SoL South Foundation: A not-for-profit community

I have been heavily influenced by Peter Senge's work and especially his celebrated book The Fifth Discipline. I've tried to practice the disciplines and have undertaken "personal vision" exercise twice (in 2002 and in 2007) which has greatly improved both my personal and professional life.

Last year, Raja Chidambaram, a friend, mentor and a leadership consultant called and invited me to join the governing board along with him and several other highly distinguished folks, to start a not-for-profit community under the aegis of SoL (Society for Organizational Learning). I was naturally thrilled and excited to see how we can bring SoL's concepts for the benefit of people in India.

SoL, is an intentional learning community composed of organizations, individuals, and local SoL communities around the world. A not-for-profit, member-governed corporation, SoL is devoted to the interdependent development of people and their institutions in service of inspired performance and meaningful results. SoL serves as a space in which individuals and institutions can create together that which they cannot create alone. The purpose is to discover (research), integrate (capacity development) and implement (practice) theories and practices of organizational learning for the interdependent development of people and their institutions and communities such that we continue to increase our capacity to collectively realize our highest aspirations and productively resolve our differences.

The governing board of SoL South Foundation is a very diverse set that includes an innovation consultant, two leadership consultants, CEO of a mid-sized IT/ITeS organization, someone who is running an NGO for ages now, a healer and wellness advisor, two IT professionals that include me, two HR professionals and a sculpter. We have been meeting every quarter in Chennai and Bangalore for the last 9 months to chalk out the vision and the action plan. One such meeting was with Jeff Clanon, Director of SoL, who introduced us to the various activities of SoL and helped us formulate a vision and an operating plan. We also registered SoL South Foundation with the Registrar of Societies and approval from SoL. We want to kick-start our activities publicly by offering SoL's flagship two day program Foundations for Leadership.

• Apart from offering the standard SoL courses, the broader vision for SoL South Foundation include:
• To discover, integrate and implement theories and practices for theinterdependent development of people and their institutions.
  
• To unearth the systems and practices, models and methods that were helping sustenance of culture, knowledge maintenance, and holistic systems and practices for the growth of individuals, institutions and organizations.
• To discover the systems, the basis and practices that are integrative in nature amongst body mind and soul of individuals, institutions and organizations
• To evolve a healthy and effective method of dialogue process which can be effectively used in different areas like political, communities, institutions, diverse cultures, conflicting situations, differential socio economic stratum of society, multi-linguistic groups, etc so as to promote collaborative communities, and institutions which can accommodate co-existence with difference through research, studies relating to different fields, conducting field works, examining suitable dialogue stage, etc and developing capabilities of people, systems, processes and skills in such areas as may be needed.
  
• To help build schools and other learning institutions the principles and practices of quantum and continued learning models and methods and systems
• To research and document alternative learning methods, systems, and models in health promoting areas both physical and psychological in nature in India and other neighbouring countries that holistic, systemic and complete and dessiminate the knowledge through different formats like publishing, lectures, and hands on training in curative and disease preventive areas for people and institutions.

The vision may sound grandiose, but simply put the aim is to apply the principles of learning organizations for the betterment of individuals, organizations, communities and schools. The governing board is excited about the vision and is determined to make a difference. Some of the board members have put in lot of time, money and efforts to get the community started. I plan to contribute through some research work this year.