2008 Year of Enrollment

We define enrollment as speaking and listening a possibility in such a way that it becomes present and accessible to someone else. 2008 was a year of enrollment for us as we expanded participation in the school and launched the first cohort of participants in the three-year curriculum of the school.

These are some of our major accomplishments in 2008:

• Took major ground in developing the community structure of the School for Leadership and ourselves as stewards and members of that community. Critical aspects of this included significant growth in self-generating, greater ownership of the school as a whole rather than as its various parts, and greater ability to bring gifts from the margin to the center of the community.


• Held a School Builders Conference in Montreal to do the final work of distinguishing what we mean by transformational leadership and how it differs from our usual understanding of leadership.


• Identified the set of conditions to be confronted in opening the School for Leadership, including the outcomes seen as possible, what would need to be produced, the assets available to us, the likely outcomes in the prevailing context, and possible ways of dealing with those outcomes. We then asked and answered the questions: For what am I accountable? If I were allowed to be accountable for anything within this set of conditions in the matter of opening the school, what would I choose?


• Funded the launching of the first cohort and the first five-day residential offering of the school.


• Completed the design of the three-year school curriculum, including seven dialogues to be mastered, the distinctions of transformational leadership, the promises of each offering and the structures necessary to deliver on those promises.


• Developed and documented an application and registration process for the school that is designed to provide value for the applicants and result in the enrollment of those for whom participation is the right choice at the time. The application process for the first cohort, for example, had a major focus on participants who would not only benefit from the School but be able to help us build the school over the next three years.


• Enrolled the first cohort of the school in our three-year curriculum and began with a five-day residential offering in November. There are 19 grassroots leaders in the first cohort – seven from Israel, seven from Northern Ireland and Ireland, and five from the United States.


• Created a new community element to be accountable for the ongoing coaching of participants in the school. There are now more than 20 individual coaches who work with members of the cohort throughout the year. Coaches regularly talk with participants to support them in applying the distinctions of transformational leadership in their work.


• Increased our knowledge and capacity to use digital and electronic tools that support distance learning and collaboration.