|
VOLUME 5, NUMBER 7
Reflections
The SoL Journal
on Knowledge, Learning, and Change
Awakening
Faith in an Alternative Future
Commentary
Darcy Winslow
Commentary
Elena Diez
Pinto
Commentary
Robert Fritz
|
|
Published by The Society for
Organizational Learning
4reflections.solonline.org
ISSN 1524-1734
© 2004, Society for Organizational
Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Awakening
Faith in an Alternative Future A Consideration
of Presence:
Human Purpose
and the Field of the Future
By
Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer,
Joseph
Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers
With so many social systems –
families, companies, governments, communities and societies – in disarray, it
often seems that the future does not look promising. The scenarios we imagine
most easily reveal our worst fears rather than the legacy to which we aspire.
What can we do? Based on extensive research, first-hand experience, and a
multi-year dialogue, Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer,
Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers – authors of
the new book Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future – have
concluded that in order to “create the world anew” we will be called to
participate in changes that are both “deeply personal and inherently
systemic.” Given SoL’s mission to support the
interdependent development of individuals and their institutions, we are delighted to
share highlights of the authors’ exploration into the essence of generative
learning. The article that follows is based on the introductory chapters of
their book.1 — Sherry Immediato, Publisher
 lthough the four of us came from quite different
backgrounds, we did share one thing in common: we had all experienced
extraordinary moments of collective presence or awakening, and seen the
consequent shifts of large social systems.
One of those moments occurred in South Africa in 1990. Peter was in
the hill country north of Johannesburg, coleading
a three-day leadership workshop that had been offered for 15 years, but never
in South Africa. His colleagues included
a black South African and a white South African who were being trained to
lead the program on their own in the future. There were 30 people attending;
half were white business executives and half, black community organizers.
Many took personal risks to participate in the program.
On the last day of the program, the group heard that
President F. W. de Klerk was going to give a
speech, so they took a break and gathered in front of a television set to
watch. This turned out to be the famous speech that set into motion the
ending of apartheid. In the middle, de Klerk began
to list all the previously banned black organizations that were now being “unbanned.” Anne Loetsebe, one
of the community leaders, was listening with rapt attention. Her face lit up
as de Klerk read the name of each organization: the
African National Congress (ANC), the Pan Africanist
Conference, and so on. Afterwards, she said that as each organization was
mentioned, she saw in her mind’s eye the faces of different relatives who
would now be coming home.
After the speech the group reconvened and completed the
program as usual. Later that afternoon, they watched, as was the custom in
the program, a video of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
“I have a dream” speech. This had been banned in South Africa and many of the
participants had never seen it before. Finally, the program closed with a
“check-out” that gave each person a chance to say whatever he or she wanted.
The first four people made lovely comments about how meaningful it had been
for them to be there and what they had learned about themselves and about
leadership. The fifth person to speak was a tall Afrikaans business
executive. This man, like many of his business colleagues, had been reserved
and shown little emotion during the program. He now stood and turned to look
directly at Anne. “I want you to know that I was raised to think that you
were an animal,” he said. And then he began to cry. Anne just held him in her
gaze and nodded.
“As I watched this,” says Peter, “I ‘saw’ a huge knot
become untied. I don’t know how to describe it except to say it was as if a
rope simply became untied and broke apart. I knew intuitively that what had
been holding him and so many others prisoners of the past was breaking. They
were becoming free. Even though Nelson Mandela was still in the Robben Island prison and free elections were still four
years in the future, I never had any doubt from that moment that significant
and lasting change would occur in South Africa.”
The
four of us shared a common desire to understand better how such moments and
the underlying forces for change they signal come about. We felt that what we
had written in the past, at best, described the words but left the music
largely in the background. Contemporary theories of change seemed,
paradoxically, neither narrow enough nor broad enough. 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. As Otto puts it,
“This blind spot concerns not the what and how – not
what leaders do and how they do it – but the who: who we are and the inner
place or source from which we operate, both individually and collectively.”
Of Parts and Wholes
Presence offers a theory of
profound change that is both radical and simple, based first on understanding
the nature of wholes, and how parts and wholes are interrelated. Our normal
way of thinking cheats us. It leads us to think of wholes as made up of many
parts, the way a car is made up of wheels, a chassis, and a drive train. In
this way of thinking, the whole is assembled from the parts and depends upon
them to work effectively. If a part is broken, it must be repaired or
replaced. This is a very logical way of thinking about machines. But living
systems are different.
Unlike
machines, living systems, such as your body or a tree, create themselves. They
are not mere assemblages of their parts but are continually growing and
changing along with their elements. Almost 200 years ago, Goethe, the German
writer and scientist, argued that this meant we had to think very differently
about wholes and parts.
