UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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Hello, friends, and welcome to this special edition of Insights at the Edge with Otto Scharmer. It’s special in terms of its depth and length, and also because Otto Scharmer and his teachings on awareness-based systems change—how who we are, our quality of attention, our interior awareness and development makes a difference in the world in terms of changemaking. That is a topic that I have so many questions about and is so important to me. Otto Scharmer brings his teachings on awareness-based systems change to Sounds True’s Inner MBA® program, applying the inner development that we do to the world of business to our organizations. And here for the first time, Otto’s joining me on Insights at the Edge.
Otto was born near Hamburg, Germany. And then at MIT, as a researcher and senior lecturer, he engaged in a study of innovators, people who are new types of creators in the world of business, technology, science. And through that study, and seeing what is it that enables them to come up with breakthrough ideas, he developed something called Theory U, which is a framework, a practice, and in many ways the seeds of a movement about how we can use presencing, inner presencing, outer presencing with others, to create change at this time. In the Inner MBA program, Otto teaches on leading in times of disruption. And that’s what we’ll be talking about here. You can learn more about the Inner MBA program, at innermbaprogram.com. And with that, Otto, I’m so happy to have this conversation with you. Let’s get at it.
Otto Scharmer: Wonderful. Thank you for having me as one of your guests, Tami. It’s a great delight to reconnect with you.
TS: I heard you say in a conversation that you had the sense that this time we’re in, this time of great disruption, it’s a time that you feel you were “born for” in a certain kind of way. And I think that’s true. The module that you teach in the Inner MBA is “Leading in Times of Disruption.” This is clearly a time of great disruption. But I want to know about you. Why do you feel—what’s happening in your own sense of inner direction that you feel, “I was called for this time”?
OS: Well, maybe let me respond before the story. I’ll start the response before the story that comes to my mind. A few weeks back, we were starting a project and ecosystem-wide leadership journey at the UN towards UN 2.0, is really around how to transform the UN to better meet the moment, essentially. And at the beginning, as we often are, and probably we all can relate to this experience one way or another, there was this sense of, that you often meet today, I would say almost like a collective depression. So a little bit downbeat. It’s so many things going, moving in the wrong direction. And it’s the sense of that, you find particularly among younger people and younger generations today, that all these massive developments progressing and moving in the wrong directions, and whatever I do as a person has zero impact on where things are going. So this sense of disempowerment. This sense is at the source of this collective depression, by which I mean the illusion of insignificance.
So the illusion of that, how I show up, how I pay attention to the situation, how I connect with my own deeper life’s intention, and how I connect and activate my own agency doesn’t matter to the situation at hand. So, that was very present in the room. And then a colleague of mine, Martin Kalungu-Banda, a colleague, Zambian, who does a lot of work across Africa and is currently living in Oxford, UK, co-facilitating this session, posed the following question. Because everything, all the indicators we have been making, as everyone knows, for 70 years, real progress, after the Second World War on many, many different fronts. And now, the past decade or so, the past few years really, things in terms of war, in terms of inequality, in terms of gender equity and so on, in terms of democracy, you can go down the whole list, all the indicators, we have lost in years progress we made throughout decades. And not the full progress, but part of it.
And in the light of that, here’s what Martin said. Martin said, “What if the UN had been founded for exactly this kind of moment?” And then, in that conversation, and you could really see how that whole reframing, it’s not like, “Oh, everything was moving in the right direction. Now everything is turning the other way. What can we do?” No, it was, “What if exactly the situation we are in right now is exactly that with my whole journey that brought me up to this point, have been prepared to rise to the occasion?” And so that was then the question that came up in the conversation among them. And really moving this sense, or you could say this perceived victim mindset, “This is happening to us.” And there’s like, what can we do towards, maybe this is exactly what’s bringing together here to rise to the occasion in the face of this together.
So it’s essentially, if you want, it’s a reframing of the larger narrative, in a way that is not saying, actually, these difficult developments that I mentioned are not true. No, they’re factually true, but it’s a reframing in terms of what really deserves our attention. And what deserves our attention is kind of the other part of the story. So I believe we live in a moment with two narratives. One is the one I already indicated, of something that’s ending and dying. And then there is another story, and all the environmental issues, the hyperpolarization and inequality issues, and the pandemic of mental health and so on.
