When formalized into new patterns of working together often through the creation of new umbrella

organizations with participants from diverse parts of society these mutually beneficial outcomes represent societal learning. Societal learning is a process of changing patterns of inter actions within and between diverse organizations and social units to enhance society’s capacity to innovate. Large scale problems such as poverty and environmental degradation require substantial societal learning in order for lasting change to occur.

Societal learning almost always involves the collaboration of the three organizational “sectors”: government, business, and civil society organizations (labor, community-based, religious, and nongovernmental entities). These sectors represent the three key systems of our society: political (government), economic(business), and social (civil society) (see “The Three Sectors”). All organizations can be categorized as being in one of the three organizational sectors, or as a hybrid of them. Any business that wants to profoundly alter its operating environment, any government that seeks to undertake fundamental reform, and any people who want to improve the world must partner with others from outside their sector.

Although societal learning represents an enormous challenge, the good news is that we have learned a lot about this process, and we have increased our capacity to make it happen. Still, the concept of undertaking big systems change is just beginning to influence the ways in which organizations operate.

Challenges of Societal Learning

Although related to individual, group, and organizational learning, societal learning is particularly challenging to achieve. Why? First, it necessarily involves changes in how complex institutions from different sectors operate, both separately and in tandem. So, for instance, in partnerships among environmentalists, government agencies, and corporations, all parties must embrace diverse view-points, forge new visions, and be willing to operate differently in the future than they have in the past. Reaching this level of cooperation and accommodation takes much work and a high degree of commitment, but the goal in this case, enhancing environmental sustainability is deemed well worth the effort.

Often, organizations discover that they must redefine the business they are in. In developing countries, many construction companies no longer regard themselves merely as builders of physical infrastructure, but rather as part of a joint effort to create sustainable water systems. This shift in perspective has enormous implications for how these businesses organize and undertake work. For instance, in order to engage the local communities in planning and building the infrastructure, they must take a broader approach to achieving their goals than simply completing project milestones on a tightly managed timetable.

Second, this kind of learning can take place on a local or regional level, but it also happens with global scale projects. For example, the Youth Employment Summit (YES) is a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that seeks to generate 500 million new employment opportunities for youth around the world over the next 10 years. This work involves generating cultural change through the interaction of businesses, governmental agencies, nonprofits, and others to boost the position of youth in society. An effort of this scope requires tremendous resources human, financial, and so on and profound levels of learning to accomplish.

Dynamics of Societal Learning

Given their ambitious goals, societal learning initiatives must go well beyond simply coordinating organizations and resources often referred to as single loop learning or first order change because it occurs within current structures and assumptions. Societal learning requires a shift in mental models and the development of new structures and processes, known as double loop learning or second order change.

Like organizational learning, societal learning deals with exploring the deep, underlying structures that drive behavior, surfacing the basic assumptions

we hold that limit our options, and developing innovative approaches to persistent problems. For instance, throughout the U. S., intense interaction between the banking industry and community based organizations (CBOs) revealed that the bankers’ view of poor neighborhoods as unprofitable markets was grounded not just in social biases but in fundamental business assumptions (see “Banking on Community Development”). Through their discussions with community representatives, the bankers began to understand that their assumptions about the poor were wrong. They also found that their rigid ideas about their own product lines, product development approaches, and delivery systems were the real limiting factors to the success of banking services in the neighborhoods, not the limited resources of the people who lived there. Working with CBOs and churches, the banks revamped their business models in order to better serve and profit from the community. Making this change happen took the creative synergy of all parties involved.

This kind of shift in thinking can spur complex synergies and powerful innovations. For example, the banks found that they needed to design new product development tools, because traditional telephone surveys and focus group methodologies were inadequate for conducting market research with individuals who don’t have strong English-language skills. The CBOs thus became expert articulators of their constituents’ needs and worked with the banks to develop, deliver, and manage leading edge products. Similarly, in South Africa, organizations engaged in constructing sustainable water systems discovered that the government’s budgeting process was a barrier. Once government leaders became aware of the problem, they changed the process, leading to a whole range of opportunities.

Such collaborations can even produce the more rarefied triple loop learning, which involves rethinking the way we actually think about an issue. Through their work on change initiatives, many poor people and wealthy people, business people and bureaucrats, social activists and conservatives have come to fundamentally change how they regard one another. By coming together in productive new ways, these groups create rich networks of social capital that allow societies to accomplish things they could not have done before.

Systemwide Change

In systems thinking terms, the challenge of those involved in societal learning is to understand and address numerous large and complex feedback loops. In development and change management terms, the challenge is to transform learning at a project and intellectual level into broad, sustainable systemwide change.

Because successful societal learning initiatives usually require innovations in business, government, and civil society simultaneously, some change agents are intentionally fostering organizational networks called intersectoral collaborations (ISCs). These collaborations can form at the community level, as with many community development initiatives; at the state level, as with education and workforce development programs; and at the international level, as with the worldwide “clusters” in natural resources, water and sanitation, youth, and traffic safety initiated by the World Bank.

