Program Arc
The 9-month Positive Deviants journey is broken down into three required in-person immersions, seven online group sessions, five coaching sessions from March, 2025 through to November, 2025 and regular personal practice.
The Dance of Self & System
Gathering One: April 22 - 27, 2025
Ktunaxa, Sinixt, and Syilx Nations, British Columbia
We begin by stepping out of the rhythm of our daily lives to slow down, gain perspective and explore the fractal relationship between self and system. Our first gathering builds a foundation for the Fellowship where we get to know one another and learn about each other’s stories, work, practices, dreams, challenges and systems. We will build shared language and reference points around systems and complexity and explore patterns of intervention and transformation. We will introduce and explore individual and collective practices - with regular intervals of reflection, journaling, dialogue and group discussion. You will get clear about the type of changes or edges—whether those be personal, relational or systemic—that you most need to focus on over the coming months and what it will really take to foster. What is your work to do right now? What is it asking of you? What might you need to release or say No to in order to say a bigger Yes to your own calling?
Earth As Home & Teacher
Gathering Two: July 2nd – 11th, 2025
Ktunaxa and Blackfoot Territory, British Columbia
Earth as Home & Teacher offers participants an experiential dive into the ecology of self and system. Based at a remote lodge in the Canadian Rockies, we will spend time together on the land along with the opportunity to spend several days alone in reflective solitude. This can be an opportunity to awaken - or deepen into - complexity consciousness…a particular quality of our being that integrates our many ways of knowing, being and doing, and in which the rigors of science and rationality can find common ground with the wisdom of the heart and a sense of the sacred. Such consciousness enables us to directly experience a deeper sense of kinship and connectedness—with ourselves, with others, and most importantly, with the more-than-human world. Just to be clear, complexity consciousness is not something that you don’t already have or need to get! It is the ground of being from which we no longer experience ourselves as being separate—the foundation upon which systems thinking and complexity leadership rest. As such, it is an orientation that enables us to participate in and influence the world from a posture of greater relationality. From it flow:
A deep time perspective: a sense of consideration for and responsibility to future generations;
A relational perspective: a capacity for empathy and relational intimacy with all life together with a felt-sense of membership in a single human family and the wider Earth community;
An ecological or systemic perspective: an understanding and reverence for the inter-connectedness and inter-dependence of all life; and
A principled perspective: an ethic of self-restraint and right relationship alongside a deep commitment to the flourishing and well-being of others.
Note: this is a wilderness camping experience in a single occupancy tent. See Accommodations in Important Details below.
From Social Change to Systems Artistry
Gathering Three: November 2 – November 7, 2025
Treaty Seven Territory, Canmore, Alberta
It’s our final gathering. We’re moving from a wild landscape to an urban setting where we will dive into the craft of systems influence and complexity leadership with a renewed focus. But just as there’s no final destination or state in a complex living system; the Fellowship is really just getting started. It’s a good reminder that our work will always involve enabling adaptive emergence in the face of complex and ever-evolving challenges. Change is the only constant.
We’ve borrowed the term systems artistry from the futurist Jean Houston who describes it as the ability to navigate and creatively engage with complex, interconnected systems using both intuitive insight and practical strategies. It involves seeing the world as an interconnected web of relationships and patterns, and artfully intervening in ways that foster transformation, coherence, and emergence. It’s another way of saying positive deviant – and an artist’s work is never fully done! There will be opportunities for revisiting and reimagining familiar challenges and opportunities to reveal new opportunities for creative action. To take your work to the next level – whatever that might mean for you and the communities you serve. We will explore practical tools, techniques, tactics, strategies, concepts, models, resources and system ‘hacks’ that you might be able to apply directly to your own work. We’ll continue to have opportunities for personal reflection, collective deliberation and ongoing practice. And there will be opportunities to take stock of the past months, to pull out and integrate some of their threads and lessons, and to look forward to the journey ahead.
Online Sessions
Group Sessions (4 total):
Complexity micro-doses
These online learning sessions dive more deeply in specific complexity tools, models and perspectives. They are delivered by both Wolf Willow team members together with leading complexity scholars and practitioners. The small size of our group mean that there will be opportunity to engage directly with program faculty.