But then there’s another story. And the other story is really about a new presence, a new quality of connection that we have to each other, to the planet, and to ourselves, being born, being cultivated, and being the starting point for a whole web, new web of connections, of initiatives, of relationships, that we see taking shape in so many communities right now.
So that’s kind of the story of, you could say, where, not only a new society, I would say, it’s really across civilizations, where a new civilization, one that is based on reconnecting with the planet, reconnecting with each other, and reconnecting with ourselves, not only on a mental level, but also on a level of opening our heart, is turning into practical activities, it’s turning into practical innovations. And then I would say it’s the second story that’s happening today. And that’s the most significant story of our time that is least well told. And the first story, the story of destruction, gets amplified with social media by a trillion-dollar industry every single day. The second story, the story of emergence and of something new being born, is a story that does not have that amplification mechanism. And that’s why we need to come together, to create that. We need to come together to create these holding spaces.
And let me just back up this storyline with one more number, and that will wrap up my first response to you. And the number is 69. A few weeks back, a couple of months back now, the new UN human development report came out. It’s basically a stock taking of development globally, where we are, as a planetary community. And one of the most interesting numbers in that report is 69. 69% of humanity today, according to their polls, and according to their research, is willing to sacrifice part of their income to address global challenges like climate change. 69%. But many of these people believe, wrongly believe, that they’re in the minority in their own communities, in their own countries. So 69%, that’s more than five billions of us. That is the biggest movement this world, this planet, has ever seen, that is not even aware of itself because it cannot see itself, because most people in this movement believe they’re in a minority. And if it’s just me, but not the other people around me.
And I think this gap between the personal willingness to sacrifice something for the common good, and the misperception of the collective intention of what others really try to do, and the complete failure of our collective decision-making to really translate the deeply held intention of the 69% into practical results, and into collective decision-making. That’s one of the most interesting numbers, I would say, that exists today. Because they point us at a huge potential.
It’s a huge potential where a possibility that is present and that many people are aware of today, has not quite landed yet. And I think leaning into this space of possibility, and everyone knows really when you look at history and how does the new happen. Well, essentially, it’s always the same story. It’s through movements. So politicians do what social movements in societies make them do. And so it’s how to turn these 69% really into a multi-local, and multi-regional, and cross-sectoral movement, that is working towards actively bridging the ecological, the social, and the spiritual divide. I think that’s one of the most timely, interesting, and challenging, and also challenging opportunities of our time.
TS: What would you call such a movement, Otto, that brings those different sectors, if you will, and concerns together to galvanize the 69% plus?
Otto Scharmer: Well, currently that movement has not one face, but many faces. It does not have one name, but many, many names. And I’m not even sure how useful it is to move everything under one single banner. I think perhaps one of the most interesting insights up front is there’s something wrong with our collective decision-making. The problem is not individual intention; the problem is not that people don’t know; the problem is not that people don’t want to do the right thing; the problem is our collective decision-making. So that’s the question of democracy. It has of governance, of how we come together. But it is also the question of a movement.
So, what is the right name for that? I don’t know. And I’m also hesitant to be very active and putting a label on that, because I think to come up the first before, maybe a name comes up, or a label comes up, or several. It may be a constellation of frames and names. We should actually move into attention. We should actually move into perception. We should actually move into attending to what it is that’s wanting to happen there. And I would say it has a lot of places to do with how we move from extraction to regeneration, how we move from silo to system, or from ecosystem awareness to ecosystem awareness, as I would like to say. And how do we move from just reacting against the issues of the past, towards sensing and actualizing the future that is wanting to emerge.
TS: So Otto, I’m going to ask my questions as we’re talking from a real personal place, as I listen to you. Because when you talked about, “Oh, the challenge is collective decision-making, it has to do with our democracy, and how it’s structured in governance.” Then I picked up on this other term, the illusion of insignificance. And I immediately felt my own insignificance. I don’t know how to make a dent in our collective decision-making process. Better go back to work and see the, “Oh, this world I’m part of, it’s ending, it’s dying. It’s going to be horrific for a period of time.” Yes, I sense the second narrative coming, but feels over a horizon of tremendous pain. I don’t know how to impact collective decision-making, so that’s a big question I’m throwing at you, that I imagine some listeners share the sentiment that I’m sharing with you.
