Why do our attempts to deal with the challenges of our time so often fail? Why are we stuck in so many quagmires today? The cause of our collective failure is that we are blind to the deeper dimension of leadership and transformational change. This “blind spot” exists not only in our collective leadership but also in our everyday social interactions. We are blind to the source dimension from which effective leadership and social action come into being.

We know a great deal about what leaders do and how they do it. But we know very little about the inner place, the source from which they operate

Successful leadership depends on the quality of attention and intention that the leader brings to any situation. Two leaders in the same circumstances doing the same thing can bring about completely different outcomes, depending on the inner place from which each operates (see “Three Perspectives on the Leader’s Work”).

Slowing Down to Understand

At its core, leadership is about shaping and shifting how individuals and groups attend to and subsequently respond to a situation. The trouble is that most leaders are unable to recognize, let alone change, the structural habits of attention used in their organizations.

Learning to recognize the habits of attention in any particular business culture requires, among other things, a particular kind of listening. Over more than a decade of observing people’s interactions in organizations, I have noted four different types of listening.

Listening 1: Downloading. “Yeah, I know that already.” I call this type of listening “downloading” — listening by reconfirming habitual judgments. When you are in a situation where everything that happens confirms what you already know, you are listening by downloading.

Listening 2: Factual. “Ooh, look at that!” This type of listening is factual or object-focused: listening by paying attention to facts and to novel or disconfirming data. You switch off your inner voice of judgment and listen to the voices right in front of you. You focus on what differs from what you already know. Factual listening is the basic mode of good science. You let the data talk to you. You ask questions, and you pay careful attention to the responses you get.

Listening 3: Empathic. “Oh, yes, I know exactly how you feel.” This deeper level of listening is empathic listening. When we are engaged in real dialogue and paying careful attention, we can become aware of a profound shift in the place from which our listening originates. We move from staring at the objective world of things, figures, and facts (the “it-world”) to listening to the story of a living and evolving self (the “you-world”). Sometimes, when we say “I know how you feel,” our emphasis is on a kind of mental or abstract knowing. But to really feel how another feels, we have to have an open heart. Only an open heart gives us the empathic capacity to connect directly with another person from within. When that happens, we feel a profound switch as we enter a new territory in the relationship; we forget about our own agenda and begin to see how the world appears through someone else’s eyes.

Listening 4: Generative. “I can’t express what I experience in words. My whole being has slowed down. I feel more quiet and present and more my real self. I am connected to something larger than myself.” This type of listening moves beyond the current field and connects us to an even deeper realm of emergence. I call this level of listening “generative listening,” or listening from the emerging field of future possibility. This level of listening requires us to access not only our open heart, but also our open will — our capacity to connect to the highest future possibility that can emerge. We no longer look for something outside. We no longer empathize with someone in front of us. We are in an altered state. “Communion” or “grace” is maybe the word that comes closest to the texture of this experience.

When you operate from Listening 1 (downloading), the conversation reconfirms what you already knew. You reconfirm your habits of thought: “There he goes again!” When you operate from Listening 2 (factual listening), you disconfirm what you already know and notice what is new out there: “Boy, this looks so different today!” When you choose to operate from Listening 3 (empathic listening), your perspective is redirected to seeing the situation through the eyes of another: “Boy, yes, now I really understand how you feel about it. I can sense it now too.” And finally, when you choose to operate from Listening 4 (generative listening), you realize that by the end of the conversation, you are no longer the same person you were when it began. You have gone through a subtle but profound change that has connected you to a deeper source of knowing, including the knowledge of your best future possibility and self.

Deep Attention and Awareness

Deep states of attention and awareness are well known by top athletes in sports. For example, Bill Russell, the

STRUCTURES OF ATTENTION

In order to respond to the major challenges of our time, we need to extend our ways of operating from Fields 1 or 2 to Fields 3 or 4 across all system levels.

key player on the most successful basketball team ever (the Boston Celtics, who won 11 championships in 13 years), described his experience of moving from regular to peak performance. He talked about experiencing a slowing down of time, a widening of space, a panoramic type of perception, and a collapse of boundaries between people, even between people on opposing teams (see “Structures of Attention,” movement from Fields 1-2 to Fields 3-4). While top athletes and championship teams around the world have begun to work with refined techniques of moving to peak performance, where the experience Russell describes is more likely to happen, business leaders operate largely without these techniques — or indeed, without any awareness that such techniques exist.

To be effective leaders, we must first understand the field, or inner space, from which we are operating. Theory U identifies four such “field structures of attention,” which result in four different ways of operating. These differing structures affect not only the way we listen, but also how group members communicate with one another, and how institutions form their geometries of power.

The four columns of “Structures of Attention” depict four fundamental meta-processes of the social field that people usually take for granted:

• thinking (individual)
• conversing (group)
• structuring (institutions)
• ecosystem coordination (global systems)

Albert Einstein famously noted that problems cannot be resolved by the same level of consciousness that created them. If we address our 21stcentury challenges with reactive mindsets that mostly reflect the realities of the 19th and 20th centuries (Field 1 and Field 2), we will increase frustration, cynicism, and anger. Across all four meta-processes, we see the need to learn to respond from a deeply generative source (Field 4).

The U: One Process, Five Movements

In order to move from a reactive Field 1 or 2 to a generative Field 3 or 4 response, we must embark on a journey. In an interview project on profound innovation and change that included 150 practitioners and thought leaders, I heard many practitioners describe the various core elements of this journey. One person who did so in particularly accessible words is Brian Arthur, the founding head of the economics group at the Santa Fe Institute. When Joseph Jaworski and I visited him, he explained to us that there are two fundamentally different sources of cognition.

One is the application of existing frameworks (downloading) and the other accessing one’s inner knowing. All true innovation in science, business, and society is based on the latter, not on the everyday downloading type of cognition. So we asked him, “How do you do that?” In his response he walked us through a sequence of three core movements.

The first movement he called “observe, observe, observe.” It means to stop downloading and start listening. It means to stop our habitual ways of operating and immerse ourselves in the places of most potential, the places that matter most to the situation we are dealing with.

The second movement Brian Arthur referred to as “retreat and reflect: allow the inner knowing to emerge.” Go to the inner place of stillness where knowing comes to the surface. We listen to everything we learned during the “observe” phase, and we attend to what wants to emerge. We pay particular attention to our own role and journey.

