Speaking of The Asia Pacific

Article by John Stubley, Jayce Pei Yu Lee , Shobi Lawalata-Dobbs, Katie Stubley, Pramita Indrarini, Bel Villavicencio, Shenali Perera, Indra Zaka Permana, with ELP AP Module 3 extended team and fellows.

Ecosystem Leadership Program Asia Pacific, Module 3, May-August, 2026.

Ecosystem Leadership Festival Asia Pacific, Bali, Aug 9–12. Register here (scholarships available).

Collective layered images (top left and right) of visual scribings by Shenali Perera (bottom left), Indra Zaka Permana (bottom middle) and Jayce Pei Yu Lee (bottom right) during the Ecosystem Leadership Program Asia Pacific (ELP AP) Module 3 online session one, May 20, 2026. We scribed at the same time and layered each image for the visual resonance to serve the poetic moment.

The Ecosystem Leadership Program Asia Pacific (ELP AP) is a three-module journey over the course of two years, from 2024–2026. It follows on from the global ELP in Berlin in 2019, and has run parallel with the ELP in Latin America. The intention for the ELP AP has been to co-create a regional ‘fireplace’ where we can support the highest potential futures for each other as individuals, as communities, as cultures, as nations, as economies, and as a region, in order to contribute towards a better world as a whole. To do this, we have been working with many awareness-based systems change practices and processes. The journey has been held by a cross-regional governance structure, as well as a collective of partnership organisations.

The ELP AP journey from 2024–2026.

Throughout the journey, all fellows (including the extended team) have held transformative inquiry questions that have led to ongoing action research in all our places of work. This also means we have been on a peer-to-peer journey of co-creation where facilitator-participant dynamics have transformed and inverted so that during the upcoming festival in Bali, it will be the Module 3 fellows who will be taking the lead with their own action-research contributions, supported by the extended team. At all stages of the journey we have used the social arts — especially Visual Scribing, Social Poetry, and Social Presencing Theatre — as individual and collective action research methodologies for co-perceiving and co-creating the future that stands in need of us to make it.

The following is the collective poetic mirroring from Module 3 online session one, co-created by all fellows who chose their most resonant lines and phrases from the sharing in trios of individual life-stories, especially as these stories relate to our capital W ‘Work’ and our capital ‘S’ Self. The co-created poem that follows is therefore also a kind of ‘speaking’ from the Self and Work of the ELP AP at this stage of its collective journey, from each of us as individuals, and also from the highest potential of the Asia Pacific region as a whole. We will also now insert some further reflections (in italics) between different sections of the collective poem, taking this same speaking as our muse and guide:

Collective layered image by Shenali Perera, Indra Zaka Permana and Jayce Pei Yu Lee during the ELP AP Module 3 online session one, May 20, 2026.

Presence, IKIGAI, break through passion! Vulnerability!

During the ELP journey so far we have travelled through observation, presence, Ikigai — the meaning of our lives — breaking through, with passion, vulnerability.

Experiencing humankindness to build humankindness, I believe everything happens for a reason. Tending to difference to be truly myself. Courage to be me.

We cannot change or create something ‘out there’ without creating it also for ourselves. We attend to the guiding forces of karma and destiny, while knowing we play a free hand too, finding ourselves amongst others.

Mystery uncertainty, AI is infiltrating our lives.

In the mysteries of not knowing, the necessities of our time approach us.

Empathy, connection and truth, connecting to our hearts. Creative thinkers of the generations to come — It makes me want to DO something because we are human I play. I improvise. I words. I converse. Dreams started to come through, connecting people with art work… called into the unknowingness of things. Deep trust and care for the spaces in between, leading from the heart. Deep trust and care, deep level of interest, deep listening.

How do I need to be in order for dreams to come through? — what do I need to align in myself and between us as human beings? What role the arts in uncovering these next steps?…

Freedom to pause.

Say no more.

Carry on from childhood. Questions bring us back to centre. Working with differences as Oneness. It is not the only canvas

We carry our histories. We carry our presents. We carry our questions. Differentiated and yet common. Upon what surfaces do we make our marks?

Surrender. Do not be afraid. Put your intention there and something will be born — magic happens. Leading from the heart, a note to a pulsation. Put your intention there and something will be born: Creating a shared future.

The courage to not give up, but to give in. Intention is a seed from which a collective future is born and grows. The heart is a magical gardener, a grand composer in the music of the world waiting to be made.

Oceans of human-ness affirming our humanness…. water has memory, oceans have life… the 5 elements are core of who we are I cannot turn away from

As human beings, as countries in a region, we are connected by water, by what flows through all living things. The ocean in a drop. The world: the human being writ large. We can face this, we can…

Jump into the unknown to create a cycle of good practices. World of distraction… A different way. Let go of control…haha. Lost…..find my purpose again! Trust, rooted, full of heart, proud!

We can jump into this unknown, into these connections of life. We can let go of what we have had, of who we were, finding something in the next, finding purpose, finding Ikigai, finding root there through the heart.

Art has the ability to hold space: bridging inner to outer; simultaneous decaying and emergence. Listen to the voice from the inside; we heard each other. Power of art.

Art can show us the pathway on this side. Until we step into the co-creating of new systems, of a new world, where every human being is an artist in this grandest of artworks. Where we support each other in this becoming,

Like a daycare centre To express themselves from trauma. The most important thing about the most important thing.

Places for human beings to grow out of what has been, with all it carries, into the essential part of who we are, and of what this world is needing to become, and needing us to become: the most important thing, about the most important thing.

Collective layered image by Shenali Perera, Indra Zaka Permana and Jayce Pei Yu Lee during the ELP AP Module 3 online session one, May 20, 2026.

If you feel connected to this work in the Asia Pacific, then we invite you to the Ecosystem Leadership Festival in Bali, August 9–12. The festival doubles as the in-person component of the ELP AP Module 3. It will be supported by the extended team with contributions woven together from all Module 3 fellows. Register here (scholarships still available, especially for those working in the field of landscape restoration and food).

The ELP AP organising team (Shobi Lawalata, Katie Stubley, John Stubley, Jayce Pei Yu Lee, Pramita Indrarini, Bel Villavicencio) on behalf of the 2024–2026 extended team (Cokorda Dewi, Otto Scharmer, Crystal Huang, Bradley Chenoweth, Renu Burr, Megan Seneque, Shenali Perera, Indra Zaka Permana, Lili Xu, Marisol Lopez Eala, Chenny Galano, Jim Mackintosh, Masatoshi Torii, Mutia Rizqydiani, Manish Srivastava).

With thanks to the hosting organisations: Presencing Institute (PI), United in Diversity (UID), The Rizal Academy for Innovation and Leadership (TRAIL), Commonland, and The Australian Centre for Dialogue at the Australian National University (C4D @ ANU). A very large thank you must go to Commonland for their partnership, especially for the landscape-restoration program stream with scholarship support for participants who are engaged in this important work; the ELP AP would not have been possible without Commonland.