John Renesch San Francisco, California, USA email

What is an underlying question that gives form to your work or interest in this field?

How do we find the collective will and courage to live together in a harmonious world where everyone has their basic needs met?

What is your personal experience of collective wisdom in groups?

Since I began hosting public dialogue groups I find a common wisdom in the hearts and minds of virtually everyone engaged in the conversations. Values are remarkably similar, aligned and in resonance in terms of what is ultimately wanted by the collective. However, I don’t see this wisdom being put into practice in the world on any significant scale. People seem to have plenty of reasons why these values cannot be put into practice. My interest lies in narrowing this gap between wisdom and action.

What is it about the work in this field that excites you and connects you to your own deepest self?

My work is focused on helping to bring about a better future, what I call “The Great Dream.” When I sense so much alignment in what people value and the kind of world they would all like to have I get very excited and encouraged to keep at it. This also provides me with many opportunities to get to know myself better. By taking on such work I am able to discover my own shadows and further appreciate my strengths.

I am inspired by the writing that comes through me and am grateful for the willingness I have to provoke new thinking, to challenge convention and the status quo, to spark whatever revolutionary cells are just waiting to be catalyzed.

As I grow in gratitude and humility, courage and compassion, wisdom and caring, I also grow in self-compassion, self-love and empathy with all living things. Then I am better able to contribute my gifts, to simultaneously be a life scholar as well as an elder in the work I am doing.

Please provide a brief storyline or snapshot of what brought you to this work.

I came into this work in my early 40s, soon after I passed through what many call a “mid-life crisis.” I engaged the human potential movement and found latent ambitions for making the world a better place. As a free-wheeling entrepreneur with a cowboy mentality since I was 18, I next started a successful real estate investment company with some partners so I could afford to help improve the state of the world. This brought me into contact with Willis Harman in the early 1980s, who subsequently became a teacher and dear friend, and the notion of systems thinking. I got introduced to a whole new community of people who were doing exciting things about changing the collective worldview so human beings had a shot of making it.

Following a profound experience while sitting in the Cow Palace with 10,000 others in 1982, I was given a preview of my destiny. I wasn’t sure what to say or do with the experience other than hold it as a “brick” until it was revealed to me in the years ahead.

Soon, I saw the link between sustainable global mind change and the need for business to drastically alter its course. So my present work began, focused on bridging the world I was calling “consciousness” and the world of business or work. This path took me through the World Business Academy (late 1980s/early 1990s with two years as its Managing Director), serving as editor/publisher for series of progressive business anthologies (New Leaders Press) and speaking publicly, writing books and articles on various subjects that fit into this genre.

Now I see my work in a wider field, having added social commentary to my “bag of tricks” as a provocateur. It became clear to me that while I didn’t have any magic formula for global transformation, I did know it would have to begin with people talking with each other about subjects that really mattered. In 2000, I co-founded The Presidio Dialogues as a means of supporting genuine “conversations for conscious business.” These are ongoing public gatherings here in San Francisco but our all-volunteer organization plans to eventually support anyone in the world who wants to start similar gatherings.

How would you like to be available to others in this field? What would be a meaningful connection? Are you available to talk with others? What contribution might you be able to make?

I am interested in simplifying and demystifying the art of dialogue. I am not an academic and have little tolerance for processes that need to be explained or heavily facilitated, especially when it seems like such a natural thing for human beings to do. We have simply forgotten how to talk to one another.

By hosting public dialogues each month, complete strangers enter our gatherings regularly. This allows me and my colleagues to practice simple and uncomplicated ways to host meaningful, deep conversations without lots of instruction, process management or complex formats.

Perhaps this is a perspective I can offer to the field.

Links to this site or others:

Most of my personal work can be found at www.Renesch.com while the dialogues work I do with other volunteers can be seen at www.ThePresidioDialogues.org.