THE U

In order to move from Field 1 or 2 to Field 3 or 4 ways of operating, we need to move first into intimate connection with the world and to a place of inner knowing that emerges from within, followed by bringing forth the new, which entails discovering the future by doing.

The third movement, according to Brian Arthur, is about “acting in an instant.” This means to prototype the new in order to explore the future by doing. To create a little landing strip of the future that allows for hands-on testing and experimentation.

I have come to refer to this sequence as the U process, because it can be depicted and understood as a U-shaped journey. In practical contexts, the U-shaped journey usually requires two additional movements: an initial phase of building common ground (co-initiating) and a concluding phase that focuses on reviewing, sustaining, and advancing the practical results (co-evolving) (see “The U”).

1. Co-initiating: Build common intent. Stop and listen to others and to what life calls you to do. At the beginning of each project, one or a few key individuals gather together with the intention of making a difference in a situation that really matters to them and to their communities. As they coalesce into a core group, they maintain a common intention around their purpose, the people they want to involve, and the process they want to use. The context that allows such a core group to form is a process of deep listening — listening to what life calls you and others to do.

2. Co-sensing: Observe, observe, observe. Go to the places of most potential and listen with your mind and heart wide open. The limiting factor of transformational change is not a lack of vision or ideas, but an inability to sense — that is, to see deeply, sharply, and collectively. When the members of a group see together with depth and clarity, they become aware of their own collective potential — almost as if a new, collective organ of sight was opening up.

When it comes to organizing knowledge management, strategy, innovation, and learning, we outsource the legwork to experts, consultants, and teachers to tell us how the world works. For simple problems, this may be an appropriate approach. But if you are in the business of innovation, then this way of operating is utterly dysfunctional. The last thing that any real innovator would outsource is perception. When innovating, we must go places ourselves, talk with people, and stay in touch with issues as they evolve. Without a direct link to the context of a situation, we cannot learn to see and act effectively. When this kind of deep seeing — “sensing” — happens collectively and across boundaries, the group as a whole can see the emerging opportunities and the key systemic forces at issue.

3. Presencing: Connect to the source of inspiration and common will. Go to the place of silence and allow the inner knowing to emerge. At the bottom of the U, individuals or groups on the U journey come to a threshold that requires a “letting go” of everything that is not essential. At the same time that we drop the non-essential aspects of the self (, “letting go”), we also open ourselves to new aspects of our highest possible future self (, “letting come”). The essence of “presencing” is the experience of the coming in of the new and the transformation of the old. Once a group crosses this threshold, nothing remains the same. Individual members and the group as a whole begin to operate with a heightened level of energy and sense of future possibility. Often they then begin to function as an intentional vehicle for the future that they feel wants to emerge.

4. Co-creating: Prototype the new in living examples to explore the future by doing. I often work with people trained as engineers, scientists, managers, and economists (as I was). But when it comes to innovation, we all received the wrong education. In all our training and schooling, one important skill was missing: the art and practice of prototyping. That’s what you learn when you become a designer. What designers learn is the opposite of what the rest of us are socialized and habituated to do.

When I was a doctoral student in Germany, a design professor at the Berlin Academy of Arts, Nick Roericht, invited me to co-teach a workshop with him. The night before the workshop, I was invited to meet with Roericht and his inner circle at his loft apartment. I was eager to meet the group and to see how a famous designer had furnished his Berlin loft. When I arrived, I was shocked. The loft was spacious, beautiful — but virtually empty. In a very small corner kitchen stood a sink, an espresso machine, a few cups, and a quasi-kitchen table. But no drawers. No dishwasher. No table in the main room. No chairs. No sofa. Nothing except a few cushions to sit on.

I later learned that the empty loft reflected his approach to prototyping. For example, when he developed a prototype interior design for the dean’s office at his school, he took out all of the furniture and then watched what happened there. Roericht and his students then furnished it according to the dean’s actual needs — the meetings he conducted and so forth — supplying needed objects and furnishings in real time. Thus, prototyping demands that first you empty out all the stuff (“let go”). Then you determine what you really need (“let come”) and provide prototype solutions for those real needs in real time. You observe and adapt based on what happens next.

So the prototype is not the stage that comes after the analysis. The prototype is part of the sensing and discovery process in which we explore the future by doing rather than by thinking and reflecting. This is such a simple point —  but I have found that the innovation processes of many organizations are stalled right there, in the old analytical method of “analysis paralysis.”

The co-creation movement of the U journey results in a set of small living examples that explore the future by doing. It also results in a vibrant and rapidly widening network of change-makers who leverage their learning across prototypes and who help each other deal with whatever innovation challenges they face.

Very often, what you think you will create at the beginning of the U process is quite different from what eventually emerges.

5. Co-evolving: Embody the new in ecosystems that facilitate seeing and acting from the whole. Once we have developed a few prototypes and microcosms of the new, the next step is to review what has been learned — what’s working and what isn’t — and then decide which prototypes might have the highest impact on the system or situation at hand. Coming up with a sound assessment at this stage often requires the involvement of stakeholders from other institutions and sectors. Very often, what you think you will create at the beginning of the U process is quite different from what eventually emerges.

The co-evolving movement results in an innovation ecosystem that connects high-leverage prototype initiatives with the institutions and players that can help take it to the next level of piloting and scaling.

The five movements of the U apply both to the macro level of innovation projects and change architectures and to the meso and micro levels of group conversation or one-on-one interactions. In martial arts, you go through the U in a fraction of a second. When applied to larger innovation projects, the U process unfolds over longer periods of time and in different forms.

Seven Leadership Capacities

The U process feels familiar to people who use creativity in their professional work. They say, “Sure. I know this way of operating from my own peak performance experiences.” But then when you ask, “How does work look in your current institutional context,” they roll their eyes and say, “It looks more like this downloading thing.”

Why is that? Why is the U the road less traveled in institutions? Because it requires an inner journey and hard work. The ability to move through the U as a team or an organization or a system requires a new social technology (see “A New Social Technology”). The social technology of presencing is based on seven essential leadership capacities that a core group must cultivate. Without the cultivation of these capacities, the process described above (five movements) won’t deliver the desired results.