OS: Well, I mean, I share it. And to me, the area of impact is wherever you are. What I don’t mean to suggest is now everyone has to ruminate about collective decision-making or something like that. What I mean is, what I want to draw the attention to is how we actually pay attention. In our public space, and often also in our lives, there is a disproportion between the story of death and destruction, and between the story of emergence and rebirth. And so, who is the central agent in this story? It’s us. And a lot has to do with how we pay and what we choose to pay attention to.
So I think the discipline there is really about focusing on the moment. We cannot control the outcomes, but we can control the current moment and how we relate to that. So that’s kind of where we have a lot of agency. And that’s really what I’m talking about. So, each of us is making the impact. I said sensing and actualizing the future. What really does that mean? When I use the word future, I use it very differently to the way it’s usually used, which is in a much more personal way. Usually, when experts talk about the future, 2030, 2050, we have experts talking about what happens in a different time, often in a different place by different people. That’s not how I use the word future. When I use the word future, I mean something utmost personal that happens here and now. Because it has to do with a sense of possibility that I am aware of that is connected to my own forward journey. And that is looking at me, because it depends on me to manifest. So it doesn’t get more personal.
So again, the future is a possibility that is not me, but that is looking at me, because it depends on me to manifest, to come into the real world. And this intimate relationship to something that may emerge, but doesn’t have to. And that completely depends on how I show up. That really is what I learned from studying innovators, studying creative people, studying people who brought in their discipline something new into the world. It is kind of this felt responsibility for something that is wanting to happen that isn’t me, but that is in need of me in order to come into the world.
So, this relationship is essentially what I’m talking about. This is what needs attention. And it may be something different for each of us. And each of these stories, each of us matter. The illusion of insignificance is this. It is essentially based on an assumption that there is some big lever out there, that if someone is moving it from left to right, something is happening that’s solving all these things. For us, that’s kind of the illusion part. Because in reality, we know how big change happens, which is, it’s many, many seemingly insignificant small things that all add up and that are connected through a web of awareness, through a web of connecting our awareness with our deeper intention of what it is that we want to be in service of. And that’s what I believe is at the root or the foundation of all movement building.
It’s a shared sense of possibility that you can articulate one way or another, but it’s a shared sense that we feel, and that, in some cases, in my youth, it brings us together onto the streets. But it also animates us in different ways of showing up in our work, in our lives, in our relationships, and how we show up in difficult situations. That’s really what I’m talking about. So it’s not anothering of the future that’s kind of out there, someone else, something big. No, the future, if this possibility, yes, I mean, I’m not in denial of all the challenging situations. I mean, I alluded to them in the beginning. None of that is wrong. What I’m saying is, and what I’m talking about is, you asked, “How do you deal with that?” And I responded to you, I have the same issue.
But what I try to hold is a balance between attending to what’s going on, yes, but also attending on my own sphere of influence, where I can actually, in small ways, it’s always small ways for each of us, can nudge things, can connect for each of us, and match things, can connect things, can show up in an awareness that is not stopping inside my own bubble. Right? And so, I mentioned ego-system awareness or ecosystem awareness. So, progressing from one to the other. What do I really mean with that?
I understand they’re very technical. Right? Ego-system awareness is when your awareness originates from inside your own bubble. That’s ego-system awareness. Ecosystem awareness is when your awareness originates from outside your own bubble, outside the boundaries of your system.
For example, by deep listening. Right? When you really listen to another person, what she, or he, or they are trying to convey, so when you listen to someone else’s story, it’s very easy for us, as humans, what’s happening to us? We are taking a deep dive into that narrative. Suddenly, we are no longer looking at that narrative from outside, but we are inside that story. We begin to sense into a situation through another person’s narrative, or eyes, and that’s what we call empathic listening.
We all can do that. That’s an example of moving from ego to eco. I don’t mean that in the moral way. I mean that really in a very technical way. Ecosystem awareness is the capacity that we have, as humans, to operate from beyond of our own bubbles, from beyond of our own physical and institutional boundaries by opening the mind, opening the heart, and opening our will.
