Theory U

Leading from the Future as It Emerges

Otto Scharmer

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781626568006
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Access the deepest source of inspiration and vision We live in a time of massive institutional failure that manifests in the form of three major divides: the ecological, the social, and the spiritual. Addressing these challenges requires a new consciousness and collective leadership capacity. In this groundbreaking book, Otto Scharmer invites us to see the world in new ways and in so doing discover a revolutionary approach to learning and leadership.In most large systems today, we collectively create results that no one wants. What keeps us stuck in such patterns of the past? It's our blind spot, that is, our lack of awareness of the inner place from which our attention and intention originate. By moving through Scharmer's U process, we consciously access the blind spot and learn to connect to our authentic Self—the deepest source of knowledge and inspiration. Theory U offers a rich diversity of compelling stories, examples, exercises, and practices that allow leaders, organizations, and larger systems to cosense and coshape the future that is wanting to emerge.This second edition features a new preface in which Scharmer identifies five transformational trends and describes U process case stories around the world. There are also eight color drawings by Kelvy Bird that capture U journey applications and illustrate the concepts in the book, as well as new resources for applying the principles and practices.

Part I

Bumping into Our Blind Spot

We all recognize social acts when we see them: people talking, laughing, crying, clashing, playing, dancing, praying. But where do our actions come from? From what place deep within (or around) us do our actions originate? To answer this question, it is helpful to look at the creative work of an artist in three ways. First, we can look at the result of her (or his) work, the thing, the finished painting. Or we can observe her while she (or he) is painting: we can watch the process of the colorful brushstrokes creating the work of art. Or we can observe the artist standing in front of the empty canvas. It is this third perspective that creates the guiding questions of this book: What happens in front of the completely white canvas? What prompts the artist to make that first stroke?

This book is written for leaders, the individuals or groups who initiate innovation or change—the “artists.” All leaders and innovators, whether in business, communities, government, or nonprofit organizations, do what artists do: they create something new and bring it into the world. The open question is: Where do their actions come from? We can observe what leaders do. We also can observe how they do it, what strategies and processes they deploy. But we can’t see the inner place, the source from which people act when, for example, they operate at their highest possible level or, alternatively, when they act without engagement or commitment.

That brings us to the territory of what I call our “blind spot.” The blind spot concerns that part of our seeing that we usually don’t see. It’s the inner place or source from which a person or a social system operates. That blind spot is present every day in all systems. But it is hidden. It is our task, as leaders, and as creators, to notice how the blind spot shows up. For instance, Francisco J. Varela, the late professor of cognitive science and epistemology in Paris, told me that “the blind spot of contemporary science is experience.” This blind spot shows up in many different ways. We will learn about them as we continue this “field walk,” this “learning journey,” together.

The following seven chapters offer seven perspectives from which we can explore the different ways the blind spot shows up in society, in science, and in systems thinking as a defining feature of our time. Blind spots appear in individuals, groups, institutions, societies, and systems; they reveal themselves in our theories and concepts in the form of deep epistemological and ontological assumptions.

I invite you to explore with me several different areas of the blind spot. We start from the view of the self and move through the team, the organization, society, the social sciences, and, finally, philosophy.

Chapter 1

Facing the Fire

When I left my German farmhouse that morning for school, I had no idea it was the last time I would see my home, a large 350-year-old farmhouse thirty miles north of Hamburg. It was just another ordinary day at school until about one o’clock, when the teacher called me out of class. “You should go home now, Otto.” I noticed that her eyes were slightly red. She did not tell me why I needed to hurry home, but I was concerned enough to try to call home from the train station. There was no ring. The line was obviously dead. I had no idea what might have happened, but by then I knew it probably wasn’t good. After the usual one-hour train ride I ran to the entrance of the station and jumped into a cab. Something told me I didn’t have time to wait for my usual bus. Long before the cab arrived, I saw huge gray and black clouds of smoke billowing up into the air. My heart was pounding as the cab approached our long driveway. I recognized hundreds of our neighbors, area firefighters, and policemen along with people I’d never seen before. I jumped from the cab and ran down through the crowd, the last half mile of our chestnut-lined driveway. When I reached the courtyard, I could not believe my eyes. The world I had lived in all my life was gone. Vanished. All up in smoke.