1. Holding the Space: Listen to What Life Calls You to Do. “The key principle of all community organizing is this,” L. A. Agenda’s Anthony Thigpenn once told me., “You never hand over the completed cake. Instead, you invite people into your kitchen to collectively bake the cake.” The trouble with this principle is that most meetings in most organizations work the other way around. You only call a meeting once you have completed the cake and you want to cut it and serve it.

To start with the desire for a cake rather than with the completed cake requires a leader to create or “hold a space” that invites others in. The key to holding a space is listening: to yourself (to what life calls you to do), to the others (particularly others who may be related to that call), and to that which emerges from the collective that you convene. It also requires keeping your attention focused on the highest future possibility of the group. Finally, it requires you to be intentionally incomplete, to hand over the recipe, cooking tools, and ingredients rather than the finished cake. Yes, you can talk about why this is a particularly good recipe, you can add some ingredients, and you can help mix the batter, too. You can even go first if you want to. But you must intentionally leave a lot of open space for others to contribute.

A NEW SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY

The ability to move through a U process as a team, an organization, or a system requires a new social technology, presencing, an inner journey and intimate connection that helps to bring forth the world anew.

2. Observing: Attend with Your Mind Wide Open. The second capacity in the U process is to observe with an open mind by suspending your voice of judgment (VOJ). Suspending your VOJ means shutting down (or embracing and changing) the habit of judging based on past experience in order to open up a new space of inquiry and wonder. Without suspending that VOJ, attempts to get inside the places of most potential will be futile.

3. Sensing: Connect with Your Heart. The third capacity in the U process is to connect to the deeper forces of change through opening your heart. This is the essence of what moving down the left side of the U is all about—facilitating an opening process. The process involves the tuning of three instruments: the open mind, the open heart, and the open will. While the open mind is familiar to most of us, the other two capacities draw us into less familiar territory.

To awaken this other capacity in people, teams, and organizations, I have found it productive to have people work on real projects in real contexts that they care about and to support them with methods and tools that cultivate the open heart. The mind works like a parachute, as the old saying goes — it only functions when open. The same applies to the intelligence of the heart. It only becomes available to us when we cultivate our capacity to appreciate and love. In the words of biologist Humberto Maturana, “Love is the only emotion that enhances our intelligence.”

4. Presencing: Connect to the Deepest Source of Your Self and Will. The fourth capacity in the U process is connecting to the deepest source of yourself and will. While an open heart allows us to see a situation from the whole, the open will enables us to begin to act from the emerging whole.

Danish sculptor and management consultant Erik Lemcke described to me his experience of this process:, “After having worked with a particular sculpture for some time, there comes a certain moment when things are changing. When this moment of change comes, it is no longer me, alone, who is creating. I feel connected to something far deeper and my hands are co-creating with this power. . . . I then intuitively know what I must do. My hands know if I must add or remove something. My hands know how the form should manifest. In one way, it is easy to create with this guidance. In those moments I have a strong feeling of gratitude and humility.”

5. Crystallizing: Access the Power of Intention. The back-stories of successful and inspiring projects, regardless of size, often have a similar story line — a very small group of key persons commits itself to the purpose and outcomes of the project. That committed core group and its intention then goes out into the world and creates an energy field that begins to attract people, opportunities, and resources that make things happen. Then momentum builds. The core group functions as a vehicle for the whole to manifest.

In an interview, Nick Hanauer, the founder of half a dozen highly successful companies, told Joseph Jaworski and me: “One of my favorite sayings, attributed to Margaret Mead, has always been ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’ I totally believe it. You could do almost anything with just five people. With only one person, it’s hard — but when you put that one person with four or five more, you have a force to contend with. All of a sudden, you have enough momentum to make almost anything that’s immanent or within reach actually real.”

6. Prototyping: Integrating Head, Heart, and Hand. The sixth capacity in the U process is the prototyping skill of integrating head, heart, and hand. When helping a golfer who has lost his swing, the master coach in the novel and film “The Legend of Bagger Vance” advises, “Seek it with your hands — don’t think about it, feel it. The wisdom in your hands is greater than the wisdom of your head will ever be.”

That piece of advice articulates a key principle about how to operate on the right side of the U. Moving down the left side of the U is about opening up and dealing with the resistance of thought, emotion, and will; moving up the right side is about intentionally reintegrating the intelligence of the head, the heart, and the hand in the context of practical applications.

Just as the inner enemies on the way down the U represent the VOJ (voice of judgment), the VOC (voice of cynicism), and the VOF (voice of fear), the enemies on the way up are the three old methods of operating: executing without improvisation and mindfulness (reactive action); endless reflection without a will to act (analysis paralysis); and talking without a connection to source and action (blah-blah-blah). These three enemies share the same structural feature. Instead of balancing the intelligence of the head, heart, and hand, one of the three dominates — the will in mindless action, the head in endless reflection, the heart in endless networking. In short, connecting to one’s best future possibility and creating powerful breakthrough ideas requires learning to access the intelligence of the heart and the hand — not just the intelligence of the head.

7. Performing: Playing the Macro Violin. The seventh capacity in the U process is learning to play the “macro violin.” When I asked him to describe presencing-type moments from his music experience, the violinist Miha Pogacnik told me about his first concert in Chartres., “I felt that the cathedral almost kicked me out.‘ Get out with you!’ she said. For I was young and I tried to perform as I always did: by just playing my violin. But then I realized that in Chartres you actually cannot play your small violin, but you have to play the ‘macro violin.’ The small violin is the instrument that is in your hands. The macro-violin is the whole cathedral that surrounds you. The cathedral of Chartres is built entirely according to musical principles. Playing the macro violin requires you to listen and to play from another place, from the periphery. You have to move your listening and playing from within to beyond yourself.”

Most systems, organizations, and societies today lack the two essentials that enable us to play the macro violin: (1) leaders who convene the right sets of players (frontline people who are connected with one another through the same value chain), and (2) a social technology that allows a multi-stakeholder gathering to shift from debating

Connecting to one’s best future possibility and creating powerful breakthrough ideas requires learning to access the intelligence of the heart and the hand — not just the intelligence of the head.

to co-creating the new. Still, there are many examples of how this capacity to act and operate from the larger whole can work. One is in disaster response. When a disaster occurs, other mechanisms (like hierarchy) don’t exist or aren’t sufficient to deal with the situation (like markets or networked negotiation). In these situations, we see the emergence of a fourth mechanism of coordinating — seeing and acting from the presence of the whole.

