure (PDF)


Leading into an unknowable future

2. Eventually Wild – Practices at the Threshold

Wild is a state of being, carried through our own intentions, to be able to range beyond limits, to cross thresholds, inner and outer. In our working lives, we may become so defined by outer circumstance that we fail to lead into the new. Eventually Wild is a 6-day workshop offering you the opportunity to expand your perceptions of what the world is calling from you now as a leader in your field. The workshop is offered as a collaboration between Sue Davidoff, Chris Seeley, Allan Kaplan, and Rob McNeer. Click here to download the brochure (PDF)