Tom Atlee: A brief biography
Ideas and Focus
Tom Atlee is founder and co-director of the
non-profit Co-Intelligence Institute.
Recently his work has focused on developing our capacity to function
as a wise democracy,
so we can turn our social and environmental challenges into positive
developments for our society. His social change vision is based
on new understandings of wholeness
which recognize the value of diversity, unity, relationship,
context, uniqueness and the spirit inside each of us and the
world. Co-intelligence is
a form of intelligence grounded
in that kind of wholeness. It has collaborative and collective
dimensions, which we see clearly in higher forms of politics
and governance, the central focus of the Co-Intelligence Institute.
Co-intelligence theory also acknowledges many facets of intelligence
(like head and heart), wisdom, and the higher forms of intelligence
(natural and sacred) that move through and beyond us. Although
Tom and the Institute focus on very practical issues of group,
social and political dynamics, co-intelligence has many esoteric
dimensions as well.
Writings
Tom has written extensively on leading-edge issues in politics,
philosophy and social transformation. Most of this writing has
been shared with his mailing list and/or published on this website,
and a number of articles have been published
in alternative journals. The core of co-intelligence and
Tom's political vision are given in his 2003 The
Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World that
Works for All. -- a book first envisioned in 1993 with Eryn
Kalish and, after years of manuscripts reviewed by over 100 people,
finally completed in 2002 with his long-time colleague Rosa Zubizarreta.
He was co-editor with Judy Laddon and Larry Shook of the 1998
book Awakening: The Upside of
Y2K, which provides a good example of how to view major social
problems as opportunities for personal, community and societal
transformation. He has also worked with a number of other leading
authors on their books.
The Past 10 Years: Promoting collaboration
Tom's current work has grown out of years of exploring and
writing about collaborative dynamics. In Jan 1991 he did community-building
work in Belize and, funded by the German Marshall Fund, toured
Czechoslovakia with his partner Karen Mercer at the request of
the Federal Environmental Ministry, introducing activists and
government officials to ecologically sound, community-centered
alternatives and writing reports on the "green status"
of Czechoslovakian cities they visited, for the Ministry (Apr-June).
In 1993 he organized an 8-month written dialogue on "societal
intelligence" involving Robert Theobald, Fran Peavey, Howard
Rheingold, Willis Harman, Hazel Henderson, Andrew Schmookler,
Arnold Mindell, Duane Elgin, Charles Johnston, Eleanore M. Cooper
and a dozen others. From 1989-1994 he edited and published Thinkpeace,
a national journal of peacemaking strategy and philosophy for
which he wrote a bi-monthly column for 8 years (including 3 years
before he took over publishing it). From the early 1990s into
early 2000s, he became a thinking partner with Juanita Brown,
David Isaacs, Ned Crosby, Jim Rough, Sandy Heierbacher, Carolyn
Shaffer, Peggy Holman, Jay Earley, Rachel Bagby and others at
the leading edge of transformational exploration.
In addition to giving workshops,
presentations and organizing and/or facilitating a number of
conferences, he has served on several
boards and has co-organized a number of groups, including
- a weekly meeting to learn and practice the dialogue
methodologies of quantum physicist David Bohm and others
(which continued from 1991 into 1993), during which he began
his long friendship with Kenoli Oleari;
- a community of readers of In
Context [a journal of sustainable culture] and Yes! magazine
[a journal of positive futures] which met twice-monthly between
1995 and 2001 (successor to a 9-month group of In
Context readers he organized in 1991);
- a twice-monthly Utne Reader
Salon which met for five years;
- a two-year long project which successfully promoted the film
about sustainable economics, Who's
Counting: Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics,
getting hundreds of copies sold and shown on TV -- during which
he met Susan Strong who later founded the Metaphor
Project;
- dialogues during 1998-1999 about many aspects of Y2K
- from community preparation to spiritual challenges to cultural
transformation opportunities, during which he connected with
colleagues like Margaret Wheatley, Vicki Robin, Sharif Abdullah,
Halim Dunsky, Rick Ingrasci, John Steiner and others;
- the San Francisco Bay Area Center
for Group Learning, through which he met Eileen Palmer, John
Abbe and others, between 1993 and 1999;
- group inquiries into new,
non-adversarial, holistic modes of activism that take into
account the new sciences (quantum mechanics, chaos and complexity
theories, ecology, field theory, etc.)(2000-present time);
- The Sunshine Facilitation Collective in Eugene, OR, with
practitioners of numerous group practices mentioned on this website,
notably Dynamic Facilitation, consensus, listening circles and
The World Cafe.
1986: A Watershed
Tom's life was changed by his experiences on The
Great Peace March of 1986 -- an idealistic mobile community
which began its cross-country trek in LA with 1200 people, only
to go bankrupt two weeks later in the Mojave desert. 800 marchers
left and 400 stayed -- with few resources and no formal organization.
Tom was an active participant in the swirl of emerging leadership,
conversation and initiative that resulted in the March soon continuing
as a grassroots bootstrap operation, arriving on schedule in
Washington, DC, eight months later. During that time he had his
first vivid experiences of collective intelligence and self-organizing
human systems. Intense relationship work done at that time further
added to his understanding of human interactions, transformation
and community.
During the Peace March Tom and his partner Karen Mercer published
the official "Peace March Update," providing March
supporters with news of the March. Tom helped establish the March's
communications center and, as the March came to a close, organized
networking for marchers to work together after the March.
Early Years -- Learning nonviolent social change
Tom was raised in an activist, intellectual, Quaker family
with a socialist economist father and a mother interested in
Eastern spirituality and social service. After studying the relationship
between mysticism and modern physics for almost 3 years, he left
Antioch College in 1968 to organize draft resistance to the Vietnam
War. In 1969 he married and a year later joined the core group
of a large spiritual community where he was trained in marketing,
strategic planning, communications, counselling, personnel, and
food service (among other things) -- and had a daughter, Jennifer.
When he left that community in 1982 with his family, his concerns
about nuclear war led him back to the peace movement. During
the mid-80's he attempted to build bridges among antagonistic
peace groups, began editing and writing for local peace publications,
and ran the peace desk for the Mondale-Ferrarro presidential
campaign in Boston. Around that time, he also became a student
of feminism, holism and the ecological perspective. These forces,
concerns and ideas have shaped his life ever since.
Tom can be contacted at cii@igc.org
Summaries of Tom's Co-Intelligence activities
in 2000 and 2003
give a good picture of the kind of work he does every year.
What others say about
Tom Atlee's co-intelligence work
A full list of Tom
Atlee's published writings, workshops, conferences, etc.
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