In summary, the seven Theory U leadership capacities are the enabling conditions that must be in place for the U process and its moments to work. In the absence of these seven leadership capacities, the U process cannot be realized.

C. Otto Scharmer is a senior lecturer at MIT and founding chair of ELIAS, an innovation platform linking global institutions from business, government, and civil society to prototype profound system innovations. He is visiting professor at Helsinki School of Economics and founding chair of the Presencing Institute. Otto has consulted with global companies, international institutions, and cross-sector change initiatives around the world. He has co-designed and delivered award-winning leadership programs for clients including Daimler Chrysler, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and Fujitsu. Otto is the author of Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges (SoL 2007) and co-author of Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society.

This article is adapted from the executive summary of Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. To view the entire summary, go to http://www.ottoscharmer.com/PDFs/ Theory_U_Exec_Summary.pdf.

The post Leading from the Future: A New Social Technology for Our Times appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

A Shift in Awareness

In keeping with its theme of emerging futures, the book itself unfolds as a dialogue among the authors over a period of a year and a half (tellingly punctuated by September 11, 2001). Through a series of informal meetings, the four, all established organizational learning leaders and clearly also good friends, explore and enrich their understanding of the concept of “presence.”

It is not easy to say in a sentence or two what they mean by this word. The nature of presence is by definition experiential—something we feel and know in certain moments of insight, inspiration, and power. The basis for presence is awareness—being present in the moment to what is happening just now as opposed to our habitual ways of knowing, saying, and doing (which the authors refer to as “downloading”). But presence is more than merely being in the moment; it is also a deeper way of listening that allows us to let go not only of habitual ways of understanding the external world but also of our own fixed sense of identity. It loosens our desire for personal confirmation and control in favor of “making choices to serve the evolution of life.” Presence is a process of “letting come,” a way of “participating in a larger field of change” by which “the forces shaping a situation can shift from recreating the past to manifesting or realizing an emerging future.”

The authors acknowledge that this shift in awareness has much in common with traditional teachings and practices of Buddhism, Taoism, esoteric Christianity, Sufism, and indigenous cultures. They say that what is now needed in modern society is an account of how such a shift of awareness can be cultivated as a collective practice. Here lies the concept’s crucial connection to contemporary institutions, and it is here that Presence makes a fresh and provocative contribution to organizational learning theory. Organizations, from small working groups to—potentially—global companies, can be the fertile ground for cultivation of a life-serving collective transformation.

“Theory of the U”

The unfolding conversation presented in this book is by no means random or lacking in rigor. It is built around a strong theoretical skeleton that itself is based on research carried out over several years prior to and during the conversations. The research, conducted by Scharmer and Jaworski, consists of more than 150 probing interviews with “thought leaders”—leading scientists and business and social entrepreneurs around the world. Among the most frequently cited are Francisco Varela, the Chilean-born biologist, cognitive scientist, and practicing Buddhist who developed groundbreaking theories about the nature of life and living systems before his untimely death in 2000 (Presence is dedicated to him), and Brian Arthur, Santa Fe Institute economist, complexity theorist, and practicing Taoist.

The theoretical skeleton, developed by Scharmer from the interview material, is called “Theory of the U.” It proposes a three-stage model for deep change, with the letter U serving as a simple and elegant visual device (see “The U Process”). The lefthand, downward stroke of the U is called “sensing,” the turn at the bottom is “presencing,” and the upward stroke is “realizing.” The authors make the point that these three stages are not in themselves so different from standard models of learning and innovation that involve a progression from observation and data-gathering to reflection to action. What is different, and crucial, is the depth of experiencing achieved in the U process. In other words, a conventional observe-reflect-act model is a sort of shallow U. It may produce innovation, but only within the same frame of reference from which it began. The standard model “pays little attention to the inner state of the decision maker.” It does not challenge and remake the identity of the change agents themselves.

THE U PROCESS

Reprinted from Presence, with permission

To arrive at the deeper experience of presencing, we must first cultivate a deeper kind of observation, called “sensing.” This involves a specific set of experiential capacities that, though innate, must be developed. Based in the work of Varela, these subtle internal gestures are called “suspending,”, “redirecting,” and “letting go.” Roughly speaking, “suspending” is the ability to pause one’s habitual flow of ideation and mental models built up in the past, in the service of opening up a space of consciousness that is free from already-formed concepts.

“Redirecting,” also described as the ability to “see from the whole to the part,” is especially subtle and crucial. It is essentially a psycho-spiritual capacity to dissolve the boundaries between seer and seen, subject and object. “What first appeared as fixed or even rigid begins to appear more dynamic because we are sensing the reality as it is being created, and we sense our part in creating it. This shift is challenging to explain in the abstract but real and powerful when it occurs.”

The third gesture, “letting go,” is the capacity to “surrender our perceived need to control.” It is the antidote to fixed views and attachments, self-concepts, and even ideas that form during the process of innovation. The gesture of letting go brings us back to the present moment, the here and now, as both concrete reality and an endless open field of fresh possibility.

The bottom of the U is “presencing,” the mysterious, transformative moment of “field shift”—a deeply felt paradigm shift in which participants’ sense of who they are alters in synchronicity with the arising of new, previously unimaginable options for action. The authors give dramatic examples of this moment, drawn from both individual and group experiences. The two most powerful examples of collective presencing are from conflict-mediation situations. In one, a meeting among black and white South Africans during the Apartheid era leads to a stunning, in-the-moment realization by a taciturn Afrikaans businessman of the deep racial prejudices ingrained in him from childhood. His anguished but genuine confession generates an extraordinary collective experience of pain, mutual recognition, and breakthrough. In the second instance, an eyewitness account of a mass grave site from the Guatemalan civil war produces one shocking detail that dissolves the conceptual and emotional barriers among a group of former enemies. A long and pregnant silence ensues, in which a deep commonality is recognized and a commitment to building a life-affirming future for the country is born.