Such collaborations facilitate interactions among organizations from each of the three sectors in an effort to generate and apply new knowledge. Collaborating involves recasting roles, responsibilities, and allocation of benefits from the partnership. The key outcome of the process is new relationships among the three systems that lead to improved results for the organizations involved and for society as a whole.

ISCs are potent social change vehicles because:

• They bring together perspectives from each of the three key sectors of society.
• They strive to develop actions that produce value for each of the different sectors.
• They offer a broad reaching mechanism for disseminating learnings and gaining adoption of new approaches throughout society. So, rather than having a government representative urge businesses to change how they operate, business people use their own business networks to champion change, based on business experience, in a language that other business people understand.
• They provide tremendous opportunity for mobilizing the diversity and scale of resources necessary for bringing about the desired change. Business comes with its financial and production assets, government with its rule making and tax resource assets, and civil society with its foundation funding and volunteer workforce.

To fully appreciate the distinctive qualities that the collaborating organizations have to offer, we must understand the generic differences among the three sectors (see “Attributes of the Different Sectors”). For instance, the “Assessment Frame” refers to how members of a sector decide whether or not their output is “good.” Government is particularly concerned with legality; business focuses on profitability; and civil society thinks in terms of equity and justice. Therefore, to be successful, a societal change initiative must produce these three outcomes.

In addition, understanding the core competencies of partner organizations helps participants better define their own roles in learning initiatives. This process emphasizes the rationale for bringing organizations in different sectors together in the first place: to combine core strengths and offset weaknesses. An entity in one sector may be less able to accomplish a certain task than an organization in another sector. For instance, a business may be proud of customers’ trust in its products, but it is impossible to compare consumer confidence to the level of trust that a good civil society organization, such as a church, can build within its community.

Civil society organizations tend to define their issues as “problems,” whereas businesses like to frame them as “opportunities.” YES originally defined its goals from a problem and social justice perspective young people lack jobs. Through their work with business partners, organizers came to understand that failing to articulate the business benefits of their mission might ultimately limit its appeal. YES was then able to identify a number of positive business outcomes, ranging from market development opportunities to support for human resources planning, that their program might produce.

Through productive debate and dialogue among the diverse participants, ISCs can maximize the contributions of each sector and produce innovations that are valuable for all involved (see “Potential Outcomes by Sector” on p. 4). These innovations typically could not be thought of or implemented by the participants on their own. For this reason, to be successful, collaborators must be willingly to share their own goals and processes openly.

For example, environmentalists have been able to point to creative ways in which businesses can significantly

reduce their energy costs; similarly, interaction with consumer advocates has led some companies to move from merely complying with government regulations to creating new products and markets by anticipating changing consumer desires and the resulting legislation. Thus, it is important to understand the distinct goals of organization members and build mutual commitment to achieving them. Partners must also be able to define collective goals part of a shared vision.

Developing a Societal Learning Initiative

Developing a societal learning initiative requires patience, vision, and commitment. These transformations take time. About two decades passed before substantial changes occurred in the banking industry in inner cities in the U. S. However, as knowledge about how to collaborate on complex ventures grows, we’re considerably reducing the length of time it takes to realize successful outcomes. Depending on the scale and complexity of the task at hand, some initiatives can achieve significant results within three to five years.

Sometimes the collaborations begin as an NGO program, sometimes out of an event that produces common recognition that a problem/opportunity requires the resources of diverse organizations, and sometimes under the leadership of an influential individual or organization, such as a government agency. Often associations and federations of organizations take the lead in these initiatives, because such entities represent a large number of constituents faced with the same problem. However, societal learning efforts must also include frontline organizations, such as individual businesses, because these participants have different knowledge and concerns than do the associations that represent them and their industry partners and competitors.

Because these largescale projects are at the leading edge of what we know how to do in terms of creating change, they require ongoing learning and the development of innovative processes and structures. Organizers of societal learning ventures should keep the following principles in mind:

1. Make learning the guiding framework. Adopting a learning framework means that leaders must incorporate a planning action reflection cycle into every aspect and stage of the project. To do so, all participants need to agree that initial plans will be intentionally broad and that details will develop as the project proceeds. In the case of the World Bank clusters mentioned above, participating organizations began with a relatively vague idea about what they might do together. After getting to know one another, they developed learning agendas that included both looking at current strategies for working together and under taking experiments with new joint activities. A disciplined process to engaging participants in gathering data and analyzing it in real time is also a key way to develop common understanding about new ways to work together more effectively In addition, adopting a learning framework means providing workshops and other opportunities for skill development, because changing systems requires that we also change individual behaviors including our own. For example, the concept of, “co-leaders” is a natural extension of the need for peer like relationships among sectoral organizations. Rather than having “one captain of the ship,” several people share leadership. Currently, few people have the skills and few organizations have the structures and processes to share leadership responsibilities. We need to develop these abilities to move ahead with significant social change efforts.