 For Goethe, the whole was
something dynamic and living that continually comes into being “in concrete
manifestations.”2 A part, in turn, was a manifestation of the whole, rather
than just a component of it. Neither exists without the other. The whole
exists through continually manifesting in the parts, and the parts exist as
embodiments of the whole. The inventor Buckminster Fuller was fond of holding
up his hand and asking people, “What is this?” Invariably, they would
respond, “It’s a hand.” He would then point out that the cells that made up
that hand were continually dying and regenerating themselves. What seems
tangible is continually changing: in fact, a hand is completely re-created
within a year or so. So when we see a hand – or an entire body or any living
system – as a static “thing,” we are mistaken. “What you see is not a hand,”
Fuller would say. “It’s a ‘pattern integrity,’ the
universe’s capability to create hands.”3
For
Fuller, this “pattern integrity” was the whole of which each particular hand
is a “concrete manifestation.” Biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls the
underlying organizing pattern the formative field of the organism. “In
self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity,” says Sheldrake, “there
is a wholeness that depends on a characteristic organizing field of that
system, its morphic field.”4 Moreover, Sheldrake says, the generative field of a living system
extends into its environment and connects the two. For example, every cell
contains identical DNA information for the larger organism, yet cells also
differentiate as they mature – into eye, heart, or kidney cells, for example.
This happens because cells develop a kind of social identity according to
their immediate context and what is needed for the health of the larger
organism. When a cell’s morphic field deteriorates, its awareness of the
larger whole deteriorates. A cell that loses its social identity reverts to
blind, undifferentiated cell division, which can ultimately threaten the life
of the larger organism. It is what we know as cancer.
To
appreciate the relationship between parts and wholes in living systems, we do
not need to study nature at the microscopic level. If you gaze up at the
nighttime sky, you see all of the sky visible from where you stand. Yet the
pupil of your eye, fully open, is less than a centimeter across. Somehow,
light from the whole of the sky must be present in the small space of your
eye. And if your pupil were only half as large, or
only one quarter as large, this would still be so. Light from the entirety of
the nighttime sky is present in every space – no matter how small. This is
exactly the same phenomenon evident in a hologram. The three-dimensional
image created by interacting laser beams can be cut in half indefinitely, and
each piece, no matter how small, will still contain the entire image. This
reveals what is perhaps the most mysterious aspect of parts and wholes: as
physicist Henri Bortoft says, “Everything is in
everything.”5
When we
eventually grasp the wholeness of nature, it can be shocking. In nature, as Bortoft puts it, “The part is a place for the presencing
of the whole.”6 This is the awareness that is stolen from us when
we accept the “machine” worldview of wholes assembled from replaceable parts.
The Emergence of Living Institutions
Nowhere
is it more important to understand the relation between parts and wholes than
in the evolution of global institutions and the larger systems they
collectively create. Arie de Geus,
author of The Living Company7 and a pioneer of the organizational learning
movement, says that the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a new
species on earth – that of large institutions, notably, global corporations.
This is a historic development. Prior to the last hundred years, there were
few examples of globe-spanning institutions. But today, global institutions
are proliferating seemingly without bound, along with the global
infrastructures they create for finance, distribution and supply, and
communication.
 This new species’ expansion is
affecting life for almost all other species on the planet. Historically, no
individual, tribe, or even nation could alter the global climate, destroy
thousands of species, or shift the chemical balance of the atmosphere. Yet
that is exactly what is happening today, as our individual actions are
mediated and magnified through the growing network of global institutions.
That network determines what technologies are developed and how they are
applied. It shapes political agendas as national governments respond to the
priorities of global business, international trade, and economic development.
It is reshaping social realities as it divides the world between those who
benefit from the new global economy and those who do not. And it is
propagating a global culture of instant communication, individualism, and
material acquisition that threatens traditional family, religious, and social
structures. In short, the emergence of global institutions represents a
dramatic shift in the conditions for life on the planet.
It may seem
odd to think about titanic forces such as globalization and the information
revolution as arising from the actions of a new species. But it is also
empowering. Rather than attributing the changes sweeping the world to a
handful of all-powerful individuals or faceless “systems,” we can view them
as the consequences of a life form that, like any life form, has the
potential to grow, learn, and evolve. But until that potential is activated,
industrial-age institutions will continue to expand blindly, unaware of their
part in a larger whole or of the consequences of their growth, like cells
that have lost their social identity and reverted to undifferentiated growth
for its own sake.
The
species of global institutions reshaping the world includes non-business
organizations as well. Today, for example, it’s possible to enter an urban
school in China or India or Brazil and immediately recognize a way
of organizing education that has become completely taken for granted in the
West. Students sit passively in separate classrooms. Everything is
coordinated by a predetermined plan, with bells and whistles marking time,
and tests and grades to keep things moving like one giant assembly line.
