Salons and Workshops

The salons and workshops are intended as spaces for collective inquiry and learning. They offer the opportunity to deepen reflection, engage across diverse perspectives, explore the different dimensions of transformation, and advance the participants’ work and learning journeys.

Salons, Friday, October 2, 17:00–18:30

Six thematic salons will take place in parallel. These are intended as intimate, informal conversations to explore the big questions not fully explored elsewhere in the program. They can also serve to surface insights, tensions, and unresolved questions that can feed into the final day of the convening.

Salons Overview

Salon 1: Making Sense of the Moment

Is the unfolding polycrisis and the disruption of the post-war order a constraint on nature-centric transformation or its greatest opportunity?

As the institutions and assumptions that have underpinned international cooperation and coordination for decades come under increasing pressure, a fundamental question emerges: are we witnessing the temporary disruption of the post-war order, or the early stages of a broader transition to new forms of governance and collective action? This salon invites participants to compare notes on their reading of the current moment. What structural changes are reshaping the global landscape? What do they mean for large organizations whose operating models were designed for a different era? And will these shifts primarily drive institutions toward protection, retrenchment, and survival, or might they create the opening for more ambitious forms of transformation, including new approaches grounded in regenerative and nature-centric principles?

Facilitator: Bernice Lee

Salon 2: The Conceptual and Philosophical Foundations

Is the conceptual and philosophical toolkit adequate to the nature-centric transformation we are calling for?

Indigenous communities and non-Western cultures have long sustained relational, nature-centric worldviews grounded in reciprocity, interdependence, and the inseparability of human and more-than-human life. In recent decades, a growing body of Western scholarship and practice - across academia, civil society, and institutional innovation - has adopted concepts such as interconnectedness, interbeing, and regeneration as foundational points of departure. Despite this convergence, significant gaps remain in how these ideas are interpreted and applied. This session examines whether efforts to translate nature-centric visions into scalable pathways, particularly within mainstream institutions, are supported by sufficiently robust philosophical and conceptual frameworks. It further explores whether current approaches are sufficient to inform new ethical paradigms and models of cooperation, coexistence, and resilience capable of addressing human–nature alienation, or whether additional theoretical work is needed to articulate a viable alternative to dominant anthropocentric and individualistic cultural logics. The gaps and questions surfaced here feed directly into Workshop 6 the following morning.

Facilitator: Michael Nelson

Salon 3: Who Speaks for Nature?

Legitimacy, representation, and the institutionalization of non-human voice in governance processes

Rights of nature legislation, nature guardians, non-human board members, and multispecies assemblies are all emerging mechanisms to give non-human life a formal voice in governance. This salon examines how legal or institutional representation of nature plays into mainstream adoption of a nature-centric perspective.

Facilitator: Danielle Celermajer

Salon 4: Individual Nature-Centric Thought and Practice

Can organizations truly change if the people within them haven't?

At its core, nature-centric transformation is not an institutional design challenge. It is, first of all, a challenge of human consciousness, identity, values, and relationships. This salon explores the individual transformation: what it means to cultivate a genuine belonging to the natural world, and to undergo the identity and values shift that makes organizational change durable and desirable.

Facilitator: Karen O'Brien

Salon 5: Religion, Spiritual Traditions, and the Nature-Centric Transformation

What is the role of religion and religious leadership in this transformation?

The world's religions and spiritual movements are among the oldest, most enduring, and most consequential institutions on Earth, and they operate at multiple levels of society at once. They also form the foundation of cultural and societal practices and more. These institutions are themselves made up of, and serve, individuals who may hold these beliefs deeply. This salon asks what role religion and spirituality can play in supporting, or hindering, the move toward more nature-centric views within institutions.

Facilitator: Kocku von Stuckrad

Salon 6: Reform or Reimagine?

Which global institutions can be transformed from within and which need to be replaced?

Most of today's influential institutions - from corporations and financial markets to governments, international organizations, and educational systems - were designed within worldviews that prioritize human needs and economic growth over ecological flourishing and kinship with nature. An important question, therefore, is whether these institutions can be transformed from within or whether meaningful change requires more fundamental redesign. However, not all institutions are equally capable of transformation. Some possess the legitimacy, adaptive capacity, and internal coalitions needed to evolve. Others may be so deeply embedded in anthropocentric assumptions, incentive structures, and governance models that meaningful change from within is unlikely. Distinguishing between the two is both a practical and political challenge.

This salon invites participants to draw on both their personal experience and insights from the first 24 hours of conversations to explore where reform is possible, where rebuilding may be necessary, and how such judgments should be made.

Facilitator: Tamzin Ractliffe

Workshops, Saturday, October 3, 11:00–15:00 with lunch break

Eight workshops will take place in parallel on Saturday, 11:00–12:30 and 13:30–15:00 with a lunch break in between. The workshops run across both slots as a single continuous session. Participants choose one workshop and stay with it for the duration. The two-part format will allow participants to go deeper and combine generative discussion with practical exercises. Some discussion questions are intentionally revisited across multiple workshops, each time with a different emphasis or degree of depth. These recurring themes serve as common threads, linking sessions and supporting a more integrated learning journey across the group of participants.

Workshops Overview

Workshop 1: Leading Nature-Centric Organizational Transformation A-Z

What will it take to embed nature into the structures, decisions, and culture of our institutions?

This workshop is designed for those seeking a high-level discussion of the organizational journey toward nature-centric transformation. It brings together key themes explored in greater depth in Workshops 2–4. The conversation will examine what such a transformation entails, how it challenges existing institutional assumptions and practices, how change processes can be thoughtfully designed, and what it takes for deep organizational shifts to become both credible and lasting.

