THE NEXT PRACTICE INSTITUTE

2024 Annual Gathering | Program Tracks

Participants can select from one of nine tracks for the week. There are a limited number of spaces for each track. To guarantee your selection, we encourage you to sign up early! Registration details to come.

TRACK 1: Family Healing and Restoration and the Orders of Love with Ester Martinez

Ester brings twenty years of experience as a psychotherapist, constellations expert and as a mystical student of Thomas Huebl. As a Senior Transformational Faculty member of Mobius, Ester serves as faculty for our CEO program conducted with Egon Zehnder (Executive Breakthrough Program) and as a core practitioner in our executive retreat practice where she guides global leaders. This track explores the systematic principles operating within all human systems, whether family, teams or organizations. We will explore the invisible realms — the chords that guide so many of the visible symptoms we encounter. This session will lift the veil and ignite your own deep healing process as well.

TRACK 2: The Embodied Man Emerging with Gary Joplin, Gregor Steinmaurer, and Markus Hirzig

In this track we will dive deeply into the question of what it means to be living in a male body at this time in human history. Drawing our attention to what has been and to what is now emerging, we will include and integrate the lives of our ancestors and the men who came before us. We will draw from their strengths and also understanding on a deeper level which patterns we may want to release. Our journey will therefore address the physical, mental, emotional as well as spiritual level in each of us. Addressing the beauty and pain of manhood, the pride and the shame, the power and the collapse, we will create a space together to redefine what it can mean to be a man in the world today, not only as lonely wolves but also as deeply collaborative beings.

TRACK 3: Soma to Spirit: Coaching Leaders with Perspectives from Neuroscience with Dr. Srini Pillay

In this session, you will learn how to implement brain-based tools to help leaders achieve their greatest potential. Combining human behavior research with neuroscience-based guides and philosophical and spiritual contemplation in an entertaining format, the session is designed to help you incorporate principle of neuroscience in your everyday coaching and conversations. With breakout sessions, group discussions, and video illustrations, coaches will be able to implement these techniques immediately. Areas that will be covered include: Leading Change, Building Resilience, Creating Agile Teams, Igniting Creativity, and Fostering Antifragility. Much of the material is also pertinent to self-discovery. Mobius Senior Expert Dr. Srini Pillay is a neuroscientist who directed the Outpatient Anxiety Disorders Program at McLean Hospital and was Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

TRACK 4: Leveraging Change: The Power of Systems Thinking in Action with David Peter Stroh & Marilyn Paul

Learn how applied systems thinking enables leaders and agents of organizational change efforts to meet four challenges: motivating people to change, creating collaboration across diverse stakeholders, focusing limited resources on high-leverage interventions, and stimulating continuous learning. As a result of this highly experiential workshop, you will be able to: Understand why systems resist people’s best intentions to improve performance; distinguish conventional from systems thinking; integrate the principles of systems thinking into a proven four-stage change process; learn basic tools of systems thinking; apply these tools to uncover the root causes of a chronic, complex change problem you are facing; and identify high-leverage interventions to address your problem. Mobius Senior Expert David Peter Stroh and his partner and collaborator Marilyn Paul are renowned experts and authors in leading systemic change for social good.

TRACK 5: Fierce Civility: Creating Cultures of Mutual Empowerment with Joe Weston

The extremes in polarization, volatility, confusion, anger and anxiety – both internal and external – require us
to upgrade, refine, and add to our current skills in order to meet the challenges of our time. Joe will offer an experiential exploration into the “alchemy of the heart”, based on skills and strategies he has developed and road- tested for 30 years. Through this process, people across the human spectrum, from those in industrialized nations to those focused on surviving in conflict zones, have found their grounding and a way through the confusion and animosity. These skills and strategies – laid out in his two books, Amazon #1 bestseller Fierce Civility: Transforming our Global Culture from Polarization to Lasting Peace (2023) and Mastering Respectful Confrontation (2012) – facilitate the creation of a field that melts and resolves resistance, opposition and fear in a way that ensures safety and trust, while activating one’s creative power. This leads to personal transformation, healing, reconciliation, deepening of relationship, the de-escalation of conflict and the organic emergence of new solutions. Joe Weston is a Mobius Executive Coach and Transformational Faculty member.

