Weekend Among Friends

April 26 – 29, 2018
Small changes making big differences

A Tribute to Uncertainty

How can organizations and individuals transform themselves so that they can become as subtle, sensitive, intelligent and fast-responding as the world around them?
(David Peat, 2010)

We are pleased to invite you to a collaborative gathering held in the beautiful little village, of Pari, Italy. The landscape and community, the Pari Center and Pari Networks all represent a container in which one feels invited to explore the arts and the sciences, as well as culture, music, food and wine as means to denote, understand, reflect and renew ourselves, our organisations, and our communities. 

We would love to share this place with friends, meeting each other at the intersection of good living and good conversation in a beautiful, wise environment. This year we pay Tribute to Uncertainty. Godelieve Spaas and Jena Axelrod have been working on this theme for a while now. Jena is working to capture these concepts in her documentary, Absurdity of Certainty, based on in the intersection of David Peat’s work and Jena’s studies. Godelieve co-creates with people and organizations, ways to work in harmony with and contribute to society and nature by allowing uncertainty to be a basic tenet of their organizational entrepreneurial concepts and practices.

Together they are in the middle of developing lecture performances, workshops, dialogues, films and podcast episodes to explore, understand and apply uncertainty as a basic tenet for organising ourselves and our institutions. We invite you to step into their process of becoming Uncertainty Revisted, to experience their work so far, to add to their exploration and creation and to share your ideas and notions on the subject.

We are all familiar with setting goals and making action plans to realize them. We plan to move, to find a new job, to do better in our friendships or to quit our bad habits. Organisations also strive to implement certainty by setting and evaluating objectives to score success. We are accustomed to circles of planning and control and almost naturally analyse causes of failure and success to predict how to do better next time.

We all know life is not that linear, not that singular, nor that predictable. Life is subtle, sensitive and dynamic. We are related to each other and our environment in many ways. We are interdependent beings, communities, and organisations in an interconnected world. To adequately respond to the economic, ecological, social and personal trouble we face in the world around us, we need to understand and act upon its intertwined, co-creative and manifold nature. This Weekend Among Friends, we pay a tribute to uncertainty, as a basic tenet that might open pathways of organizing that are intelligent, responsible and contributing to nature, people and purpose.

Weekend Among Friends is an initiative of