The final movement of the U is “realizing,” a three-stage process of operationalizing the radical learning achieved in “sensing” and “presencing.” A key injunction here is that, after the slowing down and deepening of the earlier stages, realizing must be executed with swiftness and courage. Given that many of our organizational situations do not lend themselves to abrupt change, how is this possible? The authors recommend “rapid prototyping”— quickly enacting innovative ideas as small-scale, real-world experiments. They make the point that, in prototyping, you construct and test a model before you understand the whole of the emergent situation. It is only through a rapid cycle of experiments involving the “capacity for self-observation and course correction in real-time” that a sustainable new operational design can emerge. “Prototyping is not about abstract ideas or plans but about entering a flow of improvisation and dialogue in which the particulars inspire the evolution of the whole and vice versa.”

The end point of the U comes when innovation is institutionalized. Scharmer says, “[Institutionalizing] can sound like making something that is rigid and fixed. I think of it as more like the collective equivalent of embodying—we know we’ve learned something when it becomes part of how we do things. Until the new becomes embedded in its own routines, practices, and institutional laws, it’s not yet real.”

As an example of this kind of institutionalizing, and of the whole U process successfully carried through to unforeseen and powerful results, the authors describe the creation of Visa in the late 1960s and early 1970s under the leadership of Dee Hock. Visa is now one of the largest businesses in the world, but rather than being publicly traded, it is owned by its 22,000 member institutions, which are simultaneously one another’s suppliers, customers, and competitors. Its groundbreaking network design—Visa operates as a worldwide democracy governed by a common purpose and set of principles but with an unfettered capacity to grow and change in response to local conditions—emerged through a multi-year process of dialogue among key players in the industry. “Visa was born out of deep immersion in the chaos of the early days of the credit card industry. That chaos ultimately gave way to a sense of the unique opportunity that was available—if people could suspend their established assumptions about banking, set aside their self-interest, and truly see what was needed to serve an emergent whole.” The ultimate breakthrough came about when Hock and his colleagues were able to imagine a business model patterned after a complex living system built up from genetic code.

Senge emphasizes that both the process of reinventing the credit-card industry and the innovative solution arrived at were democratic processes, as opposed to the “totalitarian dictatorships” that still function in most of our institutions. He makes a powerful plea for true democracy within organizations:, “[T]his is the defining feature of our era regarding leadership. In a world of global institutional networks, we face issues for which hierarchical leadership is inherently inadequate.”

Our Own Sources of Power

For deep organizational and societal change to occur, there must be an ongoing synergy between the personal and the collective.

In the end, Presence returns to a theme first articulated in The Fifth Discipline, that the capacity to do all of this depends on personal mastery, and specifically on the cultivation of reflective awareness. The authors cite Buddhist meditation and other Eastern contemplative practices as powerful methods for this cultivation. Senge, who speaks from his own deep commitment to study and daily meditation under the direction of a remarkable Chinese Zen-Taoist-Confucian master, uses a simple systems diagram to illustrate the pervasive dysfunction lying at the heart of modern culture. He says: “Western culture’s growing reliance on reductionist science and technology over the past 200 years fits the shifting-the-burden-dynamic remarkably well, revealing a play of forces that create growing technological power and diminishing human development and wisdom. . . . By giving us perceived power, modern technology reduces the felt need to cultivate our own sources of power.”

For deep organizational and societal change to occur, there must be an ongoing synergy between the personal and the collective. Generating new options depends both on the inner development of individuals and on collective processes in which they mutually enact the field of the emergent future. Presence concludes on a hopeful note that contains a call to inquiry and to action. “The changes in which we will be called upon to participate in the future will be both deeply personal and inherently systemic. The deeper dimensions of transformational change represent a largely unexplored territory both in current management research and in our understanding of leadership in general.” Auspiciously, this book serves as a personal and collective compass to guide us into this new land.

David I. Rome is senior vice president for planning at the Greyston Foundation, an integrated system of nonprofit and for-profit organizations in Yonkers, New York, that offers a wide array of programs and services to more than 1,200 men, women, and children annually. He also presents “Deep Listening,” a training program in reflective awareness and communication skills. David and his colleagues from Greyston will be presenting at the 2004 Pegasus Conference.

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Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (Currency, 2006) is a profound book that hasn’t made it onto Oprah’s list yet and, as a result, might not have the kind of popularity it deserves in the working world. It presents a fascinating perspective about the process of tuning into the greater wisdom of the group and the world around us in decision-making, leadership, and life in general.

Letting Go, Letting Come

Presence struck a chord with me, as I have struggled to find the words to express the application of Einstein’s principle that the level of understanding that leads to the awareness of a problem is not the level of understanding required to solve that problem. If that is true, then where does that jump in understanding come from?

The common short answer is that when we discuss our problem with another person or group, we have access to the group’s knowledge and ideas. This often reaches beyond our own knowledge limits. Many times, a group can come up with an answer when an individual cannot. There are also times that neither the individual nor group has the answer. At these times, we need to trust that there is an answer—even if we don’t have it yet—and a process to find it.

This can be a difficult concept for leaders who believe we must have all the answers. That’s what makes a leader effective and successful, right? Often, as leaders, we are asked to make decisions with far too little information or when we simply feel underprepared. And in certain situations, we may not have any experience at all. It is in these times that we need to draw on a greater source than our own knowing.

Senge and his colleagues describe this process as “letting go” and “letting come”—letting go of our preconceived answers and allowing the greater wisdom of the collective world to come into us. We can then begin to see an answer emerge. The crucial element in this process is getting to a point where you have let go of all of your answers and your need to be the source of the answers. Somewhat akin to the old Zen story of the master who fills the student’s teacup to overflowing to demonstrate that it is not until the student empties his cup (his mind) that the teacher can begin to put in new ideas.

The Ultimate Source of Knowing

It may sound metaphysical, but it is a powerful process. Here’s how to give it a try: Next time you face a dilemma— personal, work, or family—catch yourself in the moment of “not knowing.” It is important to admit out loud that you don’t know. It is our “knowing” that gets in the way, and the admission of not knowing that opens the door. Instead of seeing not knowing as the end of the line, see it as the beginning of discovery.

Next, try looking at the situation from the outside in. How does it look from another’s perspective? How does it fit into the world? What might be “wanting to happen” if you weren’t there? Ask all the questions that don’t make sense (remembering that if it made sense, it would fit within your “already known” answer set). Try starting a sentence without knowing the end of it, and the answer may come as you speak. For example, say, “It’s obvious that what I really need to do is …, “Run headlong into the end of the sentence without thinking—thinking, after all, is the enemy of the process of “letting come.”

