Indirect Work: A Regenerative Change Theory for Businesses, Communities, Institutions and Humans

I’ve organized much of my life and work around the insight that real change comes when we engage consciously with our own mental processes. Along the way, I’ve become aware of the importance of what I call resourcing, which works on awakening in people their capacity for critical thinking and agency with regard to growing and expressing their perso

indirect work is building the capacity in people to consistently think at higher levels in order to create innovations for advancing specific contexts and streams of activity.

Establishing a strong, ongoing intention to become conscious is the necessary first step toward habituating ourselves to continually observe our thinking patterns, trace them back to old sources, and replace these sources with new ones for higher-level thinking and imaging. It takes an equally strong and ongoing intention to cultivate a culture tha

Resourcing is not mentoring or coaching, both of which assume some kind of superior knowledge.

Profound change rarely comes from direct interventions in the world. Rather, it comes from working indirectly over time, helping people engage consciously to develop their own understanding, motivations, aspirations, and will.

we invent mechanistic metaphors and processes for educating and healing ourselves. In other words, we resort to conditioning, a default approach that is precisely the opposite of living free, self-determined human lives. And, in a mechanical feedback process, this conditioning reinforces the already prevalent tendency toward automatism.

It is through internalizing a framework that one earns the right to bring it into work with others.

The primary purpose of this book on indirect action is to encourage and support readers’ self-examination by introducing the thought that indirect actions might be orders of magnitude more effective than direct ones when it comes to pursuing their global imperatives. This is where it is necessary to examine one’s assumptions about what constitutes

Albert Einstein, in his characteristically pithy and quotable way, once said that “you can’t use an old map to explore a new world.”