Org School

Org School is an academy where social purpose organizations come to learn the art of organizational wellbeing. Org School “students” are not individual leaders or small groups, but the organizations themselves.

For 20+ years we have explored the nature of organizational wellbeing on five continents by studying unusually vibrant social purpose organizations. We found them to be surprisingly different from each other in terms of structure, culture, and leadership. But they were strikingly similar in their quality of relationship, or what is often known as their social fields.

When organizations express wellbeing in the day to day of their work, they undergo a profound shift. People begin to feel a rightness in their work together, a sense that they are exactly where they are meant to be. They experience joy more frequently. And the organization comes to seem kinder and wiser, more imaginative, more awake. When an organization flourishes in this way, its ability to disrupt and reimagine social and environmental systems grows markedly. An organization that faithfully nurtures its own wellbeing is an organization with a chance to change the world.

We began to ask, “How have these organizations actually learned to sustain wellbeing in this way?” Previous efforts to connect wellbeing to social change have largely focused on helping individual changemakers care for their personal wellbeing. But we discovered that social fields actually learn in a very different way than do individuals. Org School has been carefully built around our emerging understanding of field learning.

Mission

Cultivating vibrant learning spaces for organizations to rediscover their innate goodness and beauty.

Vision

That organizations experience the same wellbeing they are working to nurture in the world.

Why Do We Need Org School?

Social purpose organizations are in pain. While the global challenges they seek to address grow more urgent, the organizational models they rely upon feel increasingly dehumanizing. People experience a disturbing incoherence between the wellbeing they are trying to foster in the world and the lack of wellbeing in their daily organizational lives.

The research is clear: in a large proportion of all organizations, disengagement, burnout, inauthentic relationships, power inequities, financial instability, and time poverty contribute to a downward spiral of fragmentation and isolation. Structures of exclusion turn unhealthy organizations into unjust ones, where historically oppressed groups are deprived of agency, voice, safety, and authenticity. The very social purpose organizations charged with fostering innovative responses to complex global challenges often remain stuck in a thin industrial paradigm that shuts out access to human diversity, connection, and spirit.

Changing the lived experience of social purpose organizations, then, may be the most powerful leverage point for institutional transformation and the evolution of consciousness. Organizations are where we have the most immediate collective agency - the time, the energy, and the creative capacity to shepherd our future. Org School is an applied method of shifting our attention to the inner life of organizations, thereby reclaiming that beautiful agency.

The Nature of Organizational Wellbeing

Organizational wellbeing is a sustained relational state where our daily work nourishes a shared sense of authenticity, connectedness, and possibility. It is related to personal wellbeing but distinct in two ways: it isn’t something that we build with individual practices and then carry into our work; it is something we experience through our work. It happens when our teams, our meetings, our daily projects and tasks, enliven and connect us. Second, it is a mutual experience, a feeling not simply that I am well and you are well but that our relationship is well, that we are well together.

Who We Are

Our team has broken bread with members of the African Union and struggled side-by-side with scrappy nonprofit organizations in Chicago, Cape Town, Montreal, Bogotá, and Amsterdam. We’ve humbly witnessed and strategized with B Corp owners in the UK and rural Wisconsin. We are organizational development experts, wellbeing scholars, graduate school administrators, university educators, nonprofit executives, small business owners, accompanied learners, and everyday dreamers. We’ve led and loved organizations of nearly every size, geography, and mission imaginable, always quietly yearning for organizations to be where we come together to be well.

Our relationships run deep, many across decades and continents. Together, we’ve managed programs, started organizations, hosted convenings, published articles, and traveled to remote villages and large cities in search of organizations that could teach us the art of relational learning and collective wellbeing. And together, we hold infinite capacity to nurture, and to be nurtured by, the organizations we will meet at Org School.

The Invitation

Like wellbeing itself, Org School will be a profoundly collective endeavor. As we attune to the goodness that we sense is possible in organizations, we’re excited to discover who our partners will be along the way. Here are some of the things we’re looking for:

-beautiful questions and curiosity
-funding for our planning year and our 3-year pilot
-institutions exploring the frontiers of field learning
-organizations interested in going to Org School

But we’re most keen to discover the gifts that we’ll need but haven’t even thought of yet. What are your gifts?

If anything about this project speaks to your mind, heart, or intuitive spine, please reach out to us. We’d love to connect!