Elisebeth VanderWeil

I help individuals, groups, and organizations open opportunities to be wonderful.

I work with people as a teacher, consultant, administrator - teaching and guiding as we are experiencing and pursuing change that is conscious and evolving. I am privileged to live in the Pacific Northwest, with our diverse, open, and vital atmosphere of creative ways to engage technology in complement to our natural world.

I am facsinated with self-organizing, dispersed leadership as it is being realized in the 21st Century, such as Burning Man, Occupy, and shared economies. These are brilliant expressions of organized chaos, acceptable deviance, and other juicy paradoxes. These systems of leadership have taken adaptive leadership and made it even more powerful. What if we expected people to be wonderful rather than expecting the worst until proven otherwise?

I am curious how leaders in these movements are engaging this radical organizational paradigm with those whose only experience of leadership is that of hierarchy, bureaucracy, and competition. Is this next most elegant step in our evolving understanding and practice of leadership?

I also write articles and provide workshops around optimizing the power of fear in decision-making and learning. I consider myself a fear expert - in that I understand and use what seems to scare people. Funny that.