TRACK 6: Delighting in Complexity with Jennifer Garvey Berger & Zafer Achi

Have you been feeling like the complexity of the world around you is unsettling the world inside you? Like your tools and techniques and habits were perfect for what used to be but not so effective at what seems to be the new normal? It turns out complexity requires new tools, skills, and capacities from us, and it also delivers more possibility for connection and creativity than you might have imagined. Come join us to learn how to use your entire being—your body, mind, and spirit—to face into complexity with something that feels more like joy than difficulty. We will help you understand and practice powerful new ways of making sense and taking action. Jennifer is a Mobius Senior Expert and global expert in the field adult development and complexity thinking and is the best selling author of four books on leading in complexity. A McKinsey & Company Director Emeritus, and a Mobius Senior Expert, Zafer has over 30 years’ experience with large-scale transformations. Together Jennifer and Zafer will help you cultivate advanced skills in complexity of mind and help you discover innovative solutions to the complex challenges you and your clients face.

TRACK 7: Conscious Becoming: Coaching Yourself, Loving Yourself, Being Yourself with Yotam Schachter

What holds us back from growth is fear, and what frees us to grow is loving the heart that fears. Yotam Schachter’s self-coaching practice creates a container for inner work that welcomes fear, welcomes doubt, welcomes all of you as you are, and invites forward the further evolution of you. In this track, you will develop a vibrant rapport with the conjured voice of an ideal inner listener/coach and have conversations that support you in, as Thomas Hubl says, “learning from every difficulty.” These compassionate, developmental dialogs with yourself honor and disarm your fears, inviting into their place presence, flow, and joyful purpose. This track is led by coach and Mobius Transformational Faculty member Yotam Schacter.

TRACK 8: BRITE – Transforming the Way we Measure Team Effectiveness with Lani M. Van Dusen, Ph.D.

BRITE (Broad-based Roots Influencing Team Effectiveness) is a new team assessment developed from research with more than 26,000 teams around the world. It brings together the most validated findings on teams (and discards a few myths), creating a new standard for how team coaches and facilitators can unleash the collective power of a team. BRITE examines five critical elements of team effectiveness – measuring the underlying generative and disruptive factors within each that affect the flow of energy in a team. Viewing teams as dynamic energy systems unlocks the key to understanding and elevating team synergy. Join us as we dive deeply into what this assessment has to offer and how insights from this tool have been used to increase team alignment and success.

TRACK 9: The Power of Being Internally Referenced with Paul Dunion & Andi Winter

We are taught to be externally referenced, identifying with the values and expectations of family, teachers, coaches, and bosses. This track uniquely depicts what it means to be internally referenced portrayed by self-intimacy. Self- awareness, self-trust, self-loyalty, and self-love will be considered as we move into the inquiry involving intimacy with the self. Participants will be given concrete tools for deepening self-intimacy as well as being introduced to what it means to live intimately. Special attention will be given to what it means to be an internally referenced leader. Our exploration will be conducted by short lectures, storytelling, small group discussion, ritual, journal writing and guided imagery. Senior Mobius Transformational Faculty members Paul Dunion and Andi Winter will lead this track.

Monday Afternoon

Hitendra Wadhwa, Outer Chaos, Inner Harmony: A Model for Living and Leading in Today’s World

We are living through a perfect storm. How do we learn, perform and thrive when the world as we know it is getting dismantled, the rules are ever-changing, and no one knows what the new order is going to be? Hitendra will present a model for life and for leadership that he has developed and evolved over the last 17 years at Columbia Business School, and at the Mentora Institute, drawing from ancient wisdom, modern science, studies of moments of exemplary leadership, and experiments in the flow of life and work.

Tuesday Morning

Cecily Sommers, Lead Like a Futurist

Cecily Sommers is recognized as one of the “Top 50 Female Futurists in the World” (Forbes), and is the strategist that Google, Salesforce, Purina, and JP Morgan Chase choose when they want to turn an ambitious idea into a clear pathway to the future. Cecily is also a renowned speaker, the author of Think Like a Futurist, and a leadership coach who applies foresight principles and ‘change literacy’ to inner development, aligning what’s emerging inside with what’s emerging in the world.