Logistics
We will host an online information session prior to the July in-person land-based gathering to review equipment, preparation and logistics.
Listening circles
Following our first two in-person gatherings, we will reconvene online for an integration and follow-up session.
Dates & times:
Online sessions always happen on Wednesdays and always start at 12pm Mountain Time.
They take place on the following dates:
March 12: Group introductions & Complexity Microdose I (2 hrs)
May 7: Listening Circle I (60 mins)
June 4: Complexity Microdose II (90 mins)
June 11: Preparation and logistics for land gathering (60 mins)
July 23: Listening Circle II (60 mins)
September 10: Complexity Microdose III (90 mins)
October 1: Complexity Microdose IV (90 mins)
Convert to your time zone here.
Personal & Systems Coaching
The Fellowship includes a package of five sessions with a skilled coach who brings experience navigating inner work, systems work and the dynamics of complex social contexts. Dates and times—along with the specific intentions and content for the sessions—will be negotiated between you and your coach. These coaching sessions are intended to offer you a space for deeper reflection, compassionate accountability, insight and exploration.
Personal Practice
We ask you to commit to three practices.
We become whatever we regularly practice. And everything we regularly do in our lives – our morning routines, our stress reduction strategies, our patterns of consumption – is a practice. It is the wolf we feed, the muscle we exercise, the path we walk. But most of our practices are unconscious and are often misaligned with our aspirations. If you want to see what someone is becoming, look at what they are practicing.
But Positive Deviants asks you to commit, upfront, to only three things:
20 minutes of seated meditation per week.
20 minutes of intentional contact with wild nature per week plus three longer sessions (2hrs+) over the course of the year.
One 200 word post of each week that describes what you are noticing about your inner state and the way it seems to be related to the work you are doing in the world.
That’s it. You’re welcome to do more but not less. No menu substitutions!
FAQ’s?
If I listen to Headspace under a tree does that count as both meditation and wild nature contact? No!
Can I meditate while I’m doing my daily run? No!
I was camping for the weekend so does that count as 16 hours of wild nature contact? No!
I wrote 800 words last week so can I take September off? No! No excuses!
Over the course of the year it comes to about 10 hours of seated meditation, 16 hours connecting with wild nature, and no more than 10 pages of reflective journal entries. It’s not an arduous commitment – but it’s not insignificant either.
Please don’t apply if you are not able to sincerely commit to these specific practices at this point in your life.
Contemplative Practice.
Insight, clarity, wisdom, compassion. All of these flow from the deeper layers of the mind. Meditation is simply whatever we regularly do to help us access and inhabit those deeper layers. The value of a regular meditation practice is well described in the research literature; documented benefits include reduced stress & lower blood pressure, improved brain and immune system function, increased focus, concentration & creativity, less unhealthy self-criticism and an increase in the ability to respond to complex and difficult situations with a more objective and open-hearted perspective. Such practices have also been identified as a critical catalyst in large-scale system change. Whether you are an experienced practitioner or tasting such practice for the first time, the Fellowship asks you to commit to a minimum of 20 minutes of meditation per week. For many, this is likely become a sustained daily practice. We will teach a simple, non-denominational form during the first gathering and host an optional weekly online practice space each week between the first two modules.
Wild Nature Practice
Our capacity to understand and influence larger fields for change is enhanced through what systems sage Peter Senge has called “direct contact with the generative capacities of nature.” Wild nature is present everywhere – in the body, the city, the social system – not just in natural or wilderness landscapes. To encounter the wildness of the world is to encounter its infinite creative energy, its animacy, its vibrant complexity and its self-organizing capacity. Awakening or deepening or connection to the wild gestures towards new cultural patterns and possibilities. When we lose connection to wildness, the severance shapes our consciousness and we end up with monocultures of the mind and spirit no matter how diligent our awareness practices. We ask prospective Deviants to commit to a practice of contact and connection with wild nature every week. Guidance around this practice will be given at the first gathering and throughout the fellowship. At minimum, participants should be prepared to commit at least 20 minutes per week, along with three more extended (2hrs +) periods over the course of the year.
