The View from Big Sur – From Vision to Reality: Making our Values Count
Esalen President Gordon Wheeler's Blog
February, 2011
Everywhere I go in the world people come up to tell me about "their Esalen"– when they were last here, and what it has meant to them over the years. Very often it's a story about how Esalen "changed my life." I love these stories - I think we all do here at Esalen. They inspire us and keep us going.
And no two stories are the same. For some, it's the magic teacher or group they experienced here - once, maybe years ago, or again and again in different ways over a period of years, and still happening. For others it's a single conversation, perhaps outside of group, or a flashing meditative insight in the baths, in the gardens, on the beach. Or amazingly often, it seems to me, the story is about the life partner they met at Esalen ("by chance but not by accident," as one couple assured me just last month - onscreen from New Zealand, in the course of a webinar conference).
For a significant and ever-growing group, it's the inspiration they found at Esalen to go out and create the organization, the teaching method, the NGO that has since become their life's work, carrying something of Esalen's inspiration out into the world, but in their own uniquely creative form. In the process they give life and breath to our Esalen slogan, "personal and social transformation." The one feeds into the other, the two fundamental terms of our lives - the personal and the social - that can never be separated.
All this diversity of inspiration and impact is a tribute to Esalen's founders and their culture-morphing, limits-busting vision. Not to platform any one issue or practice exclusively, but to "open a space for exploration of everything excluded from the mainstream 'academy' of the day." That "everything excluded," as I'm always saying and writing, included most of the explorations and cross-discipline methods that have produced the essential "toolbox" for building and navigating the world of complexity we all live in and continue to transform today.
"Unity in diversity," as the phrase reads in our Esalen Values statement: changing our world, but not so as to make it over in some single image. Rather, the Esalen idea has always been to render the culture as a whole more open to creativity and the evolutionary power of everything human, everything connective, in all dimensions of our human experience and human potential.
In my last blog I wrote about the tricky task of putting words and signposts on that vision, to guide us in seeing opportunities and making hard choices in today's world. I described some of the exciting process we went through then, to render our legacy of visionary statements into some clear commitments to mission, values, and practices -- without constricting that open creative impulse which has always been deep in the dna of Esalen. You can see the results of that here.
And then the immediate point of that vision exercise: to generate some clear mandates for issues we need to attend to today, in order to ensure that Esalen's next 50 years will be as pathbreaking, as culture-shifting, as paradigm-shattering as our first 50, in a world landscape replete with new opportunities, new complexities and challenges unimaginable half a century ago. Those Strategic Issues and Mandates too you can see here.
And even then, after those months of intense, whole-organization activity, hard-thought and deeply clarifying - after all that, we're still in the realm of "just words." Most "strategic plans," we all know, end up in just one place: gathering dust on a shelf, or more likely today in the online version of what we used to call the "circular file."
And so having completed that huge and inspiring task together, we rolled up our sleeves and really went to work. The goal this time, just 3 or 4 years ago now: something we called the "ISM," for "integral sustainability model" - what in a more traditional organization we'd probably just call a new "business plan." If the Strategic Plan project was uplifting, even exhilarating, this part of the work is harder, making needed changes and sometimes difficult choices in the direction of greater effectiveness, greater mission impact in every area.
The effect of the strategic vision work was to reaffirm the fundamental purpose and direction of Esalen. Esalen - and with it, all of us who serve and support and work and teach here - are here in service to the mission of transformational change in the larger world. Esalen itself can never be the primary focus of that change mission. That would be the creation of a sort of "Shangri-la," some remote ideal place that exists apart from the "real world," as a refuge or a retreat from the challenges "out there." Rather, everything we do here is in service of that change out in our emerging world culture, and our shared, ever-threatened world. We ourselves are part of that world, a lab and an experimental venue for it. But impact out there is always the larger goal.