Indeed, it was the assembly line that inspired the industrial-age school design,
with the aim of producing a uniform, standardized product as efficiently as
possible. Though the need to encourage thoughtful, knowledgeable,
compassionate global citizens in the twenty-first century differs profoundly
from the need to train factory workers in the nineteenth century, the
industrial-age school continues to expand, largely unaffected by the new
realities within which children are growing up in the present day.
As
Buckminster Fuller pointed out, a living system continually re-creates itself.
But how this occurs in social systems such as global institutions depends on
both our individual and collective level of awareness. For example, each
individual school is both a whole unto itself and a part, a place for the
“presencing” of the larger educational system. So, too, is each individual
member of the school: teachers, administrators, students, and parents. Each
of us carries the memory and expectations of our own experience as
schoolchildren. The same holds true for the way business organizations, and
their members, are places for the presencing of the prevailing systems of
management. As long as our thinking is governed by habit – notably by
industrial, “machine age” concepts such as control, predictability,
standardization, and “faster is better” – we will continue to re-create
institutions as they have been, despite their increasing disharmony with the
larger world.
In
short, the basic problem with the new species of global institutions is that
they have not yet become aware of themselves as living. Once they do, they
can then become a place for presencing the whole as it might be, not just as
it has been.
New Ways of Thinking About
Learning
When
any of us acts in a state of fear or anxiety, our actions are likely to
revert to what is most habitual: our most instinctual behaviors dominate,
ultimately reducing us to the “fight-or-flight” programming of the reptilian
brain stem.
Collective actions are no different. Even as conditions in the world change
dramatically, most businesses, governments, schools, and other large
organizations continue to take the same kinds of institutional actions that
they always have.
This
does not mean that no learning occurs. But it is a limited type of learning:
learning how best to react to circumstances we see ourselves as having had no
hand in creating. Reactive learning is governed by “downloading” habitual
ways of thinking, of continuing to see the world within the familiar
categories we’re comfortable with. We discount interpretations and options
for action that are different from those we know and trust. We act to defend
our interests. In reactive learning, our actions are actually reenacted
habits, and we invariably end up reinforcing pre-established mental models.
Regardless of the outcome, we end up being “right.” At best, we get better at
what we have always done. We remain secure in the cocoon of our own
worldview, isolated from the larger world. (See Figure 1: Reactive Learning.)
But
different types of learning are possible. More than seven years ago, Joseph
and Otto began interviewing leading scientists, and business and social
entrepreneurs. The interviews – which now total more than 150 – often began
by asking each person, “What question lies at the heart of your work?”
Together, the two groups illuminated a type of learning that could lead to
the creation of a world not governed primarily by habit.
All
learning integrates thinking and doing. All learning is about how we interact
in the world and the types of capacities that develop from our interactions.
What differs is the depth of the awareness and the
consequent source of action. If awareness never reaches beyond superficial
events and current circumstances, actions will be reactions. If, on the other
hand, we penetrate more deeply to see the larger wholes that generate “what
is” and our own connection to this wholeness, the source and effectiveness of
our actions can change dramatically. (See Figure 2: Deeper Learning.)
In
talking with pioneering scientists, we found extraordinary insights into our
latent capacity for deeper seeing and the effects such awareness can have on
our understanding, our sense of self, and our sense of belonging in the
world. In talking with entrepreneurs, we found extraordinary clarity
regarding what it means to act in the service of what is emerging so that new
intuitions and insights create new realities. But we also found that for the
most part, neither of these groups talks with the other. We came to realize
that both groups are really talking about the same process – the process
whereby we learn to “presence” an emerging whole, to become what George Bernard
Shaw called “a force of nature.”
The Field of the Future
The key
to the deeper levels of learning is the recognition that the larger living
wholes of which we are an active part are not inherently static. Like all living
systems, they both conserve features essential to their existence and seek to
evolve. When we become more aware of the dynamic whole, we also become more
aware of what is emerging and our part in it.
Jonas
Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, spoke of tapping into the
continually unfolding “dynamism” of the universe, and experiencing its
evolution as “an active process that . . . I can guide by the choices I
make.”8 He felt that this ability had enabled him to reject common wisdom and
develop a vaccine that eventually saved millions of lives. Many of the
entrepreneurs we interviewed had successfully created multiple businesses and
organizations. Consistently, each felt that the entrepreneurial ability was
an expression of the capacity to sense an emerging reality and to act in
harmony with it. As one of our interviewees, W. Brian Arthur, a noted
economist of the Santa Fe Institute, told us, “Every profound innovation is
based on an inward-bound journey, on going to a deeper place where knowing comes
to the surface.”