Throughout the millennia, scientists and philosophers have asserted that there exists a collective wisdom that is far greater than anything any one person can surmise. The great Zen masters teach that everything that is known and yet to be known already exists in the present; we just can’t see it. What if you could tap into that source of wisdom? What questions would you ask? Which questions, decisions, and dilemmas would you no longer avoid out of fear of not knowing the answer first? This process might just be the key to unlock that source—the ultimate source of knowing.

Kris Girrell (kgirrell@camdenconsulting.com) is a senior partner at Camden Consulting Group, a leadership development and executive coaching firm headquartered in Boston. He is a specialist in learning, assessment, and career development and has more than 30 years of experience.

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If you’re not part of the problem, then you can’t be part of the solution.
– Bill Torbert

While this was happening, I was at my home in South Africa working on a book about how we can solve such tough, complex problems through open-minded, open-hearted talking and listening. Then my youngest stepdaughter, who is 27 years old, came home for the holidays and immediately lapsed into her old teenage behavior. She would go out without telling us, stay out partying until late, and sleep away the day. One evening she had spent hours on the phone having a weepy conversation with an old boyfriend. I was furious! I told her that this kind of behavior was absolutely unacceptable and that she needed to change what she was doing if she wanted to use my phone and stay in my house.

That approach didn’t work. The next morning she left and went to stay with her sister. I had managed to do in my own home what the Americans were doing in Iraq. I had tried to solve a tough problem by using authority: by force.

Why is it that we so often end up trying to solve our tough problems by force? Why is it that our talking so often fails? The answer is both simple and at the same time subtle and challenging. Our most common way of talking is telling, and our most common way of listening is not listening. When we talk and listen in this way, we guarantee that we will end up trying to solve our tough problems by force.

Two Distinctions for Solving Problems

I would like to offer two sets of practical distinctions that you can use to solve your tough problems more effectively. The first distinction is that there is more than one way to solve problems. There is an ordinary approach that works for simple problems, and there is an extraordinary approach that works for complex problems. The second distinction is that there is more than one way to talk and listen. If we are to solve our tough problems peacefully, we need to learn an extraordinary way of talking and listening.

I will explain these two distinctions by sharing two dramatic, life and-death stories. I’m not that sensitive to these distinctions, and so the volume has to be turned way up if I’m going to be able to hear them. These two stories involve situations in which the volume was turned way up, but the two sets of distinctions apply to all human settings—home, school, work, meetings, and national and international affairs.

I learned the first set of distinctions in 1991. I was living in London working for Royal Dutch/Shell’s scenario planning department, heading the social-political-economic research group. Our job was to tell stories about what might happen in the world outside the company, as a tool for Shell executives to use in making decisions today that would allow the company to do well no matter what happened tomorrow. One day, my boss, Joseph Jaworski, received a phone call from a professor in South Africa named Pieter le Roux, who wanted to use the Shell scenario methodology to help make plans for the transition in South Africa away from apartheid. Pieter was wondering if Shell could send somebody to provide methodological advice to the team he was putting together and to facilitate the workshops.

When I was chosen for this project, I knew almost nothing about South Africa, except that the country had a complex problem of apartheid, which most people thought could not be solved peacefully. I knew that the white minority government had been trying for years to deal with the situation by force and had failed, and that the opposition, led by the African National Congress, had tried to over throw the government by force and had failed. I was also aware that Nel- son Mandela had been released from prison a year before and that some negotiations were starting. But I didn’t know much about the scenario team Pieter had put together, except that it was very diverse and included blacks and whites, people from the left and right, professors, political activists, businessmen, establishment figures, trade unionists, and community leaders. I also knew that these people were heroes who had all, in different ways, been trying for a long time to make South Africa a better place.

Since I was very busy with my work at Shell, I didn’t do what I normally would have done: read up on South Africa and form my expert opinion about what was going on and what they ought to do about it. Not having had the time to form such an opinion, I arrived with a greater openness to what this amazing team was going to be able to do. I had also never done this kind of work outside of a company, so we simply used Shell’s scenario methodology. The team immediately launched into discussions about the ANC, the NP, the PAC, the SACP, the CP, and the UDF. I had no idea what they were talking about. One of the team members later said to me, “Adam, when we first met you, we couldn’t believe that anybody could be so ignorant. We were certain you were trying to manipulate us. When we realized that you actually didn’t know anything, that’s when we decided to trust you.” I had, by accident or synchronicity, managed to arrive with the perfect orientation: curious, respectful, and open.

What I came to understand in South Africa was that two parallel processes were occurring. There were the formal, official negotiations around a new constitution, which the newspapers reported about daily. But underneath these were hundreds of informal, unofficial meetings, such as the one I participated in, that brought together all the stakeholders—all the people who were part of the problems—to talk together about the problems and what ought to be done about them. It was through these myriad informal conversations that the formal process succeeded.

I also noticed that, even though we were using the exact same methodology as at Shell, the South African group brought a different energy to the work. In one way it was more serious, and in another more playful. What I eventually understood is that although the methodology was exactly the same, the group’s purpose was fundamentally different. At Shell we had been telling scenarios about what might happen as a tool to help the company adapt as best as it could to whatever might occur in the future. In the South African team, we were telling scenarios not so much to adapt but to create a better future. And this is what accounted for the different energy in the team.

Three Types of Complex Problems

So here’s what I learned in South Africa: a problem can be tough and complex in three different ways.

Socially Complex. A problem is socially complex when the people involved, the actors in the system, have highly diverse perspectives and interests. Problems that are socially simple can be solved by experts and authorities, because it’s easy to agree on what the problem is and for an expert or a boss to propose and implement a solution that people will support. But a socially complex problem cannot be solved without the direct participation of all the stakeholders involved.

Dynamically Complex. A problem is dynamically complex when its cause and effect are far apart in space and time. This is the kind of complexity that is addressed by systems thinking. A dynamically simple problem can be solved piece by piece, but when dynamic complexity is involved, we have to look at the behavior of the system as a whole.

Generatively Complex. When a problem is generatively complex, the future of the system is unfamiliar and undetermined. A generatively simple problem can be solved using rules of thumb from what worked in the past. But when the problem is generatively complex, it can only be solved through a group of people working it through together, listening for and trying out emerging solutions.