TS: I’ve heard you, Otto, talk about opening the mind, the heart, and the will, and opening the mind I think can be intuitive to people, listening to other perspectives, not judging and shutting down, opening the heart, I think people may also have a feeling sense of that. Not that there’s not a lot more to say about both of those types of opening.
But I think when it comes to opening the will, that’s where there’s this, “What’s Otto talking about anyway?” So, let’s go there.
OS: Okay. So, opening the will is actually the most subtle shift, and also the one that usually is least talked about, and attended to, so I want to give maybe two approaches, or two ways of understanding that.
The first one is just on a very technical level, opening the mind really means suspending your habits of judgment, opening your heart really means a redirection, your attention, your listening begins to happen from the field, from the place someone else is speaking from, and opening will really is about letting go, and letting come.
So, open will, letting go, can, of course, happen on many levels. So, for example, when you think about social processes, when you think about perhaps workshops, or when you think about difficult situations we have been in, there is this period where we still hold on to the original concept, to the original construct, and everything is readjusted to that.
Until we see it’s no longer possible. Then there is this moment of stopping, and letting go, and opening up. That’s often, in a social process, so, for example, when you facilitate a deeper multi-stakeholder situation and conflict, that’s this … Until you reach that point where everyone is willing to, at least, open up to the possibility that there needs to be a letting go. For example, when you merge two organizations. Right? What is it that people hold onto? Their old identities. Right? It’s still us versus them.
And so, letting go has a lot to do with our own identities, has a lot to do with what it is, what we choose in our own story. Right? There are many possibilities, but what we choose to wrap our identity around.
Now when I say letting go, I don’t mean a letting go of everything. So, that’s not what I’m talking to. What I mean with letting go is letting go of everything that is not essential, and I remember I once interviewed the Brian Arthur, who was the lead economist of the Santa Fe Institute when I conducted that conversation. He really taught me about that principle. The power of intention, and how much it has to do with letting go.
So, when I asked him about the power of intention, whether that he said that’s a very powerful force in the universe, whether he could say more about that, so his response was, “No. It’s not a powerful force. It’s the only force.”
And then when I asked him to elaborate a little bit on that, he shared a personal story, which was a story of really of letting go, of everything that is an essential, which, as he added, in his case was just about everything.
So, everything that is non-essential means everything that can get into the way to relate to our deeper sense of intention. So, why we are here, what it really is we want to be in service of, and what it really is we want to pursue as a purpose, or we want to help to manifest.
And so, if you go to that place, it is as much a place of not knowing as it is of knowing, so you could also think about this open will that you move from the part that you know, which is often the part that is less interesting towards attending to what we don’t know.
You move from all the certainties, what you thought the answer was, towards opening up, and allowing the universe to talk to you. So, for me, this open will has really everything to do with listening, listening to what my context, what perhaps the planet, and what perhaps the universe is calling on me to do. It’s just an openness. Right? It’s an openness. It’s not, “Okay, now I figured that out, and the rest is implementation.”
It’s an inner attunement per a deeper opening than you allow yourself to stay open to the messages that are coming through life, through all sorts of experiences you may have. So letting go is really the deeper process of opening that in terms of your own deepest intention, you realize that you may have a direction, in terms of knowledge, and answers, but that to really take the next step, you need to lean into your own not knowing.
TS: When I hear you talk about open will, Otto, I think of personal experiences, really difficult, challenging experiences. Some people might say, “That was when I had a dark night of the soul.” And I’m curious, for you, when you say, “Oh, this is when I really discovered what open will means in my life,” was there something happening, that you can reference an experience, and go, “That was an experience where I discovered this”?
OS: Many times. So, the letting go, and letting come experience, I have had many times. It continues to happen. I remember one of the first times is … I think it’s something that I describe early in the Theory U book, when I came back as a 16-year-old from the city to a farm that the 200-, 300-year-old house we have been living in up to that point, everything was gone. It was taken by the fire. Everything that was left was a burning heap of rubble.
So, it was, if you want, early in my life, an experience of full [inaudible 00:35:46] there was nothing there, but I had a deep experience of looking into that fire, because I realized how much what was burning in the fire was related to my own identity. Now how much I was actually, without knowing it, in my identity, tied to these material things of the past.