This
“inward-bound journey” lies at the heart of all creativity, whether in the
arts, in business, or in science. Many scientists and inventors, like artists
and entrepreneurs, live in a paradoxical state of great confidence and profound
humility – knowing that their choices and actions really matter and feeling
guided by forces beyond their making. Their work is to “release the hand from
the marble that holds it prisoner,” as Michelangelo put it. While they know
that their actions are vital to this accomplishment, they also know that the
hand “wants to be released.”
Can
living institutions learn to tap into a larger field to guide them toward
what is healthy for the whole? What understanding and capacities will this
require of us individually and collectively?
Presence
We’ve
come to believe that the core capacity needed to access the field of the
future is presence. We first thought of presence as being fully conscious and
aware in the present moment. Then we began to appreciate presence as deep
listening, of being open beyond one’s preconceptions and historical ways of
making sense. We came to see the importance of letting go of old identities
and the need to control and, as Salk said, making choices to serve the
evolution of life. Ultimately, we came to see all these aspects of presence
as leading to a state of “letting come,” of consciously participating in a
larger field for change. When this happens, the field shifts, and the forces
shaping a situation can shift from re-creating the past to manifesting or
realizing an emerging future.
Through
our interviews, we’ve discovered similarities to shifts in awareness that
have been recognized in spiritual traditions around the world for thousands
of years. For example, in esoteric Christian traditions such shifts are
associated with “grace” or “revelation” or “the Holy Spirit.” Taoist theory
speaks of the transformation of vital energy (qing,
pronounced “ching”) into subtle life force (qi, pronounced “chi”), and into spiritual energy (shin).
This process involves an essential quieting of the mind that Buddhists call
“cessation,” wherein the normal flow of thoughts ceases and the normal
boundaries between self and world dissolve. In Hindu traditions, this shift
is called wholeness or oneness. In the mystic traditions of Islam, such as
Sufism, it is known simply as “opening the heart.” Each tradition describes this
shift a little differently, but all recognize it as being central to personal
cultivation or maturation.
Despite
its importance, as far as we know there is relatively little written in
spiritual or religious traditions about this shift as a collective phenomenon
or about collectively cultivating the capacity for this shift. Yet many of
our interviewees had experienced dramatic changes in working groups and, in
some cases, in larger organizations. Some of the theorists had even developed
ways of thinking about this that transcended the dichotomy between individual
and collective.
In the
end, we concluded that understanding presence and the possibilities of larger
fields for change can come only from many perspectives – from the emerging
science of living systems, from the creative arts, from profound
organizational change experiences – and from direct contact with the
generative capacities of nature. Virtually all indigenous or native cultures
have regarded nature or the universe or Mother Earth as the ultimate teacher.
At few points in history has the need to rediscover this teacher been
greater.
It All Starts with Seeing
In a SoL leadership workshop several years ago, Fred, a
Jamaican man from the World Bank, told a remarkable story. A few years earlier
he had been diagnosed with a terminal disease. After consulting a number of
doctors, all of whom confirmed the diagnosis, he
went through what anyone would in that situation: for weeks he denied what
was happening. But gradually, he came to grips with the fact that he was only
going to live a few more months.
“Something
amazing happened then,” he said. “I simply stopped doing everything that
wasn’t essential. I didn’t do anything that didn’t matter. I started working
on projects, with groups of kids, that I’d always
wanted to do. I stopped arguing with my mother. When someone cut me off in
traffic, I no longer got upset. I just didn’t have time to waste on anything
like that.”
Near
the end of this period, he began a wonderful relationship with a woman who
thought that he should get more opinions about his condition. He consulted
some doctors in the United States and soon got a phone call telling
him, “We have a different diagnosis.” The doctor told him he had a rare form
of a very curable disease.
“When I
heard that,” Fred told us, “I cried like a baby, because I was so afraid my
life would be back to the way it used to be.”
We’ve
learned from years of scenario-planning exercises that imagining alternative
futures, even negative futures, can actually open people up. Used artfully,
scenarios can alter people’s awareness of their present reality and catalyze
profound change. In the mid-1980s, five years before Nelson Mandela was
released from jail, citizens in public forums throughout South Africa confronted “the low road” and
“the high road” – two scenarios about the consequences of, respectively,
maintaining or stopping the country’s apartheid policies. The key to making potentially fearful
futures generative is to see that we have choices, and that our choices
matter.