TWO WAYS TO SOLVE PROBLEMS

A problem can be tough and complex in three different ways; it can be socially, dynamically, and/or generatively complex. Ordinary problem-solving approaches work well for simple challenges. But when we want to solve complex problems, we need to use an extraordinary approach, in which stakeholders look together at the system as a whole and work through an emerging solution.

To give you an idea of how this problem-solving model works, let’s look at the simple matter of a police officer directing traffic at a difficult intersection. The problem is socially simple because everybody has the same objective: to get through the intersection safely and efficiently. The problem is also dynamically simple because all the causes and effects are right there, visible and immediate.

And it’s generatively simple because the way the officer directs traffic, based on what he or she learned at traffic-directing school, works fine. So the problem can be solved using the ordinary approach.

The ordinary approach works perfectly well most of the time. It’s when we want to solve complex problems that we need to use an extraordinary approach, in which the people who are part of the problem— the stakeholders—look together at the system as a whole and work through an emerging solution. This is what I realized the Mont Fleur team had done in South Africa. They had gathered leading representatives from all of the stakeholder groups and used sce- nario planning as a tool for thinking about the behavior of the whole system and finding emerging solutions. My point here is that the ordinary approach cannot generate a peaceful solution to a complex problem. If we use the ordinary approach on a complex problem, we will end up trying to solve the problem by force.

I understood the significance of this realization in my work in South Africa, where people were experimenting with an extraordinary approach to solving complex prob- lems that was applicable not just to the South African context, but else where as well. What I didn’t understand, because I was not experienced enough, is how the South African team was able to work with this extraordinary approach. In the years that followed, I got a lot of experience with this methodology through doing this kind of work with multistakeholder teams in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Israel, Argentina, Colombia, the United States, and Canada. I also began to develop, with colleagues, a family of tools for working with important complex problems in companies and governments.

It wasn’t until 1998, however, in the course of doing some work in Guatemala, that I really grasped the essence of how a group could use the extraordinary approach. I don’t know how well you know the story of Guatemala. It has the dubious distinction of having had the longest running and most brutal civil war in all of Latin America. Over a 36-year period, from 1960 to 1996, more than 200,000 people were killed and disappeared out of a population of only 8 million. More than a million people became internal refugees, and the country as a whole experienced a brutality such as humanity has rarely seen. By the time the peace treaty was signed in 1996, the social fabric of the country had been shredded.

Many brave and wonderful efforts, which continue today, have been made to try to put things back together again. One of these efforts, inspired by the project in South Africa, was called Visión Guatemala. The Visión Guatemala group brought together a group of leaders—even more diverse and senior than the South African team—from the mili- tary, the former guerrillas, business, church, academics, and youth leaders, to try to understand what had hap- pened in the country, what was happening, and what ought to happen. Those of you who follow the news know that things are by no means all right in Guatemala, but in the five years they’ve been working together, this team has made a big impact in the country, on the platforms of all the major political parties, on restructuring the education and tax systems, on constitutional amendments, on anti-poverty programs, on dialogue processes at the municipal level and among politicians, and so forth.

Four Ways of Talking and Listening

In 2000 a group of researchers from the Society for Organizational Learning interviewed members of the Visión Guatemala team to try to pinpoint exactly what happened in their group to allow them to do such extraordinary work in such a highly complex system. The answer the researchers arrived at has to do with the way this group, over the course of their involvement together, progressed in the way they were talking and listening.

Downloading. In the chart “Four Ways of Talking and Listening” (see p. 5), based on the work of Otto Scharmer of MIT, there are four quadrants. According to the researchers’ observations, the Visión Guatemala group started their conversations in downloading. This is supported by an interview with Elena Díez Pinto, the leader of the group. She said, “When I arrived at the hotel for lunch before the start of the initial meeting, the first thing I noticed was that the indigenous people were sitting together, the military guys were sitting together, the human rights group was sitting together. I thought, ‘They are never going to speak to each other.’ In Guatemala we have learned to be very polite to each other. We are so polite that we say ‘yes’ but think ‘no.’ I was worried that we would be so polite that the real issues would never emerge.”

This first type of talking and listening is called downloading, because we merely repeat the story that’s already in our heads, like download- ing a file from the Internet without making any change to it. I say what I always say or what I think is appropriate, such as “How are you? I’m fine,” because I’m afraid that if I say what I’m really thinking, something terrible will happen, for instance, I’ll be embarrassed or even killed. Listening in downloading mode is not listening at all. I am only hearing the tape in my own head.

Debating. The second kind of talking and listening is called debating. A wonderful example of this process occurred in Visión Guatemala’s first workshop. One of the interviewees said, “The first round in the first session was extremely negative, because we were all looking back to the events of recent years, which had left a deep imprint on us. Thus a first moment full of pessimism was generated. Suddenly a young man stood up and questioned our pessimism in a very direct manner. This moment marked the beginning of a very important change, and we continually referred to it afterward. That a young man would suddenly call us ‘old pes- simists’ was an important contribution.” This was debating in the sense that the young man was saying what he really thought, which is what happens when people make the transition from downloading to debating. A clash of arguments occurs; ideas are put forward and judged objectively as in a courtroom.

I used to undervalue debating because it seemed so commonplace. But in the last few years, through observing how many countries and companies in which I’ve worked stay in downloading mode, where people are afraid to say what they think, I’ve come to appreciate the move from downloading to debating as a huge step forward. You can see more perspectives, that is, more of the system.

However, in debating as well as downloading, you’re still seeing what is already there. Neither of those modes creates anything new. For example, in a debate or a courtroom, people have prepared what they want to say before they even enter the room. In that sense, both download- ing and debating lead to a reenactment of patterns of the past or of existing realities. To bring forward something new, we need to talk and listen in an extraordinary way.

Dialoguing. The third mode is called dialoguing. My favorite example of this in the Visión Guatemala team occurred one day when the group was talking about an extremely difficult subject: the civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people had been killed. A general in the army was trying to explain honestly what the war had looked like from his experience and perspective, which was both a very difficult and an unpopular thing for him to do. He certainly did not have the sympathy of most of the people in the room. As he spoke, the woman listening beside him, Raquel Zelaya, the cabinet secretary of peace who was officially responsible for implementing the peace accords, leaned over to him and said, “Julio, I know that nobody enrolls in a military academy in order to learn how to massacre women and children.”