2. Use action learning to support the societal learning process. Action learning involves developing knowledge about how to approach an issue and then creating a strategy for doing so, while at the same time gathering data to refine the approach. Coupled with systems thinking skills, this methodology can help people simplify and clarify complex problems. The World Resources Institute is using this technique to develop management tools to help governments, NGOs, and companies fulfill commitments made in international environmental conventions.

3. Begin by thinking through the full spectrum of issues involved in addressing a challenge. Governments and development agencies have long thrown money at the problem of inadequate water services in the developing world. Time and again, they have organized government bureaucracies or hired international engineering firms to build infrastructures of pipes, dams, and water treatment plants. Within six months, the new infrastructure is often in disrepair, and people are getting water through their traditional methods. Now that’s a fix that fails!

In this example, the well-intentioned parties wrongly define the problem as strictly a technological one, rather than also being one of societal learning. Analyzing the current situation and the intended outcome would define not just the necessary physical infrastructure, but also the changes in behavior, beliefs, resources, and organizational support required to optimize outcomes. The analysis should also show critical barriers to success; for instance, many people in the developing world think of water as being free and are unwilling to pay for it; communities cannot afford to remain dependent on outside experts to operate and maintain the system; and communities need to have a regulatory structure to monitor the system and ensure that it functions to quality standards.

4. Map the current system. Participants should take the time to identify all stakeholders in the system and analyze the relationships among them. Doing so offers planners a sense of the current reality, the key stakeholders, and the actors involved. It can also help them to identify organizations that are “early movers” an important category in any change process, because they are the ones most likely to lead the effort.

5. Follow the traditional planning action reflection learning process. Convene the players to investigate possible new directions; collectively design pilot projects and implementation steps; define learnings; plan for scaling up the initiative; scale up implementation, and so on. One important task is to develop tools to address classic problems that frequently crop up, such as maintaining the commitment of organizational participants; addressing “glocal” (global local) concerns (ensuring that the venture responds both to local needs and those of outside participants); maintaining organizational simplicity in the face of task complexity; and producing valuable outputs for both the overall project and the individual organizations. Regular review processes are part of the important work of formalizing feedback loops.

Unintended Consequences

Given the large number of variables in such global efforts, there are often many unintended consequences. In the banking example, some CBOs found that their increasingly close ties to the industry undermined their support from within their communities. Construction companies in developing countries realized they had to rethink their business model. And by decentralizing and privatizing public services, governments often discover that they need new budgeting, monitoring, and regulatory processes. All of these lessons reflect deepening societal learning. When the collaborations are working well, these lessons will be ongoing and profound.

As with any innovation, societal learning can involve substantial conflict. In successful collaborations, dynamic tension does not go away, but the parties find ways to harness that tension. Sometimes, the disappearance of tension indicates that societal learning is not occurring that collaborators are having difficulty getting beyond the exchange of pleasantries to get to the hard work of grappling with deeper issues and differences. Or, the lack of conflict might indicate that societal learning has already occurred, and the collaboration is moving into a maintenance stage. The absence of tensions usually indicates that participants should reassess the purpose of the collaboration, whether it has resulted in societal change, whether the change is limited to a small group of organizations, whether external change has made the collaboration irrelevant, or whether there is a new purpose that the group wants to develop.

Enormous Potential

Organizations often approach today’s problems and opportunities from yesterday’s perspective. Nevertheless, much has changed in the last decade. In that time, many new NGOs and businesses have formed; even more important, there are now improved global networks including the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the International Business Leaders Forum, and CIVICUS (a civil society organization) that are engaged in intersectoral collaborations. Through experiments with these collaborations over more than a decade, we have vastly improved our knowledge about how to develop and sustain them. In this way, we have substantially increased our capacity for societal learning and our ability to effectively address complex issues such as the environment, war, and poverty and to create outcomes that are win win for all segments of society.

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In her earlier writings, Wheatley deepened her readers’ understanding of how systems behave. The world is inherently orderly, she has said, as she invited us to live simply as partners within its playful dance. In this book, she goes a step further—she exhorts us to collectively birth the future.

Conversational Practices

The book is organized in three parts. The first part sets out the power, the courage, and the practices of conversation. Wheatley has been hosting dialogues of various kinds for a decade. But her appreciation of the potential of conversation has been deepened by two approaches that generate deep insights, a strong sense of community, and innovative possibilities for action. From Christina Baldwin, Wheatley gained a deeper understanding of circle and council practices for evoking compassionate listening and authentic conversation. From Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, she has incorporated the World Café, an exciting way to focus on “conversations that matter and questions that travel well.” This approach links small-group conversations in a way that causes knowledge to grow and the collective wisdom of the group to become visible to participants. Based on learnings from these and other sources, Wheatley founded The Four Directions, a global initiative that links local circles of leaders in a worldwide network on behalf of life affirming futures.

The brief second portion of the book is devoted to simple yet captivating sketches by Vivienne Flesher, coupled with pithy hand-scripted statements such as “It’s not differences that divide us. It’s our judgments about each other that do.” These statements or questions, often accompanied by a thought-provoking quotation, lend an “open-journal” feel to the book. Some readers may be prompted to add their own thoughts to these pages, making it an even more personal document.

