🌱 May 10,000 Wisdom Schools for Innovators Bloom

Beautifully, together, in every space and place, to reimagine innovation education and culture

**Enrollment now open for 🌸 Spring Cultivator starting April 3rd. Watch info session recording here.**

Fellow travelers,

If you're reading this, there's a chance that you see the need for–and inevitability of–this vision too 🙏

As exponential technologies rapidly close the gap between vision and reality (Michael Garfield suggests we’re not far away from waking up to 3D printed dreams), we desperately need a new approach to innovation education—one that cultivates wisdom alongside innovation.

We need bold visions for a more beautiful world. But there’s a greater meta-imperative to re-learn how to be in “right relationship” with vision. i.e. how to bring visions to life in ways that are better for all touched, including the visionary and their relationships. Lest we reproduce the same dynamics that got us into this mess, again 😅

School of Wise Innovation is part of an emerging network of wisdom schools around the world, supporting founders and changemakers in developing the awareness and capacities to live, work, and create with greater harmony with the web of life.

Here’s what we see:

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🪢 Closing The Wisdom Gap

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." - Isaac Asimov

Many of our greatest minds and hearts have said something to the effect of how at the end of the day, our greatest problems are spiritual, cultural, educational in nature. That we can’t have the power of Gods without the wisdom, love, and prudence of Gods.

So where’s the training for founders and changemakers, engineers and designers, activists and influencers to cultivate such wisdom? 🦗🦗

Educational pathways developing mature and whole adults capable of stewarding great power? While there are ample containers for startup education over here, and inner development education over there, there is a gaping dearth at the intersection. My mantra that led to leading education efforts at Center for Humane Technology was:

No humane technology without humane technologists.

AND schools to train them.

Why the dearth? We haven’t collectively valued it. And it’s seriously hard work, that is much easier to avoid. Perennial tensions abound. Fractals of the fundamental tensions we are facing as a species: between the left and right hemisphere, measurable and intrinsic value, money and the sacred.

Some of this wisdom work is happening on the side, with leaders "waking up" and questioning systems via the mainstreaming of mindfulness and psychedelics or the latest sexy modality.

But no amount of meditation or mushrooms or intellectual diagnostics guarantees that one actually lives, works, and creates with greater harmony.

Transformational experiences don’t necessarily teach one anything about interdependence, soil health, attuned communication, sharing power, or actualizing visions in ways that minimize ripples of suffering for all stakeholders.

In my experience and observation, they can often be regressive: amplifying ego, distorting visions or reifying ones that weren't to be followed, creating further disconnection from reality and the web of life.

From Embodied Ethics in the Age of AI spring 2024 course. Speaking for myself, I thought this was enough. A little plant medicine here, a little philosophizing there. Turns out, self work and good intentions might not be enough. I kept and continue to burn out, hurt people, make waves in the world I’m not proud of. This integration thing is really hard…

And regardless of the consciousness of the creator, the culture and systems they create within has devalued and marginalized a long list of elements that would be needed to support the flourishing of the vision and visionary: elders urging patience, webs of communal accountability, initiatory experiences to deeply know oneself and the world.

The Modern West is extremely far away from how many of our siblings with intact and place-based cultures have learned to bind power with wisdom and live in harmony with the web of life.

Cultures that have sustained for thousands of years simply don't give uninitiated chiefs, shamans, or warriors access to community-disrupting powers. Not without going through rigorous developmental processes in order to know how to be in right relationship in their bones. Ethics is not an abstract intellectual exercise; it’s a deeply embodied one.

In order to make wise decisions for the web of life, we actually have to be in relationship with it.

There’s a clear imperative to create the appropriate educational spaces to support those who are creating our reality. For both maturing innovators, and the next generation pursuing entrepreneurship as one of the top career paths globally, yet hungry for different ways that mitigate burnout, anxiety and depression, and making shitty ripples.

Especially at the earliest stage, or as close to the moment of vision as possible. For just like a child, what happens in the beginning overwhelmingly determines what unfolds…

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🗺️ Sewing Seeds of Potential

I recently connected with a self-identified "reinvented VC” named John Stokes, who along with partners Sam Haffar and Katy Yam is exploring a new kind of investment firm centered around a wisdom school.

