Spaces for Growth: Learning our Way out of a Crisis

By Graham Leicester and Maureen O’Hara

In normal times we tend to go about our lives oblivious to the structures, institutions, processes and shared values that shape our behaviours. In powerful times like ours, deep structures of love, power and justice are brought to light.
 
International Futures Forum (IFF), has for some time been tracking three emergencies: a real emergency (the challenges we face in the world), a conceptual emergency (making sense of the world to take on those challenges) and an existential emergency (how all of this leaves us feeling at a human level). It is the existential emergency, the human consequences of living in powerful times, that has dominated the scene.
 
Together we need to support individuals, groups, organisations, communities, institutions, human beings in all formations to expand, to develop and to grow, to rise to the occasion. This booklet proposes three steps to doing this:
 
The first section explores the context of our times and how we can learn to read the landscape more effectively, coming to feel more at home in it.
The second section focuses on transformative growth, both what we need to develop in ourselves – the 21st-century competencies – and how we can do so.
The third section moves to action, in particular transformative action that will shift our systems and patterns of activity towards our aspirations for the future. 

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