2018 Leadership Summit — Alicante Spain

• The plan is to call top NLP Leaders together for a 3-day Colloquium wherein we get acquainted, associate with one another, and have the kind of critical and difficult conversations that we need to have
• Leaders: The “leaders” include anyone who is operationally leading people in the field of NLP— Trainers, writers, researchers, editors, sponsors, etc.  anyone who has or is influencing people to care about and operate in the field of NLP.
• Assumption: Our working assumption about this is— Like it or not, we are the leaders.  The challenge is: how are we doing?  Are we the leaders we need to be?  Are we developing (grooming) leaders for the next generation?  Are we leading the field in a way that will make people proud?
• Leadership: As a field without formal leadership but hundreds if not thousands of operational and functional leaders— the time has come for us to do some critical thinking about where we are and where we want to go.  Attempts have been made to do this in the past, the 1997 Leadership Conference, the 2000 Millennial Project – both sponsored by Robert Dilts.
• Associating: As a field we have lots of Associations and small communities.  They are either National Associations or built around a single person or a model, but we do not have a sense of a worldwide community.  The Leadership Summit is not seeking to create a super-association, but something much more simple— to simply associate with one another.  The design is to reduce the separations, the suspicion of each other, the bad-mouthing of those we disagree with and create a more respectful and cooperative international presence.

Assumptions: The thinking behind the following design is this: We are all leaders and we are already, de facto, co-leading the field of NLP.  So rather than put any one or a group of persons front and center as “the leaders” — we will conduct the Event from the perspective of shared leadership.

• Day 1: AFFIRMING OUR SHARED VISION. We opened with by welcoming each and having each introduce themselves, that created the atmosphere that we wanted to create: one of associating with respect, honor, and professionalism in hope of ever-greater collaborations.  We self-organized into sub-groups, each time in new groups which enabled all to get acquainted. The sub-groups met for 90 minutes around a Critical Question and then report back to the plenary group.
  The questions of Day 1:
  • What do we agree upon?  In terms of vision, values, and identity.
  • What do we want in terms of credibility, research, standards, and reputation (branding)?
  • What are we willing to do?
• Day 2: THE PROBLEMS THAT INTERFERE.  We have some significant problems as a field and it is only realistic and professional to talk about them.  The first purpose was not to solve them, but to understand each other.
  The questions of Day 2:
  • What is in the way which is blocking an d interfering with achieving our vision?’
  • What can we do about these interferences?  What are we already doing?  Waht else needs to be done?
  Day 3: FORWARD TO A BRIGHTER FUTURE.  We ended on a high by focusing on how we have come to understand ourselves and each other better, and by creating some action plan for moving forward.
  Questions of Day 3:
  • What can we learn from each other?  There is a lot of wisdom and experience in this place, what can we learn from each other?  How can we do that?
  • What will we do?  What ongoing work groups will we establish?   Menu List:
  ∙ Membership of NLP Leadership summit work group
  ∙ Research/ academic work group, Widepedia work group
  ∙ Website work group: to host information about world-wide events and activities in the field of NLP.

•  A colloquium:  colloquium (klkwm) n. pl. colloquiums or colloquia (-kw-)
  1. An informal meeting for the exchange of views.
  2. An academic seminar on a broad field of study, usually led by a different lecturer at each meeting.
  [Latin, conversation, from colloqu ,to talk together : com-, com- + loqu, to speak.]