When John shared his vision of "a thousand global wisdom schools for entrepreneurs by the end of the decade," something clicked.

While it might sound like a grandiose pipedream, we feel quite certain that this phenomenon is already bubbling up, and only poised to grow. In fact, there’s early evidence of it sprouting up in a number of peer courses and programs and networks, cohorts and co-labs, each trojan horsing wisdom in their own unique ways, such as:

The Divinity School’s Originals, Innovative Learning and Living Institute, Climate Wisdom Fellowship, Downshift’s Decelerator, CIIS’s Blue Sky Leaders, Storywork Studio, Fields of Change, Intentional Society, nRythem’s Regenerative Leadership Courses, The Flight School, BraveEarth’s Reworlding Fellowship, Weaving Earth, Sleepawake, Ecoversities Alliance, BioFi’s Cultivator, JumpScale’s Resilience Circles, Small Giants Academy Programs, University of Mother Earth, Parallax Academy, reNourish Studio, The Next Economy MBA, The Wisdom Beyond, Inner MBA, Transformative Technology Academy, Project Lakefront, Pachamama Alliance’s Courses, Center for Humane Technology’s Foundations Course, BFI’s Trimtab Spacecamp and many more.

+ elements can be seen in the countless pop-up villages, residencies, and even schools in the web3 space like Edge City, Zugrama, ZK-Village, Infinita City, and Network School.

Peer organizations and spaces that comprise an emerging wise innovation education ecosystem

Another place-based example, rooted in tradition. Applications open.

But in terms of a fully baked wisdom school for professionals, we can only spotlight The Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth (MAPLE): a modern monastery developing a collective that can resolve the crises of the digital age.

Rooted in rural Vermont and spiritually grounded in Buddhism, MAPLE offers a glimpse of an educational container that is distinct from a place-less startup accelerator or soul-less university program. An example of a unique flavor of innovation culture, naturally emerging from an intersection of cultural trends, with tried and true physical retreat containers for practicing mindful silence and stillness.

John and I estimate that 100 more such wisdom schools are currently alive in hearts and minds and pitch decks.

Not only those of funds and academic institutions arriving early to the realization of the need, but especially a growing number of digital communities and land-based projects started by successful founders and investors who have since experienced some sort of personal transformation (sometimes induced by the process of becoming land stewards).

Accomplished individuals who won “Game A” (existing paradigm of social organization based on zero-sum thinking), and then through exploration and/or grace have decided to devote their entrepreneurial energies towards coaching or creating retreat spaces for healing, connection, and learning. Second time founders concentrated within a few hours drive of NY/SF/LA, or scattered around digital nomad havens like Costa Rica, Portugal, Bali. I've spent ample time at these places. I'm writing from one now. The list grows weekly.

The elegant kicker: many have visions for more evolved versions of accelerators, incubators, and other kinds of entrepreneurship educational activity happening on the land 🔥

Since the best learning happens in-person and in-nature, and blitz-scaling one homogeneous school brand Silicon Valley-style would so egregiously perpetuate the silly things our visions want to avoid perpetuating, perhaps these sorely needed educational experiences ("the software") could be planted across this growing network of unique eco-villages and land projects ("the hardware")!

Yes! That’s how we’ll easily grow to 1000 schools 🙌🏼

Not so fast, say the wise elders 🧙‍♀️

Have us wisdom school visionaries trained as educators? Studied at a legitimate wisdom school? Understand what a wisdom school for founders would look like in practice, or how to create one without exacerbating the distortions of contemporary education and entrepreneurship?

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." - Nelson Mandela

We’re playing with fire here too, and ought to bring commensurate care. Especially since having been conditioned in and found success with a Game A approach, we are highly susceptible to stumbling in solving problems from what Einstein referred to as “the same consciousness that created the problem.” With varying degrees of awareness about that (and in some cases, more awareness lowers motivation to build anything at all).

I can attest. Still stumbling, doing my best to learn a little more each time.