Awareness Practice
Positive Deviants is, above all, an opportunity to inhabit your life and work with increased awareness. To be more conscious about what it is you are up to, and the state of being from which you are up to it! We will invite you to regularly become aware of your own internal state, and the way it both impacts and is impacted by the webs of relationship and circumstance in which you are entangled and through which you do your work. We will explore various practical tools for enhancing such awareness. We are asking Fellows for a commitment to share the fruits of their learning with us and each other in the form of a short (less than 200 words) weekly post.
Other practices? There may be all kinds of other practices you currently do or would like to do. Morning routines, diet, exercise, mind-body disciplines, transformative integral kata, prayer, gratitude, breathwork, radical generosity, courageous conversation, medicine work, cultural traditions…the list is infinite. Feel free to add, subtract or just keep doing anything that works for you.
Program Elements
Important Details
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Gathering One: The Dance of Self and System
April 22nd – April 27th, 2025
Ktunaxa, Sinixt, and Syilx Nations, British Columbia
Gathering Two: Earth as Home & Teacher
July 2nd - July 11th, 2025
Cross River Education Centre
Ktunaxa and Blackfoot Territory, British Columbia
Gathering Three: From Social Change to Systems Artistry
November 2nd – November 7th, 2025
The Town of Canmore
Treaty Seven Territory, Alberta
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There is no program fee for Positive Deviants. It is generously supported by our partners at the Suncor Energy Foundation.
Participants are responsible for their own travel costs.
Suncor is an energy company with roots in the oil sands that also owns the Petro Canada gas stations. For some people, taking funding from the energy industry (or other sources) contravenes their principles. By sending an expression of interest, you are making a choice.
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Gathering I: single or double occupancy rooms.
Gathering II: single occupancy tent. Participants are welcome to bring their own equipment and we can provide warm sleeping bags, tents, sleeping pads, etc. to anyone who needs them.
Please note that there is no cell signal at Gathering II and no internet except in the case of emergencies.
Gathering III: single or double occupancy rooms.
At each gathering, we will share three beautiful meals together each day (except for arrival and departure days). All dietary needs and/or food allergies will be accommodated for.
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We will be building our knowledge and our learning container together at each session - both online and in-person. The quality of the experience hinges on everyone’s full participation. Before you apply, we ask that you take a look at your calendar and commitments to be sure that you can participate fully at each in-person gathering and online session.
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Application Window: We will accept expressions of interest and nominations until December 15th, 2024. They will be reviewed as they come in.
Expression of Interest Review: Based on the expressions of interest, we will invite some people to submit a more detailed application. We will let people know either way by December 20th.
Detailed Application: those invited to submit a more detailed application will receive specific guidance around this process. You will have until January 10th to get this to us.
Application Review: applications will be assessed by a diverse team of reviewers. Based on their recommendations, we will conduct applicant interviews during the week of January 20th.
Offers to join the 2025 cohort will be made by January 30th.
Self-Selection & Expression of Interest.
If you’re still with us, we’d love to hear from you! Here’s how it works.
Before asking you to fill out a more detailed application for the 2025 fellowship, we created an interactive self-assessment that will help you sift through the details, imagine yourself in the room, and clarify important commitments. It shouldn’t take you long to get through, but we do hope you take it seriously! The worst thing would be for you to apply even if a part of you feels this may not be a good fit for you.
This is not for everyone, and not everyone is invited!
At the end of this self-assessment tool are two upload links. We’d like to see the following:
Write a short (one page max) note telling us why you would be a good fit. Help us see how you and your work align with who and what the Fellowship is designed to support. Why is this the right timing? How might your participation in the Fellowship have a tangible impact in the world?
Include a short resume (2 pages max) that gives us a good sense of what you’ve been up to in the world.
Self Assessment & Expression of Interest
Portal will open November 15th, 2024 for the 2025 Cohort
Not For You? Not Right Now?
Nominate Someone Else!
Often people that would be a great fit for the Fellowship don’t even consider themselves for application…they encourage other people in their team or community to apply. So if you know someone who would be an excellent fit feel free to send a note to welcome@wolfwillow.org telling us why, sharing their contact details and showing us how we can learn more about them. We’ll take it from there. We will not tell them you nominated them unless you explicitly give us your permission to do so.