U.Lab
The Connecting King’s Cross Project has been an evolving story based in the locality of King’s Cross that came out of an online course for changemakers called U.Lab and the Reinventing Democracy group that formed from it.
U.Lab is a MOOC (a massive open online course) designed by the Presencing Institute that uses Theory U developed by Otto Scharmer and elements such as coaching circles, deep listening, mindfulness etc in service of co-creating projects for societal change. U.Lab is a free course and its syllabus runs over several weeks from September each year with tens of thousands of people globally meeting online and in person to follow its content and create projects.
In 2015 the Presencing Institute formed a partnership with the Impact Hub social enterprise network of co-worker spaces to bring the U.Lab online course into hubs of collective study and exploration in over 42 Impact Hubs around the globe. The idea is to create in-person communities as well as an online global movement that can “build a new economy by co-sensing and co-creating the emerging future.”
Impact Hub King’s Cross had its first cohort of U.Lab in 2015 and then it continued and grew in 2016. The course attracted people from very diverse backgrounds who came together to learn an unconventional way of building projects based on suspending all of one’s assumptions and going out into the real world and doing action research based on talking to people, but most of all listening to them and getting a feel for what is trying to emerge in any given situation.
The coaching circles based on deep listening, empathy walks and a shared desire to make the world a better place create a very particular atmosphere of connection and appreciation that mean many attending feel a deep degree of commitment to turning up week after week.
Reinventing Democracy
When the 2016 cohort of U.Lab began we decided to give the meetings a particular theme. After the June 26th Brexit Referendum result the theme of democracy, how to revive faith in it and make it more inclusive and meaningful was a hot topic. On top of this the U.Lab host Andy Paice had a strong interest in this field and so Reinventing Democracy at U.Lab became a theme of exploration at King's Cross.
Part of the inspiration was Otto Scharmer's elucidation of Democracy 4.0 "a distributed, direct, dialogic system that operates by connecting to and empowering its citizens to co-shape the whole." The invitation for the course was to take a journey into what democracy is and what it could become through our sensing and imagination.
Another idea was a desire to create a space for whole system conversations in which people representing the diversity could come together as a mini public and work out together what they wanted for their locality.
However the general callout was for a group to come together using the U.Lab methodologies to discover what they wanted to create within this particular theme.
The following (taken from the Impact Hub website) was the invitation to take part in the 2016 U.lab at King's Cross:
Part of the inspiration was Otto Scharmer's elucidation of Democracy 4.0 "a distributed, direct, dialogic system that operates by connecting to and empowering its citizens to co-shape the whole." The invitation for the course was to take a journey into what democracy is and what it could become through our sensing and imagination.
Another idea was a desire to create a space for whole system conversations in which people representing the diversity could come together as a mini public and work out together what they wanted for their locality.
However the general callout was for a group to come together using the U.Lab methodologies to discover what they wanted to create within this particular theme.
The following (taken from the Impact Hub website) was the invitation to take part in the 2016 U.lab at King's Cross:
The Reinventing Democracy project developed over 2 periods:
September - December 2016 - during the progression of the U.Lab online course as 18 of us learned how to work with the course materials and did a general learning journey into the field of Democracy.
January - October 2017 - A smaller group continued to meet to move into the prototyping phase of the project that narrowed down into focusing on more specific aspects related to democracy in terms of the local community of Kings Cross.