Early
on in our work with Presence we received a remarkable article from Surdna Foundation president, and good friend, Ed Skloot. The piece, “Global Requiem” by religion scholar
Jack Miles, was a speculation about potential cultural impacts if society
started to realize that humankind might not overcome the global problems it
faces, that we may not develop a sustainable society, and that, in fact, the
human race might perish (see sidebar, “Global Requiem: The Apocalyptic Moment
in Religion, Science, and Art”). Predictions of environmental or social
collapse almost inevitably evoke denial, fear, and even paralysis. Given that
their authors’ intent is usually to mobilize action, they can actually be
counterproductive. But what if, instead, facing a global requiem scenario led
us to “wake up,” as happened for Fred when he faced his mortality? What would
happen if such an awakening occurred and, instead of inducing denial, led us
to realize that our future as a species cannot be taken for granted, that
there is a real urgency to our present situation, and that the time to start
living together differently is now?
We believe
such an awakening may be occurring around the world. This is based on the
interviews we’ve been doing for more than seven years; on direct experiences
we’ve had with profound change; and on coming to understand better how change
occurs in living systems.
One of
the most important books in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition is The Awakening
of Faith. 9 Written in (or about) 500 AD, it provided a crucial bridge in
bringing Buddhist philosophy and practice from India to China and hence, throughout the Asian
cultures. The faith of which the book speaks is a deep conviction that
enlightenment is possible, that we each carry within ourselves immense
possibilities for connecting to the universe and participating in its
generative process. In more religious terms, you could say the book’s aim is
to show that the infinite or absolute and the phenomenal, God and human, are
inseparable, and that we have the potential to co-create our realities. But
to do so we must first transcend the myth of separation that modern culture
has taught us – separation from one another, from our highest selves, and
from the generative processes of nature. Awakening our faith that the future
can be different from the past will take nothing less than rediscovering our
place, and that of our modern societies and institutions,
in life’s continual unfolding.
Global Requiem
The
Apocalyptic Moment in Religion, Science and Art
|
|
If the first generations that
assimilated Charles Darwin’s thought were concerned with the origin of species,
our own is concerned in an unprecedented way with the extinction of species
and, above all, with the threat of extinction that faces the human species.
During the 1850s, while Darwin was concluding The
Origin of Species, the
rate of extinction is believed to have been one every five years. Today,
the rate of extinction is estimated at one every nine minutes. This raises
the question, Will the human species be
extinguished in its turn? The statistical question, perhaps the statistical
likelihood, is complicated, morally, by the probability that human
extinction, if it comes about soon, will prove to have been species
suicide.
“Human reproduction,” veteran
foreign correspondent Malcolm W. Browne wrote in his memoir Muddy
Boots and Red Socks,10 “has some disturbing
similarities to cancer…. [Humankind] will most likely destroy its planetary
host before dying out itself.” He cites the work of anthropologist Warren
M. Hem, who compared satellite images showing the growth of Baltimore and the colonization of the
Amazon basin side by side with pictures of cancer cells. As Hem put it:
“The human species is a rapacious, predatory, omniecophagic
[devouring its entire environment] species.”
As voices like Browne’s are
increasingly heard, the cause that until now has been presented as the
defense of the environment, as if the environment were an importunate
relative whom long-suffering mankind was being asked to support, is
beginning to be presented as the selfd-efense of
the human species itself. The environment is, after all, the human habitat,
and time after time, extinction has followed on loss of habitat when the
species at
|
risk was not able to adapt in
time. Despite our large numbers, we are an endangered species.
As this paradigm shift takes place
in the realms of politics and activist science, another change looms in the
realm of the imagination and, perhaps also, in the practice of religion. If
the earth is failing as a viable habitat for our species, then we can no
longer imagine our individual deaths, as we have so long been accustomed to
do, against a backdrop of continuing life. As we cease to do so, as we recontextualize our personal deaths in the emerging
prospect of species death, can there – should there – be a religious wisdom
that will accept species death as if it were personal death?
Such a prognosis, if it comes,
surely will not come as it does in the disaster movies that are now so
strangely popular; namely, with a warning that unless a given action is
taken within ten days or ten hours, the world will end. No, it will come
rather as an accumulation of ignored warnings from scientists and science
journalists and an ensuing consensus that the opportunity to take the
action that would have saved the species has come and gone. At that
scientifically apocalyptic moment, should it be reached, and we can
certainly imagine it being reached, actual extinction may still be far
enough in the future that there will be time for a new kind of religion and
a new kind of art to develop. These will be, no doubt, a religion and an
art born of despair, but religion and art – far more than politics or
commerce or science – are precisely those products of the human spirit to
which we turn in times of despair. The last days of the human race may be, not
to speak at all flippantly, our finest hour.
