One of my tribes is the international community of folks working in the fields of organizational development and conflict resolution.  Margaret Wheatley is a primary source for many of us.  She has a new book coming out in a couple of weeks entitled, Who Do We Choose To Be: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity.  She says about it;

“I know this is the most important book I have written. Writing it in September 2016, I wondered whether readers would accept the descriptions of where we are; but now, the book feels descriptive, even a bit tame, given all that continues to unfold in the world at exponential speed.”

The book won’t be released until June 19 so of course I haven’t read it.  But the excerpts she has released make a couple of things very clear.

• The problems we are facing in the world are not ones we don’t know how to solve.  We are not waiting for some technological breakthrough that allows us to address and resolve the social and environmental crises we are encountering.  We already know what to do.
• What we are missing is not technology but leadership.  We can’t implement the solutions because our leaders are people who have come to power because they love having power.  They get power from the existing structures.  They are not willing to change these structures because that will mean a loss of power.
• The leaders we need are not people who want to be in the positions of power and they are not the people that most will elect to office.  The imagination of the larger culture is not one which can contain the transformation we need.
• So the global problems can only be addressed by local leadership.  We address them by forming organizations that are in Meg Wheatley’s lexicon, “Islands of Sanity.”

Beginning in July we are forming a gathering we are calling Sacred Soup Sunday.  We are planning to meet on the first and third Sunday evenings of the month.  We will give you details as we work them out.  We long to create for each other Islands of Sanity.