Unleashing Learning: My Journey to Third Order Change

I always have wondered why there isn’t more learning in school.

As a kid, I always did the stuff that I was assigned, asked questions, and tried hard.

But it always seemed like there was another gear for learning. A deeper more powerful way of learning what matters.

The kind of learning that happened when I was out of school, highly motivated, working on something real.

Like figuring out how to frame a cabin, build a seawall on a remote Alaskan beach, or repair a mangled fishing net before the next tide.

💫How to take a solo in a bluegrass band.

💫How to cook nourishing food for a loved one who’s sick.

💫 To fix a leak in my house.

And so throughout my life I’ve followed the learning.

🚀At college I took Chinese, because I absolutely loved the tones of the language and writing the characters.

🚀I majored in Native American Studies to try to understand more about the history my Alaskan home.

🚀I signed up to teach public school in Central City New Orleans.

🚀Ran a non-profit on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico.

I left a leadership position because I felt we were getting too focused standardized test data and not curious enough about maximizing learning.

I followed the learning to New York City and studied special education and neurodevelopment.

The learning led me to teach public school in rural Vermont. We built a curriculum focused on providing students hands-on learning experiences with farmers.

I followed the learning to be a principal and a district administrator in Washington State.

Everywhere I went there were dedicated people putting in a ton of hard work to support young people.

But I’ve always felt that we are scratching the surface of what learning could be.

Like we’re stuck in an aquarium, that’s right next to an ocean of learning possibilities.

I’m interested in what might happen if we unleash the learning of our leaders, their teams, and education organizations.

Could we move out of the boxes that we are in and find a more authentic, more relevant, more freeing kind of learning?

🎉Teams working with more autonomy to make decisions.

🎉Leaders are more grounded in the relationships around them.

🎉Open, constructive debate in the board room, among organizational leaders, and between colleagues as they make decisions together.

🎉 The organization's purpose and values aligned with what its people want.

🎉 Members of the organization experience support for their own development. They start to address issues that previously had been off limits.

This dream led me to start Third Order Change. We are focused on renewing and developing leaders with the courage to create lasting positive change in their communities.

But what does that mean?

🌊Renew: connecting with your source of hope, optimism, compassion, and creativity.

🌱Develop: growing the ability of leaders and teams to hold complexity and thereby improve their overall leadership effectiveness.

❤️ Courage: the ability to generate and develop original ideas, innovate, and be willing to disrupt conventional patterns.

🎯Lasting positive change: A durable improvement to outcomes that are determined by a community. Secured on enacting self-determination and capacity building.

🏘️Community: A group with shared interests and values.

That’s why Third Order Change is focused on three primary activities:

🌱Executive Coaching: We support the development of leaders, helping them to improve their creative leadership competencies, hold a higher level of complexity, and improve their leadership effectiveness. We do this through the use of assessments, inquiry, Immunity to Change Mapping, and adaptive leadership experiments.

🌲Team Coaching: We support the development of teams, helping them to improve their collective leadership effectiveness. This involves helping the team improve their creative leadership competencies, including: relating, self-awareness, authenticity, systems awareness, and achievement of goals. We do this through the use of assessments, observation, experiential workshops, and adaptive experiments.

🌋Dispute Resolution: Conflict energy is learning energy, and adaptive organizations don’t leave learning on the table. We offer an array of dispute resolution services for purpose-driven organizations. We support negotiations, mediation, de-escalation, and restorative practices that can help transform conflicts into learning and improve outcomes for all parties. A signature offering is a dispute audit, in which we help leaders design organizational learning from various dispute patterns, recapturing lost learning and time as a competitive advantage.

Third Order Change will support you and your organization in the learning and growth needed to make the lasting positive change you and your community long for. Contact us to learn more.