—
Jack Miles
|
|
A B O U T T
H E A U T H O R
Jack Miles is senior advisor to the
president of the J. Paul Getty Trust and author of God:
A
Biography (New York:
Alfred P. Knopf, 1995). This excerpt was adapted and reprinted with
permission from Jack Miles,
“Global Requiem: The Apocalyptic Moment in Religion, Science,
and Art,” Cross
Currents, Fall
2000, Vol. 50, Issue 3.
|
Endnotes
1 Peter Senge,
C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski,
and Betty Sue Flowers, Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future (Cambridge, MA: SoL,
Society for Organizational Learning, 2004).
2
According to physicist and philosopher of science Henri Bortoft,
The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way
Towards a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne
Press, 1996.
3 Amy
Edmondson, A Fuller Explanation, 56-59 (Birkhaeuser,
Boston, 1987) and Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics: the Geometry of Thinking (NY: Macmillan, 1976).
4 See
“Conversation with Rupert Sheldrake: Morphic Fields,” interview by C. O. Scharmer (London, September
23, 1999), www.dialogonleadership.org.
5 See
“Conversation with Henri Bortoft: Imagination
Becomes an Organ of Perception,” interview by C. O. Scharmer (London, July 14, 1999),
www.dialogonleadership.org.6 Ibid.
7 Arie de Geus, The Living
Company (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1997).
8 The
New York Times, June 24, 1993, 1, 9.
9 The
Awakening of Faith, attributed to Asvaghosa,
translation and commentary by Yoshito S. Hakeda (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).
10 See
Malcolm W. Browne, Muddy Boots and Red Socks: A Reporter’s Life (New York:
Times Books, 1993).
 Peter M. Senge is a senior lecturer at the MIT
Sloan School of Management, and.the founding chair of SoL. A renowned pioneer in management innovation, Peter
is the author of the widely acclaimed The Fifth Discipline: The Art and
Practice of the Learning Organization (Doubleday/Currency 1990).
C. Otto Scharmer
is a Lecturer at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Visiting Professor at the Helsinki School of
Economics, co-founder of SoL and the Global
Leadership Initiative, and author of the forthcoming book Theory U: Leading
From the Emerging Future.
Joseph Jaworski
is the chairman of
Generon Consulting and cofounder of the Global
Leadership Initiative, founder of The American Leadership Forum, and author
of the critically acclaimed Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (Berret Koehler, 1996).
Betty Sue Flowers was a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and an international business
consultant prior to her current role as the director of the Johnson
Presidential Library and Museum.
If you would like to contact the authors
about this article or about their new book Presence: Human Purpose and the
Field of the Future, please email them at presence@solonline.org.
|
Commentary
By Darcy Winslow
|
|
|
This article (and even more so the
book, Presence) is remarkable in at least three ways. First, the authors’
work has extraordinary emotional as well as intellectual impact; it
continued to affect me long after my initial reading of it. Second, I found
that the insights I gleaned from the work depended on what was happening
around me. I suspect I will take away different messages each time I read
it. Third, the authors somehow opened me to unexpected messages and
opportunities in my own life. Perhaps because they speak so eloquently of the
need to sense one’s own connections to the world, my reading of Presence
coincided with many seemingly chance encounters that in very real and
specific ways reinforced my connections with others.
One
of the book’s themes, suggested in the article, is the idea of
crystallizing intent – disciplining oneself to retreat and reflect, to
listen to the moment. That is something I have done over and over again in
my own work. It was essential a few years ago when I started thinking about
how corporations could create a more sustainable future. I first had to
crystallize my own goals, intentions, and actions – for the year, the next
three years, and the rest of my career. That process helped me find new
ways to connect with colleagues, customers, and the larger community. I
then found that there are always people in organizations, often far from
the top or entirely beyond the walls of the enterprise, who are actively
engaged in the “right” work – practicing their values, building
connections, and actively pursuing a shared vision.
To be sure, most of what happens
in most companies is driven by the financial pressure to reward
shareholders. But I see an increasing yearning among people and their
organizations to be part of something greater than themselves.
We tapped that yearning at Nike to develop new, environmentally friendly womenswear products. We wanted to inspire people to
think differently about the products they buy or sell, and ultimately we
wanted every product to advance our goals for environmental, social, and
financial sustainability. However, I soon discovered how complex the
process of developing sustainable products would be. We had to establish a
new set of design principles, engage our supply chain, and build a network
of technical experts (many of whom we found through SoL
and other outside partners). It was an organic process of learning and
building across whole systems – something that the authors capture vividly
in their work.
From the authors’ thinking, represented in both
their article and book, I take with me two lessons in particular:
• Changing demographics are a force for change. I
have found in my own work that women and youth are leading many of the best
efforts to achieve sustainability. Whether due to an ability to connect, a sensitivity to social and natural imbalances, or a
mindset that is less tied to the structures of the past, women and young
people are natural carriers for the message of long-term, systemic change.