That letting go, seeing in that fire, and that letting go, made me realize that there is another part in ourselves that is not gone with the fire, that’s still there, and that actually became much more into the foreground of my attention while the otherwise dominant current reality was taken away by the fire.
And that other possibility, that other part of myself had to do not with necessity but with a felt sense of the future that perhaps I could be connected with, or I could help to manifest.
But there are many forms. I remember another one, as a social movement activist around the green and the environmental movement back in the late ’70s in Germany, when as a group, you experienced police violence. So, I wasn’t hurt, physically, but it was a profound experience to see that violence applied to our collective body. Right? Back then, it was 100,000 people, and mostly young people.
When I returned home that day, I was no longer the same person. I had complete clarity around what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, changing that system, that on that day, I had seen in action, and from applying these injustices.
So, sometimes it’s something very simple. So, I remember when I was an assistant professor at a university in Germany, and we were living in a student community. It was just a happy bunch, you could say. So, it was a wonderful place, and we had a wonderful time, but one Saturday morning, out of the blue, my… So, I was in the completion phase of my PHD, and my then-girlfriend, and today partner, she turned to me, and said, “You’re not learning anything new.” So, it was like, even though, it would have never crossed my mind, and the moment she said it, it was like someone is taking away a veil, and suddenly, I knew she was right. I needed to go to some other place.
I also knew instantly, without really thinking about that, what would be the number one place I would like to explore as a possibility, and that was, back then, the MIT Learning Center, that Peter Senge, Ed Schein, Chris Argyris, and colleagues, Isaacs, and other colleagues had, who founded, and that brought out a really interesting combination of acting, new thinking, but you already could… Back then, no one was talking about spirituality or consciousness, but the language was, in a way, that the personal experience was more accentuated, and it, clearly, felt, to me, as a place where maybe if you want to launch a different approach, how people think about leadership and systems change, and how we need to reimagine, and reshape these realities across institutions late in the last, and early in this century, that would be a great place to be.
So, that put me on that path, and, essentially, I came here to Boston for a couple of years, and so on, and then I never managed to move on. So, that is my story, in a nutshell, but the trigger was… So, that’s the third example of letting go, and letting come.
The trigger was a little challenge that my partner posed to me that allowed me to suddenly realize what deep down I already knew, but never had consciously thought. It was a removing of the taking for granted of current reality, and just allowing the next layer. Right? Because that’s gone. What’s the next layer that’s coming up?
So, that open will is something… Who are the greatest teachers on open will? Children, because children… So, for us, if we see a new movement of something, it’s very complicated for us to learn this, as adults. Children see it, immediately can do it. Right? Open will, essentially, open mind, open heart, and open will are not about just noticing stuff outside, but connecting from within. Right? The beingness, connecting with the beingness of what we see, and being able to embody that.
That’s also why what is a practice field at the Presencing Institute, and the useful we have probably the most successful and most usable practice field we have developed to date, and that’s Arawana Hayashi’s work on Social Presencing Theater. Essentially, a blend between awareness, mindfulness, embodied learning, and systems sensing, systems mapping, and systems sensing.
So, it’s a way of exploring not only the intelligence of our physical body, we all know that, there’s so much knowing and knowledge in our physical bodies, but then, as she likes to say, there are these two other bodies. Right? We each deal with three bodies. There’s the physical body, the small body, there’s the big body, which is the body of the planet, and then there is the social body.
The social body, essentially, is the sum total of our relationships, of how we connect with one another, and so the sum total of our relationships that we enact moment to moment, and becoming aware more of the patterns how we connect, and the patterns that manifest in qualities of thinking, qualities of conversation, qualities of collaboration, that’s, essentially, what Social Presencing Theater is offering a practice field for, and Theory U has been busy offering a framework to. Because Theory U is nothing different than looking at the qualities of relationships across all systems, from the viewpoint of different levels of awareness.
TS: Okay. I’m going to track back to something, Otto, because as you were talking about listening to the future in a very personal way, how MIT was calling you, you could hear the call, I was imagining listeners of our conversation feeling into what they’re letting go of, at this moment, in their life, and what’s calling to them from the future in a very personal way.