Tuesday Afternoon

Richard Davidson, Dancing at the Intersection of Emotions, Neuroscience and Mindfulness

Richard Davidson is the Founder and Chief Visionary, Healthy Minds Innovations; Founder & Director, Center for Healthy Minds. Davidson is best known for his groundbreaking work studying emotion and the brain. A friend and confidante of the Dalai Lama, he is a highly sought after expert and speaker, leading conversations on well-being on international stages such as the World Economic Forum, where he served on the Global Council on Mental Health. Time Magazine named Davidson one of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2006. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017.

Wednesday Morning

Zander Grashow, Leading in the Age of Adaptability

Mobius Senior Expert Zander Grashow believes that adaptability is a core competence that everyone, everywhere should possess. He has dedicated his life to putting what works in everyone’s hands so they can do more for what they care most about. Zander is a leadership practitioner and co-author of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership and Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis. Known for his delivery of truth and grace, he has spent 30 years shaping the leadership and trajectory of organizations at their moments of transition and ambition. At the heart of Zander’s work is the belief that the future depends on our ability to evolve the way we live and work – and that change can be made easier in a world that demands extraordinary change from us.

Wednesday Afternoon

Erica Ariel Fox, JourneyWork®

Erica Ariel Fox is the Mobius Chief Thought Leader and the New York Times Best Selling Author of Winning from Within®: A Breakthrough Method for Leading, Living, and Lasting Change. Erica taught negotiation and conflict resolution at Harvard Law School for more than 25 years. She now shares her latest thinking as a Senior Contributor to Forbes, as a member of the Top Voices group of global experts on LinkedIn, and as the Mobius Chief Thought Leader. Erica is a pioneer in bringing exploration of the inner life to leaders who shape the outer world. She has dedicated her life to restoring the sacred calling of leadership to people whose influence can guide the future toward wholeness. Erica is the Founder of RISE (Reach Inside; Serve Everywhere), an organization dedicated to enlisting C-Suite executives to resist fascism and protect democracy, as well as the Founding Wisdom Teacher at RISE Academy, a modern-day mystery school for CEOs and C-Suite executives who want to raise the level of consciousness from which they lead. Erica’s forthcoming book will explain her latest process for facilitating leadership transformations: JourneyWork.

Thursday Morning

Houman Harouni, Dignity, Integrity and Empowerment: Beyond the Limits of DEI

It is no secret that most approaches to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) not only fall short of the purpose,
but often engender problems that work directly against the goals of creating greater inclusion and humane, welcoming environments. What would it take to have an approach to DEI that is based on the spiritual and inherent value of each and every individual? What do we need to be able to overcome real and complex challenges, instead of holding on to high-handed moral positions? In this talk, Dr. Houman Harouni, Lecturer at Harvard and the creator of the Equity and Inclusion Fellowship, will draw on psychology, spirituality, philosophy and real- world examples to show an alternative path to upholding human dignity. This is a path based on acknowledging and working with complexity within individuals and systems. DEI work then shifts to become about increasing the capacity of people to act. It becomes a way to treat people as thinking beings in complex environments, and it focuses on the exercise of leadership, of knowing how to enact change in structures, of engaging stakeholders, and on creating a sense of empowerment for everyone within an organization.

Thursday Afternoon

Jenn Wynn, Healing Conversations

Jenn Wynn is a professor of Difficult Conversations at NYU Stern School of Business. Jenn specializes in organizational transformation, change leadership, and healing in mission-driven enterprises. She partners with individuals, teams, and organizations to live out their values and realize their full potential. Jenn is the former Director of Education at the Obama Foundation, where she led a team to design in-person and digital programs across the U.S. for community leadership and active citizenship. Prior to that she was a manager in McKinsey & Company’s New York office, where she trained top executives globally as a founding team member of McKinsey Academy.

Friday Morning

Allison Taylor, NYU Stern School, How Business Can do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World

Today’s headlines are full of employee unrest over racial injustice, communities infuriated by corporate environmental impacts, staff anxiety over surveillance, and discoveries of child labor in supply chains. We have traveled far and fast from the old world of business ethics, where black-and-white concerns about bribery and fraud could be addressed with rules and processes. Simply maximizing shareholder value while not breaking the law is no longer an option, but we have never been so confused about what it means to do the right thing. Amid stakeholder demands and transparency pressures, we can no longer treat ethics as a legal and reputational defense mechanism. Leaders at Davos and the Business Roundtable have called for a new corporate responsibility paradigm, but how to implement their ideas remains an open question as organizations struggle in an atmosphere of heightened expectations and intense suspicion. How can CEOs cut through the noise to set robust environmental and social priorities? When should they speak out on contentious social and political issues—and how? What does it really take to build a healthy organizational culture? How are we to approach corporate values when society is so divided? Alison Taylor is a clinical associate professor at NYU Stern School of Business, where she teaches sustainability and business ethics classes to undergraduate, MBA and executive MBA students.