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🛠️ Guildcraft: Process is Product

The means determine the ends. It seems that one also can’t solve a problem without:

1. A deeper understanding of the consciousness that created it #history

2. Awareness of how that consciousness is still operating inside of you, and how to be with it when it resurfaces #selfknowledge

3. Regular practices, in community, that cultivate a different kind of consciousness #embodiedethics

Insights from our first year of exploring the inquiry

Oh what a paradoxical friction:

To get this right, we need entrepreneurs to create new educational institutions.

But, there are no educational institutions training education entrepreneurs in more holistic ways.

It’s hard to change the thing while being the thing. Which begs the question:

What does it mean to be personally prepared to start a wisdom school for founders?

Similarly to how the visionary Krishnamurti believed that right education comes down to educating the educator as a whole person, perhaps what’s most needed is not a new school but a Wisdom School accelerator decelerator CULTIVATOR to cultivate healthy soil for wisdom school entrepreneurs and their visions to flower.

A training program to empower innovation education entrepreneurs, to learn and practice wise innovation, in the process of building new schools capable of teaching it effectively.

In Medieval Europe, guilds served as associations of craftsmen or merchants who regulated the practice of their craft in a particular place. They facilitated quality and conduct standards, training through apprenticeships, resource and knowledge sharing.

Might we organize a centralized Wisdom School Guild?

To deeply inquire into these questions with the leading education philosophers and practitioners past and present, to create training curricula that can guide innovation education entrepreneurs to birth schools in a good way?

To create a space to wrestle with questions of principles and business models and metrics, like our friends over at North Star are doing for the psychedelics space. While staying closely connected to the sacred at the center of the center (the hardest piece and perhaps the ultimate measure of alignment).

Continuously listening for what Life on Earth is inviting us to learn and practice. Developing novel cultural templates, technologies and pedagogies. Providing operational support, spiritual strength in the faces of strong forces, and opportunities for capital to flow from abstract and extractive holdings to tangible and regenerative ones.

This is what I pray for. If I had a magic wand, we would have had this 10 years ago when the tech reform movement began. The second best time to start is now.

There will be a wellspring of innovation that emerges in the process of innovating on innovation education. In conversation with the wisdom of the Greek philosophers and Talmudic rabbis and classical Indian systems; education giants from Rudolph Steiner and John Dewey to Zak Stein and Vanessa Andreotti; initiators of wilderness schools, midwifery colleges, the great monasteries, human potential centers from Esalen to Auroville, pioneering universities from Black Mountain College to Presidio Graduate School, and rising leaders in the wise innovation scene like Turquoise Sound and Larry Muhlstein.

We can develop a knowledge commons of best practices, empowering decentralized entrepreneurs who can adapt wise innovation curriculum for their unique bioregions.

In deep partnership with the land, and respectful and reciprocal relationship with its ancestral stewards and their traditions.

Midjourney art by Andrew Dunn

Exploding homogeneous and narrow innovation culture into a rainbow of bioregional approaches to manifesting dreams.

Some wisdom schools will be more technological innovation focused, others more cultural. Some more woke, some more woo. Some more heady, others more woodsy. Some for dipping toes in, others for going deep. Some will have flashy websites and content, others won’t leave a digital trail. Some more in the spirit of business and others in the spirit of art. The web is large and we’ll need to form a wide meshwork of differentiated answers. Tom Morgan offers in Let’s Build The World Wise Web that each founder’s vibe will attract a slightly different tribe.

The wisdom schools in Bangladesh, Tanzania, Lebanon, South Dakota, Ecuador may look wildly different from each other, while staying in cooperative relationship.

Only the medicine of each place can address the unique challenges those communities and places face. With nature, the body, and direct experience as master teachers across the board.

Each school may offer a myriad of programming, from accelerator residencies to corporate retreats, to professional sabbaticals and Executive Decelerator Programs, to spring break and summer programs, to semesters abroad and youth rites of passage, to bioregional venture studios and digital communities to support day to day continuing education and practice.

Creating islands of sanity for their communities, offering opportunities for inter-generational programming, artist residencies, even birthing and dying centers.

Wisdom schools can serve as full stack re-humaning centers for all.