Profound Challenges

It is the third part of the book that most people will find particularly useful. The author calls this last and longest section “Conversation Starters.” Each of the 10 “chapters” provides the framework for a conversation that readers themselves might host. With stories, quotations, and poetry interspersed throughout, Wheatley has lovingly compiled a set of resources that compel readers to thoughtful action on profound challenges.

For instance, she asks, “When have I experienced working for the common good?” and prompts conversation groups to dig deep inside to answer such questions as “How many times were you surprised by someone’s ingenuity, or your own?” She concludes this topic by reminding us that “if we raised our expectations, then it wouldn’t take a crisis for us to experience the satisfaction of working together, the joy of doing work that serves other human beings. And then we would discover, as the Chinese author of the Tao te Ching wrote 2,500 years ago, that ‘the good becomes common as grass.’”

This is an inspirational book at its core. It frees us to be our better selves. It’s all about service and community, and caring and unselfish behaviors. Because of its early 2002 publishing date, Wheatley must have written much of the material prior to the September 11 attacks, yet each page pulses with thoughts readers will find even more provocative since that dreadful day. One page features a World Trade Center survivor’s words: “We didn’t save ourselves. We tried to save each other.” Life is, indeed, too short to be selfish.

Wheatley also shares with us her experiences of the sacred, which is nothing special, she says—just all of life. She ends with an Aztec story about a forest fire, an owl, and a small Quetzal bird who attempts to put out the fire with tiny droplets from its beak. The owl questions this behavior, pointing out the futility of it all, but the tiny bird says, “I’m doing the best I can with what I have.”

That is, after all, the best any of us might do. Conversation, Wheatley says, requires that we extend ourselves to others, curious about what their stories might hold. For in the telling, the teller and the listener each becomes more fully human. And finally, she exhorts us, to trust that meaningful conversations can change our world.

Karen Speerstra (kspeerstra@aol.com) is a coach, writer, and editor based in central Vermont. During her 20-year career in professional and college text publishing, she was publishing director at Butterworth-Heinemann and founded a line of business books focusing on knowledge management, visionary leadership, change management, HR, and organizational development.

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• We are wise when we extend our vision to perceive the largest possible perspective of a situation. This expansion of perspective takes us closer to encountering the “whole” of life. Even though we can never experience that whole in its full scope and detail, there is much wisdom in any motion toward it.
• We are wise when we extend our vision into the future to the consequences of our present actions—and learn from reflecting on those consequences, especially before we act. There is much wisdom, then, in applying this expanded perspective to help us meet our needs in ways that don’t undermine the ability of our children’s children to meet theirs. Some call this “sustainability.”
• We are wise when we extend our vision beyond the clamor of this moment’s shallow desires and immediate demands and opportunities to understand and care for our deeper, longer-term needs. While our desires and appetites may feel vividly personal, private, and unique, our deepest needs are universal. We can find great peace in satisfying them in harmony with others and in co-creating the common good. There is much wisdom in pursuing our own best interests through the pursuit of a world that works for all.
• We are wise when we extend our vision beyond current events—both personal and collective—back into the history behind those events and forward into possible futures. In that history and those futures lie causes and stories and motivations that we can work with to call forth new options and energies. There is much wisdom in bringing the power of such understandings into the present unfolding of life.
• We are wise when we extend our vision beyond our personal view—and beyond the dominant view of our group or culture—to hear and understand the views of others. Every view has blind spots, and all knowing rests on unexamined assumptions. As these are revealed through encounters with other views and ways of knowing, we can deepen our understanding. And so we are wise to value diversity, dissonance, and dissent and to learn how to use their potent gifts well. There is much wisdom accessible through the use of dialogue to help us tap that latent power together on behalf of our whole community.
• We are wise when we extend our vision beyond convenient labels and judgments to view things more as they are. Doing so entails becoming familiar with the ways our thoughts and feelings—and, collectively, our culture and media—trick us into narrowing our view. Good and bad, order and chaos, individual and collective, you and me, simplicity and complexity—these tantalizingly useful distinctions hide the fact that reality, in all its dynamic wholeness, embraces both sides of every dichotomy. There are ways in which apparent opposites not only define and depend on each other, but live within each other and dance together. There is much wisdom in becoming aware of this bigger, truer picture of life.
• We are wise when we extend our vision beyond isolated facts and linear logic into the whole fabric of life, using all the forms of knowing that are given to us. These include intuition, spiritual experience, and the sciences that attempt to appreciate the whole and our relationship to it, such as ecology, complexity and chaos theories, and the consciousness sciences. With each way of knowing, we access new dimensions of reality. There is much wisdom in weaving them together, using each tool in our cognitive toolbox according its best purpose, along with all the others, and letting none colonize our awareness to the exclusion of the rest.
• We are wise when we extend our vision beyond certainty to the underlying, allencompassing, ever-unfolding mystery of life. Once we see through the illusion of certainty, humility and humor become natural, and paradox, ambiguity, and change become friends and teachers on our journey though life. In the midst of wonder, we encounter each situation with the curiosity and sense of adventure befitting wise and joyful spirits. There is much wisdom to be gleaned as we marvel at the nuance and vastness we encounter at each bend in the road.
• We are wise when we extend our vision beyond our personal world to the world of our fellow humans and all other life. This reaching into the world of other lives is the wisdom of compassion and the realization that our destiny is bound up with the destiny of all others. There is much wisdom in recognizing our vast and vivid interdependence. This wisdom can lead to many soulfully effective solutions to the diverse sufferings of our world and its people. We need our wisest eyes to find them.

