The Overview Experience ^©

“When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to identify with the entire planet.”
                                                                                                                                                                                   (Rusty Schweickart, Apollo 9)

   
    The Overview Experience is available as a 1, 2 or 3-day transformational training program. 
It is relevant to company, agency, and personal goals, whether focused on improving cooperation,
dealing with challenges in alignment or performance, or addressing seemingly
intractable issues that do not resolve via ‘ordinary’ approaches to problem-solving.  

While The Overview Experience supports transformation at any level, it is particularly relevant to projects and issues demanding
a change of attitude, orientation or perspective in order to grapple with seemingly impossible circumstances.

The Overview Experience is an experiential workshop that combines state-of-the-art personal and group development methods with
state-of-the-art cinematic visuals.  The merger of these technologies, particularly in the  3-D environment of
planetariums and Imax-style theaters, offers a new access to transformation,
wherein the ‘Overview Effect’¹ is recreated as a platform to help participants
create a new mindset, and produce a new understanding of themselves,
their relationships, their organizations and communities, and our place in the universe. 

   Our intent is to reproduce the impact of seeing the Earth and the Universe from orbit or the moon. 
Seeing the home planet both from space and in space is known to have fostered a significant cognitive shift
in many of the five hundred people who have traveled into space during the past half-century. 
Astronauts who have experienced this shift report that their identities changed,
from a concern for the parts to a concern for the whole. 

 When we are on the surface of the planet, the Earth is our context and the Universe is content. 
When we are in space, the Universe becomes the context and the Earth the content. 
There is a unique benefit to be realized from reversing this experience of context and content. 

At this particular moment in time, this shift in perspective is urgently necessary
to address the challenges to our human survival and planetary evolution,
which are global and interconnected, and ultimately cannot be solved without “Overview Thinking.”

 What is the Overview Effect?

“The Overview Effect” is a term coined by Frank White in his 987book,
The Overview Effect:  Space Exploration and Human Evolution. 

It refers to a sense of incredible connection experienced by many astronauts
        while viewing the Earth and the universe from orbit or the moon.  
They saw that there were no borders or boundaries on the planet from that perspective -- that we are all “in this together”
and that the Earth is a small oasis of life and intelligence in a vast and largely unknown universe.

Some astronauts report that their fundamental point of view was altered with respect to work, life, cooperation, war and peace,
and the possibility that comes from people working together in new ways.
They experienced a shift from identifying with parts of the Earth to identifying with the whole planet.

As the Overview Effect has permeated our consciousness, so has the understanding that we now have an historic opportunity
for what might be called “planetary transformation” at all levels -- corporate, governmental, community and personal --
a basic change in the context from which we view ourselves and our world.

“Never before in history have both opportunity and need been so great.
Never before has ‘grow or die’ been more apparent.
And, never before have we had the means existed to effect planetary transformation.
Indeed, this is the time to pioneer results-oriented designs that can then be applied
across the urgent and significant issues of our time.”
                                                                                                                                                       (“Personal to Planetary Transformation,” Kosmos, Winter 2007)

                          Spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle are also sharing this understanding with millions who read their books:

 “When you are detached, you gain a higher vantage point from which to view the events in your life,
instead of being trapped inside of them. You become like an astronaut
who sees the planet Earth surrounded by the vastness of space and realizes
                                             a paradoxical truth: the earth is precious and at the same time insignificant.”            (A New Earth, p. 225)

 

What is the promise of The Overview Experience workshop?

In the past 50 years we have witnessed great advances in business, government, the military, and private sectors,
as well as in personal and group development training and coaching. 

Countless lives, relationships, and organizations have benefited from new findings in cognitive science,
personal growth  technologies, and understanding of the human condition. 

 Unfortunately, this progress has not made enough of a difference in most people’s ability
to cause an increasingly complex world to “think globally but act locally.”

The Overview Experience enables a person, project team, or even an entire organization to alter the mindset they bring to their goals. 
It is designed for people who want to:

    - Create a whole new opportunity for innovation and cooperation
    - Integrate success with a noble purpose
    - Create a shared purpose across an entire organization
    - Encourage international cooperation and dialogue
    - Find ways to make globalization work more beneficially for everyone
    - Improve relationships
    - See work and life in a way that brings peace of mind
    - Something else entirely

~ ~ ~

     What are the primary and natural applications of The Overview Experience?
                                                                                                                                                                                          (as envisioned by Jonathan Smith)

First and foremost, The Overview Experience is designed to have everyone who sees it leave the room with at least
a temporary shift in their consciousness – a new and vibrant perception of both
their relationships and their goals in the context of The World.

This shift in personal consciousness is directly related to a person’s understanding of their power and accountability. 
This new understanding inspires individuals or groups to what they are capable of and not just what they already can do --
to recognize their inner possibilities and immense human potential.

This awareness must be coupled with the knowledge of the serious and physical nature of the world’s problems.
This must be so true that it borders on despair.  
The practical effect, however, is that that despair is tempered by a righteous desire to help,
which they are now capable of from their newly-awakened core of individual power and possibility. 

For those so affected, The Overview Experience can provide channels for cooperation, and access to
any level of contribution (money, volunteerism, careers, full corporate commitment, etc.)
according to the point of view gained from the experience. 
Within the emergent structures that will certainly follow, such an ever-expanding resource pool of powerful,
possibility-driven people working together toward each others’ noble and economic goals would be nigh unstoppable.  

 Depending on the level of consciousness change and commitment to the principles of The Overview Experience, innumerable projects,
both intra-corporate and integrated movement-based, could bring about fast, radical, and necessary change in the world. 

The unity, energy and undeniable nobility behind such projects would serve to create public support and maintain the moral high ground,
as well as attract new and unknown people and possibilities.

On other fronts, The Overview Experience could be used very effectively in child development. 
In the same way the US Army gives disadvantaged youth direction and purpose, so too can The Overview Experience provide
for anyone and everyone, from those already empowered to those who are misguided, undervalued and lost –
a context for sensing their personal power, and for contributing to the world around them. 

In school rooms the experience could inspire kids to levels of excellence and global ambition otherwise unthinkable.
For the environment, all the movements of the world could be unified behind a global human context. 
Research and development of technology could be supercharged by the united efforts of diverse corporations,
all together for the project, not just for pure profit.

The combined context of true human potential and global perspective would allow for a whole new level of collaboration and
dialogue to find the meaningful and effective truths regarding:                                                                                               

   education                                   religion                              business
  political  agenda                       environment                       science
urban development                   war                                      peace
 
All of the above is available from The Overview Experience, with its inherent basis in nobility, economy, and progressive dialogue.