Following this, our mandates coming out of the vision work then fell into two basic categories:
- Every program at Esalen has to be evaluated continually for mission impact: how it serves the transformation of all the participants, and how it travels outward, through them and in other ways, to serve the transformation of the world. Especially for our many subsidized and pro bono programs at Esalen - at our Center for Theory and Research, our pioneering Gazebo preschool, our leadership Farm and Garden program, our inhouse education offerings for interns and staff, and more -- we always have to keep this transformational impact criterion in mind. We have to be extra sure, where Esalen is underwriting a non-revenue program, that that program is serving not just the people here who use it, but a larger audience as well, as a model and a font of new practices and ideas; and
- Every systemic function at Esalen - our human systems, our tech infrastructure and our physical plant - has to undergo a searching assessment, to be sure we're where we need to be in our capacities in all areas, for the greatest effectiveness in delivering our transformational programs, mission, and message.
Next, this led us to four fundamental criteria for every proposed change or review or new project at Esalen. Each planning element, new or already in place, needs to be looked at in an integral way, through four distinct value lenses:
- how does it serve and enhance the delivery of Esalen's mission here and in the larger world?
- how does it enhance the welfare of the people who make up Esalen's organizational community, on and off-campus?
- how does it further our commitment to sustainable practices here on this magic site, and in our larger world?
- how does it serve Esalen's financial welfare and sustainability?
These four primary commitments were then supplemented by planning guidelines outlining a dozen specific dimensions (such as commitment to our "seekers serving seekers" staffing model, increasing diversity at Esalen, commitment to competency-based hiring and equitable pay system, and more), plus another dozen or so resources we need to count on, to make all these things realities (such as enhanced connectivity, new web presence, stepped-up fundraising, offsite officing and commuter housing on campus, and many more).
Ideally, each system, each process new or old serves all four of these value criteria, which are ultimately inseparable. In practice of course, when one of these aims is not well-enough met (most often the financial!), then that exception has to be justified through an exceptional achievement of the others - and balanced through some other compensating practice to meet that challenged mission, people, or sustainability goal in another way.
A good example of this is the way our enhanced mission-delivery goals, our land-footprint/sustainability goals, our increased staff compensation goals, and our financial welfare goals have to work together. To increase our mission delivery (and our revenue stream resource!) we needed to look toward raising our "paid bed-night" number, our fundamental revenue metric at Esalen, by about 10% per year for several years, up toward the agreed and established "persons staying on property" numbers we're allowed under our County permits and other commitments. That goal then impacts our overall "on property footprint," presenting us with a potential increase in our environmental impact here by about 3% a year (note that staff-plus-interns numbers make up only around two thirds of the people on property, our workshop seminarians about one third).
This total footprint number then has to be mitigated back down, through a variety of methods (through better tech functionality, some outsourcing which is necessary in today's high-skills world anyway - and most of all, through the opening of the Esalen Town Center in Carmel, which also serves the upgrading of our technical connectivity for our finance and other departments). Using the additional seminarian revenue, we then can uplevel our staff compensation support - and also pay for the costs of the Town Center. The integral result: more mission delivery and impact, better staff support, with revenue enhancement to support those changes, and offsets in the plan to compensate for the added on-campus footprint.
This is the complexity and "zero-sumness" of some of the numbers we work with in our remote-location, residential-staff Institute. The opportunity of that challenge is that it compels us to focus on how all dimensions of Esalen's vision, mission delivery, and human life processes have to work together, meeting the complexity challenges of today's rapidly-integrating world.
How are we doing, in this overall "ISM" transformation project here? In a score of important areas - from the highest-ever compensation increases to the lowest-ever top-to-bottom comp ratio, the introduction of high-speed internet at last, the flourishing Town Center, the upgrading our our Farm and Garden as a prime teaching department (plus the production of more crops!), our acquisition of a new staff housing site next door, the rehab of many of Esalen's rooms, our expanded catalog and our enhanced intern programs, the Web presence rebuild just being launched, and much, much more - we've covered more ground and brought in more change in the past five years than in any previous period in Esalen's history. Our programs are thriving and growing, our reserves growing, our financial bottom line holding its own in these difficult times.
Much, much more remains to be done. You, our wider Esalen community, are an essential part of this, and you'll be hearing from us in the coming year about ways to contribute and be involved. As we stand at the threshold of Esalen's second half-century of transformational life and mission. Stay tuned, let us hear from you - and see you soon at Esalen!
Gordon Wheeler, President, Esalen Institute