My kind of learning vibe. Midjourney art by Andrew Dunn.

While serving as cauldrons of R&D in translating deep wells of ethics and wisdom into contemporary language and applied practices, catalyzing novel tools across the startup stack from organizational development to software code.

Each instance becoming a story of wise innovation in and of itself, shifting startup and business narratives and culture from all angles. Ultimately, throwing a better party than overpriced and captured (and starting to get gutted?) universities teaching narrow and increasingly irrelevant material.

It won’t be easy, but it will be rich. A path home for all involved in the act of making something beautiful that lasts, versus a quick exit. Filled with all the intrinsically valuable things we have become blind to but make life worth living: community, meaning, lifelong learning, re-enchantment, re-sensitization, resilience in the dynamic times ahead. Becoming an elder. An embarrassment of riches for you and those around you. Not to mention better karma 🤭

The people, infrastructure, and potential are in place; they’re just not woven together and energized towards a shared vision.

The path to full bloom of a thousand schools is fraught with pitfalls. But we can walk it together with joy and humility. Navigating the way will be its own initiation.

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself." - John Dewey

Midjourney art by Andrew Dunn

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👣 Next Steps

Feeling this? Curious to explore, learn, practice, and grow into these questions? Let's figure out how to do this precious work together.

Subscribe to stay in the loop on the conversation.

Land stewards, education entrepreneurs, patrons, pragmatic mystics in transition: please get in touch, tell us what you see and how you feel moved to participate in what’s moving here. See you in May at Harvard’s Education for Flourishing Conference?

School of Wise Innovation is perpetually inquiring how we can be of best service to what is unfolding. Our vision has proved unwavering (a world in which visionaries, how they create, and what they create are in greater harmony with the web of life), while our mission seems it’s evolving in part towards cultivating the conditions for communities of wise innovation.

We are currently exploring supporting several education entrepreneurs across verticals, from psychedelics to land projects. Given our interstitium-ness, we are curious about how to bring these early initiatives into connection with each other in a kind of proto-guild, to learn and uncover needs and resource those needs together.

There is much mapping, convening, research and reporting to be done to do this right. But it wouldn’t take much to activate a Wisdom School Guild and Cultivator by the end of the year. We’ve been training for it. With the right sponsorship and partners, we can do it well.

We have to start somewhere. Education is crumbling and going back to the drawing board. There are over 10,000 business schools and accelerators worldwide today that are fast becoming obsolete. Let’s get going on this collective quest to reimagine innovation education.

Not a race to the top, but a group jog through the woods. Stopping to relish and learn and sit and tend along the way.

Let’s weave a global ecoversity network

To teach a multiplicity of new and ancient forms of living, working, and creating

In deep partnership with land and its traditional stewards

Catalyzing wise innovation from all corners of Earth

To help us remember, come home, and find our way, again and again

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🌸 Taste The Bloom This Spring

ICYMI, we’ve been doing our share of experimenting with innovation education, from our digital course Embodied Ethics in the Age of AI to our IRL retreat Wise Innovation Camp.

This year, we are taking a stab at a comprehensive entrepreneurship curriculum, prototyping the kind of programming we imagine at the wisdom schools for innovators to come.

We’ve divided the “Vision Cultivator” into four seasonal cohorts, each with a distinct focus:

❄️Winter on Inner Development

🌸 Spring on Collective Wayfinding

☀️ Summer on Organizational Development

🍂 Fall on Vision Actualization

As you can imagine, this is not your average innovation programming. Less happy hour and hustle, more elder councils and prayer. Embodied, cross-sector, multi-perspectival. Playing with Regenerative Time and Embodied Ethics.

Watch info session recording here.

Those who sign up for Spring Cultivator will also get access to recordings from Winter Cultivator.

Not surprisingly, many folks in The Cultivator are holding this wisdom school vision too, exploring their unique role in it as entreprenuers, coaches, teachers and land stewards. If you feel drawn to explore what you might give and receive, we’d be thrilled to be in relationship with you too.

With great gratitude and love,
Andrew Dunn & School of Wise Innovation supporters