Then to actually respond to that call, how a certain quality of boldness, or you could say courage, or, “I have to get over myself, and just do it,” and I wonder if you can speak some to that, because, here you are, you’re not an arrogant person. Far from it. I’ve asked you to say, “Why are you a person for this time?” And you talked about a whole field, the UN. You’re not here being like, “It’s the Otto Scharmer Show,” and yet, you’ve manifested a certain kind of, “I will go for it when called.” That’s the quality I’m wondering if you can speak to.
OS: Yeah. That’s a good question. I’m not so sure, Tami. To be perfectly honest.
TS: Sure.
OS: I have heard several times, “Oh, it’s so courageous to do this,” and that, and so on. Then I think, “Well, is it really courageous?” So, yes, I left the traditional academic career path, and so on. But what’s the big courage? How much was I really interested? I was, initially, to some degree. Yes. I’m not saying there was no letting go, and I’m not saying that. It does come with ambivalent feelings until today sometimes.
But, in reality, it’s not a big sacrifice. It may look like, for some people. For me, it never was a real big sacrifice, because, in a way, almost at the same thing, which is just doing the obvious. So, trying to make sense until something is really clear that it makes sense, and then following that path.
So, in that regard, it’s much more, in a way, common sense, and less about a heroic act. So, I want to give maybe another very recent example of that, because that puts it a little bit into context.
So, a couple of months back, I was in Latin America, and in Chile. The year before, we launched something new there, and so maybe I should give a little backdrop here. So, 10 years ago, I was really frustrated, really frustrated, because I always had this … We indicated that, and, usually, honestly, I would not be honest about that. I always felt that we need a larger movement. Right? I wouldn’t often talk about it, because people think, “Oh, that sounds too grandiose,” or something. It’s not down-to-earth.
But, in my heart, I always felt that. So, what do you do? You do small things. Right? Something here, something there, and so on. Then you get frustrated, because how is the small things you do, you see, you’re very aware of the gap with your original aspiration that you had. Right? What you thought was really necessary, and you would like to contribute towards.
So, then 10 years ago, I will skip over the details of that story, but, essentially, unexpectedly, a possibility opened up, so that I could potentially take my class that I teach here at MIT Sloan onto what back then was launched as MIT x, and TedX, an open learning platform, that MIT was the original pioneer of.
So, I had the fortune to be one of the early guinea pigs, not really first-generation, but soon, and in the relative early stage, and we created a new learning platform. It’s called uLab, that really it’s free, accessible until today. It has new cohorts every single year. It has lots of great tools, and allows people to self-organize in communities. So, it really has organizing communities. We have more than 250,000 registered users and so forth. So practically, in most cities in the world, they have been existing, some still exist and some not, these hubs that form, where people just dream up interesting things and then use awareness-based methods and tools to make it happen. That was one story, but I always felt that, okay, now what’s the next thing? And we always believed that the future of online is offline. You need to get much deeper into the in-person stuff. Then, with my colleagues in Latin America, we dreamed up something, which is coming together across the entire continent. Changemakers, a larger group… You just take a week per year, four days, something, and you do that over three years. You have place-based initiatives from the 17 of the 19 Latin American countries, and they all gather together, and it includes Indigenous leaders who do healing practices and participate.
It’s something that is practical. It deals with all the different ecosystems and the systems change initiatives. It’s very personal. It has to do with how we relate to the land, to the planet. When I was there for 10 days the last time, it involved with all the local adjacent events. A thousand people. I was amazed how this potential of change… It’s the first time I really saw it that deeply on such a scale across all these boundaries, all the sectors, countries, languages, and in part, belief systems. Seeing how that can grow together made me aware of one thing, which is transformational work, activating the potential that the 69% represent, is much easier than we think. Because collectively, as a planetary community, we go through what I would call the bottom of the U, but essentially is a process of letting go and letting come. We go through a profound crisis of letting go and regeneration.