However, to build bridges to these emerging constituencies we must all
become better listeners and open ourselves to ideas from remote and
unexpected sources.
• We need to measure what matters.
The “soft stuff” – values, aspirations, commitment – is the hardest to
measure. But it is what forms a culture and enables change. By contrast,
the metrics that drive most companies – revenue, growth, return
on investment – are not very inspiring. I have found that embracing
people’s deeper purposes and principles can drive a lot of decision making
in an organization. Within my own division, for example, we have four
guiding principles. One of them is “Live and lead in favor of the future.”
We constantly ask ourselves how that is manifest in our operations,
processes, and products. It is a much better way to manage: decisions that
flow from a clear set of principles are almost always better and more
widely honored than those based on purely financial metrics.
Peter, Otto, Joseph, and Betty
Sue call us to reflect, individually and with one another, about what we
share and where our future lies. Presence ends with a powerful line: “If we
find our place, we will find our purpose.” I think that is the real work
for all of us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Darcy Winslow heads the Global Footwear, Women’s
Performance division for Nike, Inc. and is a member of SoL’s
Sustainability Consortium.
darcy.winslow@nike.com
|
|
Commentary
By Elena Diez Pinto
|
|
|
In “Awakening Faith in an Alternative Future,” the
authors articulate a message that is fundamental to people everywhere: the
connectedness of all things. Their discussion of parts and wholes resonates
both intellectually and emotionally; it confirms what I have found in my
conversations with people around the world, and in my own work.
In my seven years of work
supporting civic dialogue in Latin America, I have come to understand that social and
personal transformations take place through a conscious process of
connecting people with each other, and with themselves. In Presence, the
book from which this article was drawn, the authors tell the story of
Vision Guatemala, a team of government officials,
human rights activists, businesspeople, and military officers that came
together in 1997 in the wake of a brutal, 30-year civil war. That group,
with which I was involved, sought to develop a shared understanding of the
country’s present and to create plausible scenarios for the future.
In our first dialogue, one of the
participants described witnessing an exhumation of a mass grave (one of
many hundreds) from a massacre in Rabinal, a
Mayan village. The grave included the remains of a mother and her unborn
child. When he finished talking, everyone in the room was silent and many
of us wept. Later, many recalled that moment as a “large communion”;
everyone understood that the tragedy of Rabinal
was a manifestation of the whole of our society. We discovered that day
that when we listened to one another, putting aside our usual fears and
prejudice, we were able to connect deeply and see the world differently.
Our connection with one another allowed the people in the room to step back
from the abyss and create an alternative future. We saw what the authors
have called “an emerging future that depended on us.”
Peter, Otto, Joseph, and Betty
Sue remind us that there are powerful processes for translating our
aspirations into reality. They suggest that by opening ourselves to the
world and to the living systems that sustain us, we can create meaningful
and lasting change. This may sound idealistic, but it is extremely
practical. I have learned that when I have to make a decision or want to
know what to do in the future, I need to listen to myself. If I listen with
my heart and my body, not just my mind – if I am fully present and not
distracted from what my senses and intuition tell me – I gain deeper
understanding and arrive at better, more viable decisions.
This way of being in the world is
a matter of survival – for individuals, organizations, and societies.
Listening, thinking together, and trying to understand the whole comprise
the essence of dialogue and the extraordinary opportunity that the authors
have revealed. They make visible the connectedness among people, and call on
us to get much better at seeing it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elena Diez
Pinto is the
director of the United Nations Development Programme’s
Democratic Dialogue for Latin America and the Caribbean, and a member of Vision Guatemala.
elena.diaz@undp.org
|
|
Commentary
By Robert Fritz
|
|
|
Among the many discoveries within
this brilliant new work by Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer,
Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers, one,
perhaps not obvious at first, is nonetheless particularly radical. It is a shift
of fundamental orientation.
If we are to move from relating to the world as
fragmented parts to systemic wholes, we must change our basic way of
thinking. Not just what we think, but how we think. The change is:
·
from abstract and symbolic conception to acute and profound
observation;
·
from metaphorical thinking to original and direct inquiry;
·
from the habit of not looking freshly to the discipline of finely
tuned investigation; and
·
from reliance on concepts to bring a sense of order to the world,
to an open quest to see what’s really there, even if it makes us feel
uncomfortable, unsure, insecure, and mystified.
To make this shift, we must move
from presuming to know before we look, to looking freshly without the
limitation of a concept, metaphor, theory, or history of previous
experiences. Another way to say this is: start with nothing, e.g., without
an idea of what we might find.
This is the essence of deep
listening. How can we hear if we are filling ourselves with the sound of
our own concepts? How can we hear the music that is playing if we are
singing our own song in our minds? Originality comes from deep listening,
and deep listening comes from focusing on reality without an agenda,
something that is difficult when we are in the habit of comparative
thinking.