These wise eyes are ours, if we choose to see through them together.

Tom Atlee is president of the Co-Intelligence Institute and author of The Tao Of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All (www.taoofdemocracy.com). He is currently researching process designs that can evoke the latent wisdom of whole communities and countries through informed, high-quality dialogue and deliberation among ordinary citizens. A longer version of this article appears at www.co-intelligence.org/WisdomWays.html.

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Shifting the Burden to Science and Technology

That moment in Vienna seems very real to me this morning, as I think about the keynote presentations given at this extraordinary conference. As I pondered their messages, I found myself drawing a simple picture that has lingered in my mind for many years now, but that I have never shared with anyone. Perhaps it seemed too simple or obvious. Now I think it was just too soon, and it might be of some use as we try to understand the world today.

This drawing is a “Shifting the Burden” pattern that seems to go some way toward explaining the direction Western and, increasingly, worldwide culture has taken over the past 500 years—as well as some of the profound difficulties we face today as a result. As many of you know, a “Shifting the Burden” dynamic unfolds when real problems must be addressed and a meaningful distinction exists between “symptomatic” and “fundamental” solutions. When we implement symptomatic solutions, what we often call “quick fixes,” we attempt to remove the symptoms of a problem without necessarily dealing with its underlying causes— similar to taking aspirin to get rid of a headache or cutting costs to improve profits. An “effective symptomatic solution” makes things look better in the short-term but masks the need for more fundamental actions. Usually, the problem symptoms return, thereby calling for still more, and perhaps different, symptomatic responses and setting in motion a cycle of crisis and response. Because it’s easy to become dependent on quick fixes, “Shifting the Burden” articulates the underlying structure that produces addiction.

To understand how this dynamic can help make sense of our present world situation, I’d like to share some other stories. At that same conference in Vienna, a woman approached me after the session had concluded and asked, “Have you ever thought about the effect the Plague had on the growth of Western science? After the Plague, people felt compelled to learn how to control nature.” Having lived in Europe, I have some appreciation for the deep cultural impact of the 14th-century Great Plague, which decimated nearly 50 percent of the population in certain areas. But I had never thought about the fear of nature that it engendered, nor about the imperative to dominate nature that some would say now motivates much of Western science.

The Plague occurred about a hundred years before the beginnings of what we know as modern science— inspired by Galileo, da Vinci, Kepler, and Newton. Gradually, modern science took off and became the dominant current of society, culminating in the Industrial Revolution, which restructured the social order and led to the modern age. Technology not only became integral to society, it ultimately defined our culture. For example, most of us consider anything new and exciting somehow connected to technology and think that all of our problems must have a technological solution.

A few years back, a Chinese Confucian scholar told me that 2,000 years ago, Chinese culture had reached a level of mathematical sophistication roughly equivalent to that of 17thcentury Europe. But further development of empirical science in China did not occur. According to this scholar, it was intentionally stopped by Han-dynasty emperors. These emperors reasoned that continued advances in empirical science would lead to new technologies that would improve people’s lives materially, but would increase their suffering by fueling their desire for things they didn’t have. As a result, they would become more and more dependent on that type of science and technology, and less and less happy. To the ancient Chinese emperors, it was clear that this was not a wise course to follow, so it was discouraged.

The West, of course, has taken a different path. For the last 500 years at an accelerating rate, the last 150 to 200 years at an astounding rate, and the last 20 years at an unbelievable rate, we have been developing a dependence on a particular type of science and technology. This has given us an extraordinary level of technological prowess. But at what cost?

The premise behind my diagram is that, as human beings, we have a deep desire to have an impact on our world, for example, by helping a sick child or a poor person, or taking care of ourselves when we have a problem (see “Desire for Efficacy” in the diagram “Reliance on Science and Technology”). To increase our efficacy, we pursue science and technology; but in that pursuit, we move away from another way to gain efficacy— “growth.” What kind of growth? Obviously, I don’t mean material or economic growth. I mean integrated human development (emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual). This kind of growth allows us to connect fully with one another and with nature, and to learn to live together in ways that lend meaning to our lives and that cultivate our capacity to be human.

So, this diagram suggests that a “Shifting the Burden” dynamic underlies our desire for efficacy, linking it to a dependence on a Western approach to science and technology (a symptomatic solution) and away from human development (a more fundamental solution).

