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 Copenhagen, 13 December 2009
A mini nature solo, which we co-hosted with Rowan Simonsen from Upstream. The purpose of this day in nature was to get an embodied experience of understanding our place in the larger ecosystem of our world allowing us to take better decisions, keeping our children and grandchildren in mind and being aware of the effects of our actions on all species and the grandchildren of these.
This event was part of the Survival Academy. The Survival Academy ran from 8-17 of December during the COP15 climate negotiations in Copenhagen, and explored the human dimension of climate change.What if I were the solution? The Academy includes a series of learning events including live teleseminar with Otto Scharmer, Book Release by Adam Kahane, A training in Visualizing climate strategies, Theory U workshop, World Changing input, a Deep Democracy workshop and an exploration of why Inner climate is important. To see the full programme, visit www.survivalacademy.org
 October 2009
Plan C (Transition Network for Sustainable Management of Materials) is an ambitious network in Flanders of people from the private, civil society, academia and public sector that share a common vision of a world that manages its usage of materials in a sustainable way. Natural Innovation was invited by I-Propeller , a lead partner within Plan C, to design and facilitate the innovation studios at their annual gathering ‘Plan C accelerates’ in October.
The innovation studios focused on developing green music festivals and local economies centred on local material flows using new technologies such as 3D printing.
 March 2008 – March 2009
Together with Reos Partners we supported WWF-UK with exploring the possibility for initiating a multi-stakeholder change lab in the English Education system. After having worked for many years with change initiatives on a local level, WWF felt the need to bring together the disparate initiatives and initiate a system wide movement. With the purpose to shift it from a 20th century education system geared towards a industrial society towards a more holisitic education system, responsive to the environment and a changing post-industrial globalised world. A first step of convening such a project consists of deeply sensing into the need that exists within the system and finding potential allies. We conducted in-depth dialogue interviews with stakeholders across the system and facilitated several 3-day U-process workshops for WWF to develop a comprehensive strategy to achieve their ambitions. Click here to read the synthesis report from the interviews, ‘the primacy of the personal’.
 February – March 2009
How to do you co-create a new work environment and culture that encourages collaboration amongst a team of over a hundred staff, make the majority happy with less space and more people in one office? A sub-division of Siemens came to us with that challenge. We designed and facilitated a human-centred collaborative design process, inspired by the U-process. A core team of 10 staff was formed, which represented the diversity of the whole team in terms of gender, seniority, time spent in the company, type of work etc. After a one day vision building for this process and interview training, the team interviewed a majority of their colleagues to get a more systemic perspective of the needs and requirements for the new office design and working culture. People said afterwards they really enjoyed interviewing each other as it allowed them to get to know their colleagues better and understand their context more. In another workshop of 1.5 days, we mapped all the issues and discovered the underlying patterns and themes together; we developed and proto-typed new design concepts and work methods. The new design concepts co-created by the team became the basis of the new interior design and working culture of the department. The division has now moved into the new office and people are happy with the result.
It was interesting to see the pattern of the design was not too far from how tribal villages were constructed: a round kitchen (fire place) and meeting spaces at the center with access to the garden, teams to sit together, the whole space to be personalised and with more warm but calm colors, plus a ‘cosy corner’…
 Since 2006 we have been calling and co-hosting trainings on the Art of Hosting (AoH) meaningful conversations in Germany, Belgium and the UK.
The Art of Hosting is about engaging the collective intelligence of diverse groups through dialogue that leads to wise solutions and actions for the future.
It is a living pattern, a network of practitioners, as well as a training experience for deepening competency and confidence in hosting group processes in Circle, World Café, Open Space and other forms, that support groups to go from strategic conversations to wise action and systemic change.
It is a response to a world that is becoming increasingly complex and fragmented, where true solutions and innovation lie not in one leader or one viewpoint, but in the bigger picture of our collective intelligence, in the wisdom between us.
To read more about the AoH www.artofhosting.org
 We support organisations to build their capacity to innovate and learn on a systemic level. We design generative and safe containers or ‘labs’ where the collective intelligence and creativity that exists in a system and its people can be harnessed to tackle a particular question or challenge. To do that we incubate and host learning and innovation spaces where a social ecology can come together, experience and learn about itself and the wider systemic context of its challenge. From there we provide support and empower the participants to innovate, co-create and implement the life-affirming solutions that they themselves believe in.
These cross-sector or interdisciplinary labs can be short lived (several days up to several months) and focussed on a clearly defined challenge such as a strategic review, a conference, workshop or a design challenge. Or they can be (semi) permanent and focused on a broader theme such as a sustainable financial system or urban agriculture.
In each case we will make use of a combination of participatory research, design and innovation approaches to convene, design and facilitate these spaces, such as: the U-process, art of hosting, story telling, bio-mimicry, systems thinking, action research, improvisation theatre, nature retreats, deep democracy, rapid prototyping and embodied learning.
We live and breath what we believe in. We are serial collaborative social entrepreneurs, committed to constantly be on our learning edge, making our hands dirty and taking risks to co-create new experiments to further the evolution of humanity and our planetary home. This takes different forms from artistic experiments and action research to developing multi-stakeholder change labs and spaces for social innovation. Examples of projects we co-initiated include The Hub Brussels, the Finance Lab and we are working on several other projects. Stay tuned by checking the ‘project’ category on the right sidebar.
 Collaborative innovation is both ancient and new, inspired by practices as old as humanity as well as cutting-edge social technologies. We are committed to the evolution of our field of practice. We believe our practices need practising, exploring, questioning and evolving.
We do this by sharing our skills through trainings and workshops on the one hand (click here for recent events), and co-initiating and supporting collective inquiries and action research into the new capacities needed to tackle the worlds most pressing challenges.
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