Comparative thinking is most
common in our society. It is a this-is-like-that act of categorization. We
compare our “database” of previous experiences, theories, models, concepts,
or worldviews with what we are observing. Therefore, we bias our perception
and create what Otto Scharmer calls “blind
spots.” When we think we know, we don’t ask vital questions, we settle for
easy answers, and we live in a world of presumption rather than a world of
dynamic inquiry.
Deep listening is a long
tradition for those who forged new insights. Newton, much reproached these days as
proposing a mechanical universe, was not a metaphorical thinker. He did not
think in terms of mechanical, or any other, metaphors. Others, who were not
as original, did.
Newton was a deep listener, a creative
mind, a man who invented calculus in order to further his inquiry. Those
who made his work into metaphor misunderstood the creative process that was
central to his work. He looked without a theory. If he were living in this
day and age, he would be using his deep listening to observe reality
freshly, and, perhaps, come to different insights. He said, “Hypotheses
have no place in science.” In his book, A History of Knowledge: Past,
Present, and Future, Charles Van Doren describes Newton’s gift this way: “…a mind
entirely free of traditional prejudices and capable of seeing the universe
[in] a new way.”
Descartes said, “To understand some phenomenon or
set of phenomena, first rid your mind of all preconceptions.”
Deep listening can lead us to a
deeper and often new understanding of reality. Composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen has written, “We need to close our eyes for a while and listen.
There is always something unheard of in the air.”
In the arts, students must learn to see what is
before their eyes without a concept in mind. Painter and teacher Arthur
Stern said, “…the basic problem that every painter must face [is that] the
mind stands in the way of the eye. That’s why most beginning painters don’t
paint what the eye sees, but what the mind lets the eye see. They paint
what they expect to see.”
If the universe is, indeed, a
living system, and if we look deeply enough, we will see it for what it is
– parts in relationship to each other and to the entire whole – a dynamic,
with an organic nature, that is always shifting, evolving, and emerging.
It is from deep listening, rather
than from an imposition of theory or concept or metaphor, that our
understanding becomes immediate, direct, and authentic. Living systems, as the
authors point out, are capable of change and self-creation. Understanding
this principle as the reality it is, rather than simply a concept to adopt,
gives us a chance to have an active role in the emerging creation of our
world.
Without such a revolution, we are
trapped by our outmoded, and now dangerous, styles of thinking and acting.
At this moment in history, technology, the politics of identity and
world-view, environmental conflicts, and the harsh consequences of not
understanding the actual interrelatedness of our paths, cannot be addressed
with the limitations of our traditional, fragmented thought processes. This
is why the ideas explored by the authors can lead to new possibilities of
hope, and can move us away from a precipice and toward a vastly wiser
civilization.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert
Fritz, composer,
filmmaker, and organizational consultant, is founder of Technologies for
Creating,® and author of Your Life as Art
and the international bestseller, The Path of Least Resistance.
robert_fritz@robertfritz.com
|
|
ISSN 1524-1734
EISSN 1536-0148
© 2004 by the Society for
Organizational Learning.
SoL is a registered trademark of
the Society for Organizational Learning.
Design & Production: DG Communications
(NonprofitDesign.com)
Design Concept: OHO
(OHOCreative.com)
Design & Production: DG
Communications (NonprofitDesign.com)
Design Concept: OHO
(OHOCreative.com)
|
Reflections
The SoL
Journal
on Knowledge, Learning, and
Change
Volume 5, Number 7
Editorial Team
Editors-in-Chief
Karen Ayas and Peter M. Senge
Senior Editor
Paul M. Cohen
Managing Editor
Nina Kruschwitz
Publisher
C. Sherry Immediato
Individual Subscription Options
Receive
Reflections as a SoL Connections member:
·
USD$125 U.S.
·
USD$135 International
One year Reflections subscription:
·
USD$75 U.S.
·
USD$85 International
To order online and for a full description of sub
scription options, see
http://reflections.solonline.org
For institutional subscriptions,
contact David
Mahaffey (see below).
Reflections: The SoL Journal is published 10 times
per year (July
through June) in electronic format and
once per year as a
hard copy compilation by the
Society for
Organizational Learning, Cambridge,
Massachusetts 02139, USA. Inquiries regarding
subscriptions and address changes, back issues, reprints,
and permission
requests should be directed to:
David
Mahaffey,
Publications
Management Intern
Reflections:
The SoL Journal
955 Massachusetts Ave, Suite
201 Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
(1)617.300.9515 (phone)
(1)617.354.2093 (fax)
E-mail: reflections@solonline.org http://reflections.solonline.org
|
|