There was nothing—absolutely nothing—left except the raging flames. As the reality of the fire in front of my eyes began to sink in, I felt as if somebody had ripped away the ground from under my feet. The place of my birth, childhood, and youth was gone. I just stood there, taking in the heat of the fire and feeling time slowing down. As my gaze sank deeper and deeper into the flames, the flames also seemed to sink into me. Suddenly I realized how attached I had been to all the things destroyed by the fire. Everything I thought I was had dissolved into nothing. Everything? No, perhaps not everything, for I felt that a tiny element of my self still existed. Somebody was still there, watching all this. Who?

At that moment I realized there was a another dimension of my self that I hadn’t previously been aware of, a dimension that related not to my past experiences—the world that had just dissolved in front of my eyes—but to my future possibilities, a world that I could bring into reality with my life. At that moment time slowed down to stillness, and I felt drawn in a direction above my physical body and began watching the scene from that unknown place. I felt my mind quieting and expanding in a moment of unparalleled clarity of awareness. I realized that I was not the person I had thought I was. My real self was not attached to all the material possessions smoldering inside the ruins. I suddenly knew that I, my true Self, was still alive! It was this “I” that was the seer. And this seer was more alive, more awake, more acutely present than the “I” I had known before. I was no longer weighted down by all the material possessions the fire had just consumed. With everything gone, I was lighter and free, released to encounter the other part of my self, the part that drew me into the future—into my future—into a world waiting for me, that I might bring into reality with my forward journey.

The next day my eighty-seven-year old grandfather arrived for what would be his last visit to the farm. He had lived in that house all his life, beginning in 1890. Because of medical treatments, he had been away the week before the fire, and when he arrived at the courtyard the day after the fire, he summoned his last energy, got out of the car, and went straight to where my father was working on the cleanup. He did not even once turn his head to the smoking ruins. Without seeming to notice the small fires still burning around the property, he went up to my father, took his hand, and said, “Kopf hoch, mein Junge, blick nach vorn!” “Keep your head up, my boy, look forward!” Then he turned, walked directly back to the waiting car, and left. A few days later he died quietly.

Only years later did I realize that my experience in front of the fire was the beginning of a journey. My journey began with the recognition that I am not just one self but two selves. One self is connected to the past, and the second self connects to who I could become in the future. In front of the fire I experienced how these two selves started to connect to each other. Today, thirty-seven years later and several thousand miles away in Boston, Massachusetts, these two questions appear to be more relevant than ever: “Who is my true self?” and “How does this self relate to the other stream of time—the one that seemed to draw me from the future that wants to emerge?”

The journey of Theory U is basically an inquiry into this question: How can we access these deeper sources of time, being, and self in a way that is reliable, practical, and collective—and that works without your family farmhouse going up in flames every morning? These questions eventually prompted me to leave Germany for the United States in 1994 to continue my research at the MIT Organizational Learning Center.

Chapter 2

The Journey to “U”

Theory U • Interview with Brian Arthur at Xerox PARC • Francisco Varela on the Blind Spot in Cognition Sciences • The Inner Territory of Leadership

Theory U: Beginnings

As just discussed, the blind spot concerns the structure and source of our attention. I first began noticing this blind spot in organizations when I spoke with Bill O’Brien, the former CEO of Hanover Insurance. He told me that his greatest insight after years of conducting organizational learning projects and facilitating corporate change was that “the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.” That struck a chord! So it’s not only what leaders do and how they do it but their “interior condition,” that is, the inner place from which they operate—the source and quality of their attention. So this suggests the same person in the same situation doing the same thing can effect a totally different outcome depending on the inner place from where that action is coming.