Everyone who deals with social change today is already experiencing that because we all are part of the collective. We all are part of the collective field. Whether you’re conscious or not, you have that experience already in your social field. Because of that, if you build the right kind of container, the right holding spaces, a lot can happen in just the four days. A lot more happens today, in just four days, than has happened 10 or 20 years ago, by far. In other words, transformation in the face of our current holy crisis and moment of disruption is not becoming more difficult, but the readiness is almost there everywhere, at least as far as the 69% is concerned. When I saw that, I asked myself when I came back from that, “What am I doing with my life? Why is it I’m not doing this, going from country to country? What might happen if this intensity of work and of really activating what is already there…”
There’s nothing you need to bring into that. You just need to create this holding space and allow these deeper resonances in that social field. Allow the generative level of the social field to be activated. Why is it we are not doing this in all places, in all regions? What would it take? That was disruptive for some of the other things, but that’s an example. First, there is an experience. You experiment with something, you have an experience, and then you contemplate on that experience and ask yourself, “If this is really a foreshadowing of the future, what is this calling on me to do?” That’s the letting come. It’s not like I have the answer, I project that out into the world, but more, “Given what I experienced with that community, what does it want me to do to really evolve and manifest in the way that I sense is wanting to happen?”
The letting come is, essentially, an orientation of your own attention. Back then, 10 years, 20 years ago, I described this… I wrote this book theory, it’s totally unreadable, I would say, but there’s a shorter version of the essentials. That’s more accessible. But today, I would just summarize the entire process with just three words. The three words are attention, intention, and agency. And there’s two sentences. The relationship between the two is this. Attention, if deepened, gives rise to intention, to what I’m here for, my deeper sense of calling. And intention, if clarified and deepened, catalyzes agency. That is, I believe, what many of us already experience on a personal level, and that is also what I believe, if we do that in communities locally, regionally, and across regions, that if that happens more on a community or a systems level, allows us to transform these systems that, today, are more harmful than helpful and that today, under current conditions, often lead us to collective results that nobody wants.
TS: To clarify, Otto, when you talk about the generative nature of the social field and the experience you had in Latin America showed you this power, you saw it in action. Can you help us understand that and how that model… How I could use that in my life or a listener could say, “Oh, I get it now. I get it. Otto says transformation’s not as hard as I think it is. I think it’s really hard.”
Otto Scharmer: Okay, maybe I should clarify what I try to say. What I saw in Latin America is something I have seen many times before. It’s nothing new. But it was the level of ease, the level of naturalness, to dropping into that space and the level of diversity. The diversity of the group, really across the sectors, across the political spectrum, across world views and identities, is just stunning. That it’s possible today, in a world that is characterized by hyper-polarization and that whole narrative around that, that you can create conditions that allow us to come together not with negotiating our ego interest and so on, but in a way of really attending to what’s actually happening in our larger community and how can we rearrange and reconnect our relationships in a way that allows us to move from collectively creating the results that nobody wants to collectively realigning attention, intention, and agency.
I think that’s a story that, often, we experience on a small scale, but that is often missing, but not totally missing, on the larger scale. When you think about the Paris Agreement, I would say that’s an example where it happened on a very large scale. But often, as we all know, collective decision-making is hijacked by special interest groups. It’s kind of not happening in that way. What I saw in South America is the ease and the depths of bringing very diverse groups together. You can say that the social situation in many countries in South America is even more extreme. Neoliberalism was first prototyped in Chile. That’s really the place. It came later here. So you can say Latin America, in terms of the crisis and disruption, is probably a few steps ahead of us and ahead of many other places, but we all are heading in that direction.
In that regard, I really pay attention to these experiences there, and what I saw is something that’s very encouraging because I have seen it in many other places, as well. When you work in situations of crisis, in situations of disruption, change can happen much faster, much deeper. But the same disruption can also lead to more fragmentation and to more isolation. Whether one happens or the other is a function of two things. One is our awareness, whether we are turning away and closing down or whether we are turning toward and opening up to what this moment is really wanting us to do. And two, the quality of holding space.
That’s really what I’m getting at. It’s the quality of the holding space. The missing piece is not individual intention, the missing piece is the quality of the container. That is as true for a one-on-one conversation as it is the conversation we have in a classroom, the conversation we have in a multi-stakeholder meeting, the conversation we have in our team, in our organizations, the conversations we have across sectors and larger systems change initiatives. That’s what I’m talking about, and that’s where the awareness of the crisis is helping with easing the letting go.
