Who We Are
Merle Lefkoff has a passion for helping people around the world find new ways out of their impasses. Merle holds a Ph.D. in Political Science
from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and recently completed a
three-year appointment as Guest Scientist and Affiliate at the Center for
Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory. An applied social
scientist and international mediator and facilitator, she engaged with
physicists and computer scientists in a deep exploration of the rules that
drive individuals and result in unpredictable, often surprising collective
behavior.
Merle was detailed to the Carter White House in 1977 to work on how to involve the public in Executive Branch decisions She was a member of two committees of the National Research Council. National Academy of Sciences, reporting to Congress on waste management issues on public lands. Designing and delivering leadership training has been another key focus for Merle, as a trainer for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation National Fellowship Program, the American Leadership Forum, the Salzburg Seminar and the Community Leadership Association, training Thai leaders in democracy building.
In her peacemaking and mediation efforts, Merle has worked in some of
the most troubled places on Earth, including Bosnia, Northern Ireland,
South Africa and the Middle East. She assisted back-channel negotiations
during the Oslo peace process and presently co-facilitates a leadership
project based in Jerusalem with Palestinian and Israeli women leaders.
Merle is currently writing a book about the tipping point in the
relationship between American Jews and Israeli government policy. She is
also a contributor with Palestinian and Israeli collaborators to a
forthcoming book on new strategies for Middle East peacemaking.
Merle is a board director of the American College of Women s Health Physicians and was recently appointed by Governor Bill Richardson to New Mexico's Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee.
When not teaching and writing. Merle spends time with her seven grandchildren, skiing, hiking, snowshoeing, climbing 'fourteeners' in Colorado, and staying in touch with a vast network of friends, former clients, and fellow travelers around the world.
John Goekler is a trainer and consultant with a background in organizational capacity building, adaptive leadership, whole systems design and curriculum development. His focus is on synthesizing and applying emerging work in the sciences of Complexity Thinking to influence the various social systems in which we live and work - from families and communities to companies and countries. He believes it's possible to 
generate far better products through applying much better process.
John originally began to explore and incorporate a complexity perspective while training firefighters to respond to the rapidly changing environment of a fire ground, where emergent conditions were often too fluid and complex for traditional incident command systems to manage effectively.
He translated that understanding to his work as the founding Executive
Director of Facing the Future: People and the Planet, a leading futurist
organization focused on curriculum design and professional development trainings. Through FTF. he delivered hundreds of trainings, workshops, and keynote speeches across North America and authored several award-winning texts and curriculum guides on global issues, sustainability and managing systemic change.
After years of emphasizing policy and program solutions, John progressed to emphasizing skills and process and an "organic'' decision-making model He left FTF and founded change factors to pursue this work. Along the way, he created Regime Change USA to promote political change through self-organizing "swarms" which could coalesce to undertake specific actions. He Is currently expanding that model to create sustainable communities through the 2010 Turnaround Challenge.
John also served as Advancement Director for Spring Street international School, a private 6-12 school that emphasizes Brain Compatible Education (BCE). Drawing on the work of neuro-education specialists such as Howard Gardner, Robert Sylwester and Eric Jensen, he began to understand more deeply how we learn, and how experiential curricula can maximize neurological development and decision-making capacity.
John is currently working on a new book about future models of warfare, viewed through a complexity lens. When not writing, speaking, or training, he likes to spend his time outside - hiking, kayaking, snowshoeing and bird watching. John also prioritizes working with kids, whether as a volunteer in the kindergarten, a Mentor/Big Brother, teaching enrichment math and science or coaching youth soccer.