Facilitators: Sandrine Dixson-Declève with Milan Petit, and Jacob Harold (two parallel sessions)

Workshop 2: Diagnostic Groundwork

Examining institutional mandates, assumptions, and practices through a nature-centric lens to identify pathways for transformation

Transformation requires understanding how an institution currently understands its purpose, exercises authority, makes decisions, allocates resources, and defines success. Many organizations were founded within worldviews that place human interests at the center of concern, and these assumptions are often embedded in mandates, governance structures, professional norms, and operational practices. Bringing these underlying assumptions into view is an essential step in the process of transformation. The first part of the workshop examines where anthropocentric framing is positioned in an institution's mandate, identity, and culture, and how to read an organization's readiness for transformation. The second part turns to practice: it explores the framework needed for conducting a "nature audit," and concludes by broadening the conversation beyond auditing to other entry points for implementation.

Facilitator: Desiree Farrell

Workshop 3: Making the Case and Building Capacity and Capability

Framing, legitimizing, and institutionalizing nature-centrism within mainstream organizations

Many institutions have already begun to recognize that environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, climate instability, and ecosystem decline present material challenges to their missions and long-term effectiveness. Yet recognizing the problem is not the same as embracing a fundamentally different way of understanding an institution's relationship with the living world. The first part of this workshop takes up this gap directly, examining how a nature-centric approach can be framed and legitimized in terms that resonate with mainstream institutional priorities, and how the case for it can be made credibly to leadership, members, and stakeholders. In the second part, the workshop will turn to the practical challenge of building capacity and capability. Participants will discuss how to cultivate champions, establish cross-organizational support, develop new forms of expertise, and create the conditions under which a nature-centric approach can survive leadership transitions, organizational restructuring, and competing priorities.

Facilitator: Tom Oliver

Workshop 4: How do we know we are making progress?

Defining and tracking progress with honest and practical approaches

Since it is unrealistic to expect that any transformation process in larger mainstream institutions be accomplished without demonstrated progress, this session asks how institutions can think about and measure progress in a way that can be seen across multiple levels of an organization. There are two aspects to this kind of measurement. The first is conceptual: deciding what progress even means, what an institution is trying to change, what would count as evidence of it, and how that reads at different levels and to different audiences. The second is practical: working out what it would take to put that into operation, building measurement rigorous and honest enough to capture what resists easy quantification, to surface failure rather than mask it, to resist being gamed, and to feed back into decisions while those decisions can still be changed.

Facilitator: Ravenna Nuaimy-Barker

Workshop 5: Building the Field

What resources, infrastructure, and collective architecture does nature-centric organizational transformation need to take root, grow, and sustain?

The organizations represented at Lysebu are among the earliest to explore nature-centric transformation at an institutional scale. Yet even many of the pilot organizations are advancing without a clear roadmap. The knowledge, tools, training, and field infrastructure needed to support this work across mainstream institutions remain largely undeveloped. Existing resources are fragmented across sectors and disciplines, often tailored to localized transformation efforts, and rarely organized in ways that make them broadly accessible or transferable. This session explores what the emerging field must develop - both intellectually and practically - to enable nature-centered transformation to grow across diverse institutions and contexts. It will examine the kinds of supporting architecture needed to sustain and scale this work over time, including research, training, knowledge-sharing systems, communities of practice, and other forms of field-building infrastructure that can endure beyond any single initiative or funding cycle.

Facilitator: Kirsten Dunlop

Workshop 6: Academia and Nature-Centric Transformation

What forms of knowledge, inquiry, and institution-building are needed for nature-centric organizational transformation?

This session examines how and where academia and its epistemic authority can contribute to nature-centric organizational transformation and serve as a translation interface between diverse worldviews. It asks which of academia's disciplinary boundaries, methods, and institutional incentives stand in the way, and what new structures and forms of knowledge might aid nature-centric transformations inside and outside the academy.

Facilitator: Orania Kosti

Workshop 7: Business in Transition

What would it take for nature-centric thinking to become a defining characteristic of how businesses create value?

For decades, corporate sustainability has largely focused on reducing harm, managing risk, and measuring environmental impacts. Yet a growing body of thought suggests that these approaches may be insufficient if businesses continue to view nature as external to economic activity. This workshop explores the foundational organizational and cultural transformations required for a nature-centric future. Rather than focusing on the usual ESG reporting, climate targets, or biodiversity programs alone, workshop participants will examine how governance structures, ethical frameworks, leadership models, stakeholder relationships, and institutional norms can evolve to support businesses that create value while operating in genuine reciprocity with nature. The discussion will challenge participants to consider whether today's corporations are structurally capable of embracing nature-centric thinking, what barriers remain beyond the control of business, and how business might be able to build cultures where environmental stewardship is not a separate function but a defining characteristic of how value is created.

Facilitator: Kevin Money

Workshop 8: Designing the Next Generation of Institutions as Adaptive Living Systems

What would it look like to design the next generation of larger institutions as adaptive entities modelled on the design and principles of living systems?

Large institutions are increasingly operating in environments defined by volatility, interdependence, and ecological constraints, conditions that resemble living systems more than mechanical and technological ones. Yet most organizational operating systems remain rooted in linear, extractive, and control-based logics inherited from industrial-era governance models. This workshop explores what it would mean to redesign institutional operating systems based on principles observed across living systems, including adaptation, reciprocity, symbiosis, resilience, interdependence, self-organization, emergence, and regeneration. It asks whether governance itself can evolve from a framework of management and optimization to one of participation within broader ecological and social systems. Participants will discuss how decision-making, accountability, strategy, and value creation might change if institutions were designed as dynamic, relational systems embedded within planetary life. This workshop invites participants to imagine what becomes possible if organizations were no longer designed to operate in the world, but as part of it.

Facilitator: Justin Adams

Salons and Workshops