Tom Hurley
Strategist and Senior Advisor
Awakening Essence, Inc.
96 Windward Way
Richmond, CA 94804
510-235-0627

TOM HURLEY
AWAKENING ESSENCE, INC.
tom@tjhassociates.com

BIOGRAPHY
Tom Hurley is a strategist and senior advisor for leaders exploring new organizational forms and life-affirming leadership. He has worked for more than 25 years' with innovators, thought leaders, and executives in the private, nonprofit, and public sectors, and on multi-sector initiatives, and is a master at designing and hosting conversations about "questions that matter" to foster breakthrough thinking and innovation on strategic issues that transcend traditional boundaries. Tom also serves as a keynote speaker and facilitates leadership learning activities that deepen participants’ personal and professional capacities to create positive organizational and community change.

Tom is currently guiding the global evolution of the World Café, a worldwide network of change leaders and leading-edge organizations using innovative conversational processes to access collective intelligence for knowledge development, strategic inquiry, and organizational and societal learning. He was Managing Director of the Chaordic Alliance and subsequently co-founder of the Chaordic Commons, a nonprofit consulting organization in which he partnered with VISA founder Dee Hock to develop principles and approaches to creating and sustaining self-organizing networks within and across organizations. Since 1999 he has consulted with firms and served as a thinking partner for leaders in all sectors, helping apply living systems principles and perspectives to technology, health care, international development, philanthropy, food safety, fisheries management, religion, and other fields.

Tom also served for seventeen years with the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a research organization founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, as Senior Research Associate and Director of Transformative Learning and Global Community Development. He was a member of the senior management team and Board of Directors that guided the Institute’s growth into a leading global organization on consciousness research and transformational change.

Tom has been on the faculty of the California Institute for Integral Studies and the University of Houston at Clear Lake City. He co-founded and directed Philanthropy for the 21st Century, an initiative aimed at exploring the role that philanthropy can play in addressing the most profound challenges and opportunities of the coming era.

Tom earned his M.S. in futures research from the University of Houston at Clear Lake City and holds a black belt in aikido. He lives with his wife in Richmond, California.