FOUR WAYS OF TALKING AND LISTENING

Downloading and debating work fine for solving simple problems, but they don’t work for solving complex ones. For complex problems, groups need to use dialoguing and presencing, and to be able to shift from one mode to another, as appropriate.

This was a remarkable statement. On the one hand, she was signaling that she had been listening to him with empathy, listening from his perspective and realizing that no matter what had happened, he certainly hadn’t started out his life with a brutal intention. At the same time, through self-reflection, she was indicating her understanding that the way she thought about things mattered and affected how this situation would unfold. In other words, if you cannot see how what you’re doing is contributing to creating the current reality, then by definition you have no leverage, no place to stand, no way to intervene to change the problem situation. When Raquel made that comment to the general, she was recognizing the way in which herat titudes were part of the polarization and needed to change to open up a new way forward.

So in dialoguing, I am both listening to you from within you and listening to myself knowing where I’m coming from. I am not just listening objectively to ideas; I am listening subjectively from inside you and me. And because I’m listening from inside a living, growing system, I can glimpse what’s possible but not yet there. This type of talking and listening is the root of the potential forchange and creativity.

Presencing. This fourth type of talking and listening is what Otto Scharmer, along with Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers, and Peter Senge, has written a book about, which is due to be released this winter and is titled Presence. For that reason, I am using the word presencing, because what I am referring to is the particular kind of talking and listening, of being and doing, that they describe in their book. In the Visión Guatemala group, we experienced this kind of generative dialogue one evening at the first workshop. The group had gotten together after dinner, and I had asked the participants to tell stories about their experiences, either recent or long ago. The exercise was a continuation of the scenario work of trying to understand what had happened and what was happening in Guatemala. But rather than use systems thinking as an objective tool to identify driving forces and key uncertainties, we were using amore subjective approach.

It was a dramatic evening. Helen Mack Chang, a prominent business woman, spoke about the assassination of her sister, a researcher, in broad day-light in Guatemala City some years before. She shared her experience of that day, after her sister had been murdered, and how she had run from government office to government office, trying to find out what had happened, and how the first person she had spoken to, who had lied to her and told her that he knew nothing, was the man sitting beside her that evening in the circle. We were long past being polite. Now people were really saying what they thought.

Then a man named Ronalth Ochaeta told a story. Ronalth was at that time the executive director of the Catholic Church’s human rights office, which published the very important first report on the civil war called “Nunca Más” (, “Never Again”). He spoke of how he had gone one day to be the official observer at the exhumation of a mass grave in a Mayan village. There were many such graves. As he stood by the side of the grave and watched the forensics team removing the earth, he noticed many small bones at the bottom. He asked them, “What happened here? Did people have their bones broken during the massacre?” They answered, “No, people did not have their bones broken. This massacre included several pregnant women, and what you’re seeing are the bones of their fetuses.”

You can feel a little bit now the quality of the silence—the quality of the listening, the realization, the understanding—that we have in this room right now. Perhaps you can imagine what it was like to hear that story in a group of 40 people, all of whom had lived through this experience and in one way or another been implicated. It was a silence such as I had never heard. It just went on and on, for five, maybe ten minutes.

At the end of the day, we were talking about what had happened, and several people used the word communion to refer to that moment when the whole group had been part of one flesh. I remarked that I thought there was a spirit in the room, and a Mayan man said to me afterward, “Mr. Kahane, why were you surprised there was a spirit in the room? Didn’t you know that today is the Mayan Day of the Spirits?” When the SoL researchers interviewed the members of the Visión Guatemala team, six of the intervie- wees referred to those five minutes of silence as the moment when everything had turned in the team, the moment when the team understood why they were there and what they had to do.

One of them said, “As to the story that Ronalth recounted, the one that caused such a big impact, that is one story and there must be a thousand like it. What happened in this country was brutal. Thirty years . . . and we were aware of it, I was. I was a politician for a long time, and this was one of the areas that I worked in. I was even threatened by the military commissioners on account of my political work. We all suffered, but as opponents, as enemies, always from our own particular points of view. As far as I am concerned, the workshops helped me to understand this in its true human dimension—a tremendous brutality. I was aware of it but had not experienced it. It is one thing to know about something as statistical data and another to actually feel it. To think that all of us had to go through this process. I think that after understanding this, everyone was committed to preventing it from happening again.”

This is what we mean by presencing. It wasn’t that people felt empathy for Ronalth; anybody could have told that story. It was as if, through Ronalth, we had all been able to see an aspect of the reality of Guatemala that was of central importance. It was as if, in those five minutes, the boundaries between us disappeared, and the team was able to see what really mattered to them and what they had to do together. In this way, the process of moving from downloading and debate to dialoguing and presencing can be described as one of opening, of developing the capacity to hear what is trying to come through.

Listening to the Sacred Within Each of Us

I have explained two sets of practical distinctions. First, there are two ways to solve problems: an ordinary approach that works for simple problems, and an extraordinary approach that works for complex problems. But the ordinary approach does not work for complex problems, and if we use it, we will end up trying to solve the problem by force. Second, there are four ways of talking and listening.

Downloading and debating work fine for solving simple problems, but they don’t work for solving complex problems. For complex problems, we need to use dialoguing and presencing. If you want to be able to solve complex problems, you need both the awareness of these different ways of talking and listening and the capacity to move among them.

In 1998 Desmond Tutu retired as the Anglican Archbishop of Southern Africa. His successor, Njongonkulu Ndungane, wanted to hold a strategic planning workshop with the 32 bishops who would now be reporting to him. He asked me to facilitate the workshop. Although there were some tough issues to be worked out, it was a joyous meeting.

Right at the beginning, I noticed that these bishops were remarkable listeners; they seemed intuitively to understand and be able to navigate among these four ways of talking and listening. For example, when we were making ground rules for the work- shop, they seemed concerned about the danger of downloading and not listening (they might have called it pontificating). One of the bishops proposed the ground rule, “We must listen to each other’s ideas.” A second bishop said, “No, brother, that’s not quite it. We must listen to one another with empathy.” Then a third bishop said, “No, brothers, that’s not quite it. We must listen to the sacred within each of us.”

I think the bishops got it right. If we can learn to listen to each other truly, with empathy, and if we can learn to listen to the sacred whole as expressed through each of us, then we can peacefully solve even our most complex problems.

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