By the way, there’s one more element to the generic “Shifting the Burden” pattern—unintended consequences. As we become more dependent on the symptomatic solution, unintended side effects occur. What might some of the side effects be here? Consider how science and technology produce isolation. We might think communications technology connects people more directly, but by increasing our control over whom we communicate with, it also isolates us. I recently spoke with Meg Wheatley about a study she was doing of virtual, or online, communities. She concluded that they were actually the antithesis of community. Why? Because, as she put it, “a community is what happens when human beings are stuck with one another.” Virtual communities have zero cost of entrance and exit. So they can easily become anti-communities, because the people involved are all comfortable with one another. Community for Meg is what starts to develop when we are initially uncomfortable with one another.

Waste is another side effect of our shifting the burden to modern science and technology—in the U. S. one person produces about one ton of waste every two weeks. So is a false sense of security. Obviously, we could create a long list. In this drawing, what are the consequences of side effects? An even stronger urge for efficacy and a reduced capacity for fundamental solutions. Once we recognize our insecurity, we are driven to want still more technology to ease that insecurity. To the extent that we are isolated, real human growth becomes harder to achieve.

Three Premises About Complexity

Today many wonder if we are not at a historic moment, a period of great awakening. Of course, time will tell. But September 11 surely provides a tragic testimony to the state of our world—what people must do to get their voices heard. Historically, human beings have sorted out our social and environmental issues in community. If we were damaging the local river, the pollution was right there for all to see. We either cleaned it up or we were in trouble. Our problems, however severe, were relatively local to where we lived. But in the last 50 to 100 years, suddenly many of the negative social and environmental side effects of our actions have begun to manifest themselves on the other side of the world. Learning about these effects becomes more difficult and complex, because in systems thinking, complexity is defined as a situation in which cause and effect are no longer close in time and space.

I want to share three basic premises about complexity:

• Living itself is complexity.
• Our evolution as a species is interdependent with the evolution of the very complexity that we are a part of.
• We have an immense untapped capacity to deal with this complexity.

Let’s examine the idea that life is complex and interdependent. Farmers naturally accept the premise that cause and effect are separated in time, as do most traditional cultures around the world. The seasons and rhythms of sowing and reaping separate in time our actions from their future consequences. This is part of the core perennial wisdom of human beings, and it is a reality we all confront, starting as young children. Human relationships are probably the first domain where most of us encounter real complexity: Why did this person who was so nice to me suddenly turn cold? Because we fail to understand the systemic nature of relationships, we find it exceedingly difficult to see the effects of our own actions. So most of us struggle with relationships throughout our lives. That’s complexity. But it’s important to notice how good we can get at relating if we continue working at it. We have immense capacities for connecting and relating.

RELIANCE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

As we try to increase our effectiveness in the world, we become more dependent on a Western approach to science and technology. As a result, we become less connected to and focused on developing our own capacity to impact the world.

So, I don’t agree with those people in the systems field who suggest that a gap exists between complexity and our innate capacity for understanding complexity. That gap is at best a hypothesis. I deeply believe we have no idea of our innate capacity to understand complexity. In light of the “Shifting the Burden” dynamic that we have been living out during the modern age, especially in societies most shaped by modern technology, we have grown so used to our reliance on technology that we easily confuse our innate capacity with our manifest capability. So we tend to conclude that we’re clueless about complexity. But think about this: Have you ever driven in traffic, with your life in your hands and cars darting all around you, while carrying on a conversation with the person next to you? That’s a pretty complex situation, and by and large one we handle quite well.

The complexity of living is not just a product of the modern world. But two important modern developments have made complexity much more difficult to manage: (1) distant cause and effect and (2) a focus on controlling our immediate environment rather than on expanding our understanding of the world we are creating. I believe the rise of these two phenomena have led us to underestimate our innate capacities.

I do think a different gap exists, however. I first heard this one described many years ago. A senior official of the United Nations said that, as he traveled the world, he consistently saw the same underlying problem in many different guises: a large and growing gap between our technological prowess and our ability to understand technology’s effects on our lives—in other words, a gap between our power and our wisdom. That’s the gap I would assert does exist and that the “Shifting the Burden” diagram points to. And as long as it exists, creating the world we want to live in will be difficult, because in our addiction to the power of our technology, we neglect another, different source of power.

A senior official of the United Nations said that he consistently saw the same problem: a large and growing gap between our technological prowess and our ability to understand technology’s effects on our lives.

So that’s what I’ve been thinking about the last few days and years. Hearing your thoughts in our question-and-answer period today has been quite helpful. One person mentioned the danger of implying that technology itself is the problem, because through the pursuit of technology, we can more deeply understand the nature of the universe, which can enrich our lives. I agree completely. I want to emphasize that this gap is not about science and technology per se, but a particular approach to science and technology that has dominated our world for the past several hundred years.

