About the holding team for ULab Scot

With thanks to Kuladharini for writing:

The holding team for ULab Scot is a group of people from different walks of life, with different perspectives and experiences gather every quarter to reflect, explore and sense the current and emerging future for U Lab in Scotland.

It’s a bit of a mystery how we all came to be a holding group, but there ye go, with self- organising entities like this one no-one person holds the seat of power over admittance to or exit from the group. There is an emerging we, as the work of helping nurture and sustain U lab is Scotland is developing. Its not a closed we… it can’t be.

The developing holding team has many qualities, one of which is that it is walking its own U Lab talk. The team uses the tools we are taught in the courses that have come from the theory U on which the U Lab courses are based. The team practices self-organising in its daylong meetings and the actions that derive from them.

This team is not in charge of U Lab in Scotland. It doesn’t deliver a service and is not paid to do the work it does, though many people do the work as part of a creative development in their professional lives. This team does not even do all of the work to develop U lab in Scotland, there are many self organised teams of U Lab participants taking the initiative and organising events and gatherings based on U Lab tools and ideas.

So it’s a holding space, a place where some of the national efforts to support the development and use of Theory U ideas in Scotland can be seeded and hopefully flourish from. It’s a space for reflecting on the relationship with and how we support the development of the Global U Lab. One of the ways we are doing that is by encouraging each other – and the wider Ulab community – to tell stories about our experiences with Ulab and the difference it has made.

Beneath all this though there is another quality that can be observed in the holding team members. It is a commitment to helping transform Scotland from the inside out. We were already doing that, each in our own ways before U Lab came along and each is personally committed to taking our “growing more fully human” selves on the journey of change too.

The Ulab holding team is currently (June 2016):

Chris Bruce

Brendan Rooney