When I realized that, I asked myself: What do we know about that inner place? We know everything about the what and the how, the actions and the processes that leaders and managers use. But what do we know about that inner place? Nothing! I wasn’t even sure whether there were only one or many of these inner places. Do we have two? Ten? We don’t know because it’s in our blind spot. Yet what I have heard time and time again from profound innovators and creative people is that it is exactly that kind of blind spot that matters most. It is that blind spot that sets apart master practitioners and leaders from average performers. This is why Aristotle over 2,300 years ago made a distinction between normal scientific “what” knowledge (episteme) and practical and technical “how” knowledge (phronesis, techne) on the one hand and the inner primary knowing of first principles and sources of awareness (nous) and wisdom (Sophia) on the other.¹

Shortly after I came to MIT in 1994, I watched a live broadcast on organizational learning. In response to a question from the audience, Rick Ross, coauthor of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, went to the whiteboard and wrote the following three words:

FIGURE 2.1: LEVELS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

When I saw that simple presentation, I realized that organizational change happens on different layers. In a flash I began mentally seeing these layers. Diagramming them helped, because the changes from structure to process to thoughts present more and more subtle shifts. When I completed the drawing in my mind, I had added two more levels—above structure and below thought—as well as a horizontal dimension showing change as we move from perceiving something to acting on it. This is how it began to look:

I began calling the state at the bottom of the U “Presencing.” I will talk much more about this in Part III, but for now, we can call it “seeing from our deepest source”: that is, sensing and operating from one’s highest future potential. It is the state each of us can experience when we open not just our minds but our hearts and our wills—our impetus to act—in order to deal with the new realities emerging all around us.

FIGURE 2.2: FIVE LEVELS OF CHANGE

Whenever I used this framework in presentations and in my work with groups, organizations, and communities, I noticed how deeply it resonated with experienced practitioners. As they worked with this U image, people began to understand its two key dimensions. One is the distinction between perception and action that defines the horizontal axis, as we work from deeply connecting and sensing toward enacting and realizing. The vertical axis then shows us the different levels of change from the shallowest response, “Reacting,” down through the deepest, “Re-generating.”²

Most change and learning methods are based on the Kolb Learning Cycle, which suggests a version of the following sequence: observe, reflect, plan, and act. By grounding the learning process this way, the learning cycles are based on learning from the experiences of the past.³ The distinction made by Harvard and MIT’s Chris Argyris and Don Schön between single-loop and double-loop learning refers to learning from experiences of the past.⁴ Single-loop learning is reflected in the levels of reacting and restructuring, while reframing is an example of double-loop learning (which includes a reflection of one’s deep assumptions and governing variables). However, the deepest level of the U graphic—referred to as regenerating—goes beyond double-loop learning. It accesses a different stream of time—the future that wants to emerge—and is what in this book I will refer to as presencing or “the U process.”

The concept of the U, of course, didn’t spring from nothing. It emerged from many years of study and work on change in different contexts and movements, which are documented in two of my earlier books.⁵ Important sources of my early thinking about social development and change included a global learning journey whose purpose was to study the dynamics of peace and conflict (in 1989–1990). It led me to India to study Gandhi’s approach of nonviolent conflict transformation, and to China, Vietnam, and Japan to study Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism as different approaches to development and being. I also had the fortune to work with unique academic teachers, Ekkehard Kappler and Johan Galtung, who taught me that critical thinking and science can function as powerful forces for social transformation and change. Other influences on my thinking were the work of the avant-garde artist Joseph Beuys, and the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Martin Buber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as some of the old masters like Hegel, Fichte, Aristotle, and Plato. Among the philosophical sources, perhaps most influential was the work of the educator and social innovator Rudolf Steiner, whose synthesis of science, consciousness, and social innovation continues to inspire my work and whose methodological grounding in Goethe’s phenomenological view of science has left the most significant imprint on Theory U. The simplest way of locating Theory U in the landscape of intellectual traditions is to identify it as applied phenomenology—...