Another person mentioned the need to be cautious in assuming that a symptomatic solution is “bad.” Again, this is an important point. A physician treating someone who is dying does whatever it takes to save the person, even though she knows her actions address the symptoms and not the underlying causes that caused this person’s crisis. Similarly, my “Shifting the Burden” diagram is not implying that Western science and technology are bad or should be stopped, only that our current approach to them is dangerously incomplete as a strategy for achieving efficacy.

Wholism and the “Implicate Order”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe understood deeply this gap between modern science and wisdom. Most of us know Goethe as an extraordinary writer and philosopher, a giant of 19th-century literature. But Goethe considered his efforts in literature trivial compared to his work as a scientist, in understanding light and color, in working in botany, and in rethinking the scientific method. Much of his life he spent traveling throughout Europe, continually observing certain types of plants. Years ago, when I went to the Goethe Museum in Germany, I was stunned by his extraordinary collection of plant specimens. His approach to science, however, so contradicted mainstream Newtonian-Cartesian thought that it was dismissed as the dabbling of an eccentric genius.

The essence of Goethe’s science lay in his idea of scientific understanding, what is now called “wholism.” Wholism is a way of knowing that is a close cousin to what most of us call “systems thinking.” I believe they are natural and essential complements.

Imagine looking at the night sky. We all know that the pupil of our eye is probably less than a centimeter across. But few of us realize that the entire night sky exists in that tiny space of our pupil. No matter how infinitesimally small we make that space, still the entirety of the night sky is contained within it. This is the first principle of wholism: the whole is enfolded in each element or “part.” This idea, by the way, foreshadowed the theory of the “implicate order” articulated by quantum physicist David Bohm.

As we ponder wholism, we can see the programming to which we’ve been subjected as a result of growing up in a Newtonian world. Even most of our systems thinking efforts are essentially Newtonian: We study the extended world and see the interrelatedness between different things. That approach can be a powerful tool for understanding interconnections among parts, but it still doesn’t account for something else going on in the world—the mutual evolution of the parts and the whole.

Goethe tried to understand this mysterious element in living systems. For example, he would focus on a particular plant such as coldsfoot, observing how it grew in northern and central Germany, the Alps, and the Mediterranean. In each place, the plant looked different and unique, yet Goethe observed that its essence was always the same. He would focus on each concrete manifestation of the plant until he could see, as he describes it, the true or generative plant in his imagination. He concluded that there is a single coldsfoot. Similarly, for Goethe, there is a single human being, manifesting continually and uniquely.

Goethe’s science harmonizes uniqueness and universality. Nature produces extraordinary variety and uniqueness, and seems never to produce sameness in the manufactured sense. No two leaves are identical, just as no two cells, or no two human beings, are identical. Yet, the essential generative order is universal. There is only the human being or the coldsfoot. The whole is present in each concrete manifestation. Goethe believed that the fundamental aim of real science is to see nature in this way, at its essence—to see it, as David Bohm would say, as an interplay between “the implicate and the explicate order.” When we can perceive the interdependence between the whole and its concrete manifestations and how they evolve together, we expand our capacity to deal with complexity.

My first experience seeing in this way occurred 10 to 15 years ago. One morning I skied onto a frozen lake in the middle of Maine. It was beautiful, and the sun was just rising. I looked across the wind-blown snow on the lake, gazing out toward the mountains in the distance. Suddenly—and I don’t know how to explain this to you—I saw that the shape the wind had made in the snow was identical to the shape it had made on those mountains. My sense of time shifted profoundly as I recognized the generative order of that pattern in the snow, produced two or three days ago, and the same pattern on the mountain, produced perhaps 300 million years ago.

Primary Knowing

The time for Goethe’s wholistic ideas may now be arriving. In the last five years, Otto Scharmer and Joe Jaworski of the Society for Organizational Learning have been doing “deep interviews” with thought leaders around the world, many of them eminent scientists. So far they’ve done over 130 interviews, 25 of which are up on a new web site called “Leadership Dialogues,” which you can access through SoL’s web site (www.solonline.org). I believe these interviews provide compelling evidence that a profound shift is occurring in the scientific worldview today, a shift that could eventually lead to a movement toward what I call “growth” in my diagram and that could support a very different capacity for living together on this small planet.

To illustrate new views that are emerging, I’d like to share an excerpt from an interview with Eleanor Rosch, a leading cognitive scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, whose work on how people perceive color has challenged mainstream theories of perception. More recently, Rosch has started to articulate a theory of two types of knowing, primary and secondary, which correspond to two ways of understanding complexity. Secondary knowing includes understanding “extensive complexity,” seeing patterns of interdependence in the world around us. The archetype diagram that I drew is an example of this. Primary knowing involves seeing from within the generative process that produces the pattern, or seeing with the heart.

Most of us fail to notice how a leaf, for example, is continually being reproduced, how a tree is being generated or disappearing literally before our eyes. Because we have not cultivated our capacity for primary knowing, we see phenomena as fixed, rather than seeing into their source. But Rosch contends that this is a matter of social conditioning, not innate capacity. “If you folyour nature enough,” he says, “so that you’re continually integrating, you find you come to the original being. And the original being knows and acts and does things in its own way. It actually has a great intention to be tself and will do so if u just allow it.” Primary knowing is about cultivating the capacity to see deeply in Goethe’s sense.