MYSTICAL PRINCIPLES OF TRANSFORMATION
A special group session with Thomas Huebl.

For the seventh year in a row, at the heart of our Annual Gathering, we will study the practices of consciousness development and the processes for healing individual, family, and collective trauma.

These quiet hours in the center of the week-long gathering offer a rare opportunity to study the mystical principles of transformation with non-dual teacher Thomas Huebl, who joins us each year for an immersion in his teaching.

Leading the group for a day of study, practice and healing, Thomas will offer his unique approach for living as a “mystic in the marketplace” – sharing his understanding of the mystical principles of embodiment, inter-generational restoration and personal evolution. We are truly delighted to offer this opportunity to practice with an advanced teacher who understands the challenges of modern life and grounds his work in psychology, philosophy, and meta-physical awareness.

Thomas Huebl is a rare guide: a masterful mystic able to navigate advanced realms of spiritual mastery while presenting himself in a delightfully warm, transparent, brotherly way. He is the best of modern enlightenment: deep thinking, clear-seeing, and radical in his stance.

In 2020 he published his ground-breaking book Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds. This opus explores how significant collective trauma symptoms are in shaping our modern society and contains cutting-edge remedies that serve as a beacon of hope for generations to come.

In 2023 he brought us Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma – and Our World. This profound offering shares his deep insights about core relational competencies we seek to develop as practitioners.

Thomas has been guiding many of our practitioners in the professional development of state-of-the-art healing practices and trauma-informed approaches to executive development. Through NPI, Thomas offers workshops, supervision groups/hyper-learning circles and study groups exploring mystical principles.

Thomas is blazing a path of 21st century spiritual practice and helping thousands of students around the world to really live their awakening amid today’s busy world. His annual summit on Collective Trauma and his non- profit, Pocket Project, are leading beacons in the field.

Wednesday’s session will focus on healing and the art of transformational facilitation.

POETRY BY ROGER HOUSDEN
Risking Everything: Poems of Love and Revelation
Tuesday Evening | 8:00pm

Roger Housden is the author of more than twenty inspirational books on poetry,
art, and travel. He uses the poem, the artwork or the journey as a gateway to explore existential and spiritual themes that are both personal and widely experienced by others. Housden is originally from England and started his writing career as a freelance journalist for The Guardian and for the BBC. He has lived in the Bay Area for over twenty years.

BALLET PERFORMANCE BY RACHEL COSSAR
Wednesday Evening | 8:00pm

An evening of mind-body connection with professional Boston Ballet dancers and Mobius Somatic Faculty member, Rachel Cossar. This evening will begin with some light movement and embodiement exercises and end with a short performance between long-time dance partners, accompanied by live piano.

The evening is intended to welcome in warm awareness of our expressive, physical selves with a touch of inspiration and introspection from the choreography as well.

AN EVENING OF GOSPEL MUSIC WITH MICHAELA HARRISON
Thursday Evening | 8:00pm

Michaela A. Harrison is a recently-returned Washington, D.C. native whose career is rooted in relaying the healing, transformational power of music through song. She has performed nationally and internationally as a soloist and with various bands and musical collectives. As a resident of New Orleans for over 17 years, Michaela established an enthusiastic following at local venues such as Café Istanbul, Second Vine Wine, Ashé Cultural Arts Center and Three Keys at the Ace Hotel. She is as comfortable with a full band, a choir or an orchestra as she is with in a duo, and works/has worked regularly with New Orleans favorites Joy Clark, Ian Villafana, and Alexey Marti, the late, great jazz guitarist Todd Duke, Dorise Blackmon and Tanya Huang (as Mother Tingue), and, when in Brazil, with guitar virtuoso Márcio Pereira, bassist Alexandre Vieira and drummer Ivan Torres (Os Brothers).