Growing Together Professionally:

March 12th - April 30th

A Seven-Week Online Course with
Aftab Omer

Aftab Omer

Aftab Omer, PhD is the president of Meridian University which offers degree and professional programs globally, emphasizing the power of transformative learning. He is a sociologist, psychologist, developmentalist, and futurist. Raised in Pakistan, India, Hawaii, and Turkey, he was educated at the universities of M.I.T, Harvard and Brandeis. His publications have addressed the topics of transformative learning, dialogic capability, developmental power, cultural leadership, civil society, generative entrepreneurship, and the power of imagination. Aftab’s advising work focuses on team development and on leveraging the creative potentials of conflict, diversity, and complexity. Formerly the president of the Council for Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychologies, he is a Fellow of the International Futures Forum and the World Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Course Description

This course is for aspiring, early, and mid-career developmental practitioners, who may choose to identify professionally as coaches, consultants, managers, therapists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or leaders.

Life, for most people, is difficult. Growing, especially growing together, is not easy. There are many indications, both globally and locally, of cultural crises that are worsening with each passing day. Such crises engender collective trauma but at the same time, whole communities normalize development-eroding conditions. This is due in part to the absence of effective developmental practice. Without developmental leadership, such crises result in the institutionalization of structural and cultural violence.

Evolutionarily and historically, human communities have flourished based on the great transmission of human development through the means of culture. During cultural crisis, the transmission of individual and collective capability diminishes or even breaks down as families and communities no longer serve as nurturing developmental spaces. At such times in the past, individuals have responded to cultural crisis by initiating communities of practice that are personally and culturally transformative, thereby re-igniting both inner and outer development.

Associated with increasing technological and social complexity, these cultural crises are embedded systemically within the polycrisis of the system-world – a cascade of multiple crises, at once. They manifest variously in such areas as conflict, climate, finance, food, water, and health.

Modern and postmodern societies are organized to manage complexity through professions that promote inner development. This course looks at how developmental practitioners such as coaches, therapists, managers, generative entrepreneurs, and transformative leaders can initiate and sustain transformative communities of practice. Such communities of practice generate a cultural commons in the service of transforming professions while also fostering the personal and professional development of community participants.