The claim
In February 2026, Otto Scharmer and Michael Pirson published twelve principles for reimagining universities through the Club of Rome — describing a university that functions as a living innovation ecosystem, educates "first-rate humans, not second-rate robots," treats real-world challenges as the curriculum, uses nature as a teacher and presencing as a way of knowing, and builds the connective middleware that transformation requires. They asked, in effect: where is this university?
This paper's answer: it is in Olympia, Washington. It has been running since 2017. It uses a public library on Tuesday afternoons and an old-growth forest when the questions need more space than a room can hold. The paper maps all twelve principles, one by one, against the Changemaker Lab's documented practice — not as aspiration, but as an audit of eight years of evidence.
How the mapping works
For each principle, the paper presents evidence from the longitudinal evaluation record (2018–2025), student self-evaluations, and contemporaneous practitioner documentation. Community embeddedness shows up as ventures with real boards and real beneficiaries; social soil as the container-building practices captured in 360° peer evaluations; deep action learning as governance sessions where "no grade depends on the outcome — the community they serve will tell them if they got it right"; nature as teacher in forest debriefs where "the land sets the pace"; ecosystem breathing in the weekly rhythm of immersion and reflection; middleware in the global Tiimiakatemia network across 14+ countries and the Presencing Institute's community of practice.
The integrating thread: fourth-person knowing
The paper's deeper argument is that the twelve principles are not a checklist but a developmental ecology: each creates a different enabling condition for fourth-person knowing (Scharmer & Pomeroy, 2024) — the quality of awareness the polycrisis demands and extractive education excludes. Remove any principle and the others are diminished. This is why the university of the future is not primarily a new institutional form; it is a new epistemological commitment, enacted in practices that consistently create the conditions for that awareness to arise.
Honest limits
The paper names what the evidence does not show. Scale: hundreds of learners, not thousands — one prototype within what must become a distributed network. Context-dependence: Evergreen's narrative evaluation and learning-contract architecture are enabling conditions not universally available. And an unresolved tension: how the team company container holds genuine demographic and developmental diversity, including where it has failed to. The prototype's honesty about its limits is presented as constitutive of its pedagogy, not incidental to it.
Status and access
This paper is forthcoming in Responsible Enterprise Pedagogy (Emerald Publishing), Special Edition: Team Academy and Team Coaching — expected September 2026. This page summarizes the submitted manuscript; the full text will be posted upon publication. For scholarly correspondence or a preprint conversation: dion@changemakersteamacademy.org.