This type of knowing is what Goethe considered seeing so deeply into what nature has produced that you can see its generative essence and begin to transform it. For example, if you can see the complexity of the “Shifting the Burden” dynamic—that you are part of society’s addiction to modern science and technology, it’s not just something occurring “out there” separate from you—you can begin to shift away from addiction toward growth.

Years ago I heard the famous inventor Buckminster Fuller say that all of us are scientists; in other words, we all have the capacity for primary knowing, for seeing the generative processes of life. Today, we have put science on a pedestal, occupying a similar position to religious institutions of the past. Scientists have become people who tell us how things “really” are, and most of us have become passive recipients of their knowledge. Bucky had a very different view. He believed the future lay in cultivating the scientist in all of us.

Today, as our scientific foundation shifts, the underpinnings of modern society are starting to shift. But such a shift may take 300 to 400 years, as with the first scientific revolution. I’d argue that we don’t have that much time left if we’re going to ensure that our society survives. Accelerating this shift is up to those of us serious about cultivating our capacity to see what is occurring all around us. Both systems tools and primary knowing can help us pay closer attention to and effect profound change in the world.

The Generative Nature of Reality

I want to close by sharing two events in South Africa that illustrate some shifts that are already occurring in our social reality. The first took place in the early 1990s. On the day when former South African President F. W. DeKlerk announced the ending of apartheid, Bryan Smith and I were in South Africa, doing a three-day leadership course. The group was mixed, about half white business leaders and half black community leaders. One black and one white South African cofacilitated the training with us. During the last day, we heard that DeKlerk was going to make an important announcement on TV, although no one knew what it was about. So we took a break to watch it. As we sat and listened to him give his famous speech, people’s jaws dropped. At one point, DeKlerk listed all the political organizations that were being unbanned, such as the African National Congress and the Pan-African Union. I watched the face of my dear friend Ann Loetsebe, a community leader and teacher, light up as she visualized all of her cousins and relatives who could finally come home.

We then finished the course with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, something we had done for 15 years. Because the video was actually illegal in South Africa at the time, few participants had ever seen it. Afterwards, people stood up and shared their reflections. One white man looked Ann right in the eyes and said, “I have been brought up to think of you as an animal.” Then he broke down in tears. In that moment, I knew things were going to change in South Africa. When you get so inside the phenomenon of reality that you realize you are part of the phenomenon itself, you see that even the most “stuck” parts of reality can unfold. When he said this, I had a strange image of chains falling away from him.

When I heard Wendy Luhabe talk yesterday about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I was deeply moved. I know of no other example in history where people whose relatives had been killed stood facing the people responsible for their deaths and just listened, with complete understanding that these admissions were not about punishment, but about telling and reconciling. That’s what it’s like when you see together deeply into the generative nature of reality. You see that reality is like a flower: It is becoming. So why are we working like mad to “fix it”?

What will it take for us to once again become indigenous?

I want to leave you with a question. Bill McDonough is one of the world’s best-known green architects. His buildings generate more energy than they use. Right now he’s leading the redesign of the famous Ford Rouge plant, where Henry Ford first produced the Model T. Two weeks ago at MIT, McDonough gave a group of us a gift. He said he had been working in the field of green design for more than 20 years and had finally concluded that everything could be articulated by a single question. It lies at the heart of everything he’d been doing and maybe much of what we’re all trying to do. McDonough’s question is, “What will it take for us to once again become indigenous?”

This simple question gives each of us much to ponder. What does it mean to be indigenous? I think it means to be connected—to place, to nature, to life. It also has to do with stewardship and responsibility. The book Ishmael (by Daniel Quinn) tells the story of a man who goes to be taught by a teacher who turns out to be a gorilla. Most of the book is about their conversation. In the very first scene, the gorilla’s cage has a sign that says, “With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?” It’s another way of saying that human beings have lost a sense of having a purpose as a species. So maybe that’s what it will mean to become indigenous again.

One other thing this question might lead us to understand is why each and every part is important. A native elder recently told Bill Isaacs that indigenous Americans have a very clear idea of why all the people of the world are here. The brown people, meaning the indigenous people, are here to connect humans and nature. The yellow peoples of the Orient are here to connect mind and body. The black peoples sang the universe into existence and are the generative force. And the pale faces? It is their job to bring them all together. No one is left out.

Peter Senge is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization and coauthor of the three related Fieldbooks, most recently Schools That Learn. He lectures throughout the world about decentralizing the role of leadership in organizations to enhance the capacity of all people to work toward common goals. He is a member of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and founding chairperson of SoL’s Council of Trustees.

Editorial support for this article was provided by Kali Saposnick.

Suggested Further Reading

Bortoft, Henri. The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way Toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature (Lindisfarne Books, 1996)

Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael (Bantam-Turner Books, 1992)

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