Because what does disruption, at the end of the day, mean? It means something very simple. It’s going to change. The future is going to look different from the past. That’s what disruption is. So by definition, there is a moment of letting go and letting come. All I’m saying is everyone knows that already. Therefore, the perceived impossibility of creating new patterns of connection with one another is a misperception. What is lacking are the quality holding spaces, but to some degree, also the social technologies. The methods, the tools, how you actually shift the conversation from debate to dialogue and so on and so forth. It’s these methods and tools, and that’s why I find that my field has changed and systems thinking and what’s the key metaphor we all have been using for the past a hundred years? It’s the iceberg. There’s one part visible, a small part above the waterline, and then everything else below the waterline. That’s what you try to understand the deeper layers of the iceberg.
I always thought, okay, a hundred years on, maybe it’s time to come up with a new metaphor. The metaphor that my new [inaudible 01:05:10] that I’m in the process of writing and completing is around the social field. The roots for that metaphor, for my own life experience, is the farm I grew up on. My parents, who some 65 years ago shifted their way of farming from conventional to regenerative… When you are a regenerative farmer, when you listen to them, when you grow up on a regenerative farm, what’s the number one thing that you learn? It’s all about the quality of the soil and the quality of the ecosystem.
All the attention… And you realize that if you don’t use pesticides and chemical fertilizers and so on, the quality of what’s growing above the ground is a function of the quality of the soil. Today, many years later and a few thousand miles apart from that farm, I believe I’m still doing the same thing. Because in the field of social change, if you are an educator, a parent, if you are a therapist, if you are a leader in any kind of organization, we all deal with what? With social fields. There’s the visible part of the social field, it’s the practical results that we create. And what’s the invisible part? It’s the quality of our relationships. That’s kind of the quality of the soil. The quality of our relationships, and the quality of our awareness of how we pay attention to them, and how much we are where our awareness is originating from, from inside or outside my own bubbles and boundaries.
Essentially, I think we are stuck in the world today because all the attention is going to the results above the ground. But to really shift the system, we need to cultivate the social soil, we need to cultivate the quality of our relationships. For that we need methods, tools, practice fields, and holding spaces. It’s funny. I’m a change maker. We have developed… I have been working really with communities around the world, across sectors, and making this stuff happen. I thought that’s the difficult part. Once you demonstrated that, then you could take these living examples and take it to the next level, make them democratize the access to them. And that, interestingly, seems to be the most difficult part, because I can fund all sorts of things, practical projects. What I cannot fund is democratizing access to that.
I would say the most important work that I can contribute today, like the example in Latin America, is exactly the part of the work that’s almost unfundable because it doesn’t fit the existing frameworks of foundations and so on and so forth. While the stuff that I can fund and do fund are actually in areas that are also significant, but much less significant, in terms of systems change. I’m sharing that because I think many of us have that experience, yet the quality… You can fund what’s growing above the ground, but you can’t fund improving the quality of the social soil, yet that’s the most important thing today, and each of us, because we enact, as human beings, these relationships together, each of us is a gardener of that social field. And that’s why we need everyone to participate in the shifting and the deepening and the cultivating of these relationships.
TS: Otto, there’s so much I want to talk with you about, but I am zeroing in. I want to make sure I understand your soil metaphor. It’s based on these high-quality, good soil, high-quality relationships, lots of relationships that go out into the edges, not just the people close to me. What else makes healthy soil?
Otto Scharmer: A farmer would respond, it’s the right kind of plants. Plants with good roots. That’s really what’s creating the soil, and that’s the plant-based, also carbon sequestering, storing… Regenerative soil is really the organic matter, so I would say the number one thing probably is that is quality of how we pay attention to that, and also the spaces that we create, where you experience a different quality of a social field. It’s something that the body knows the moment you enter it, but if you have not seen it and experienced it, you can’t explain it with words. I still remember when I arrived, back then, at the MIT Learning Center, and I saw for the first time how, with a group of hundred people, you could work in a way that is deeply, deeply personal. That is actually, inside that larger group, more personal and more intimate than it would be if we are just five people there or just two or three and more directly relating to your own essence.
That’s why, back to the Latin American example. I saw that once. I saw that once, and immediately, my body and my mind knew. I didn’t know that was possible. The moment I felt it, I experienced it. In that moment, a whole new set of possibilities is opening up in front of your mind, right away. I think that’s why what we learned over the years is, “Yes, you need tools, but it’s not enough, because what you really need is practice fields, where you experience that.” And yes, practice fields is important, but also that is not enough, because you need these larger arenas where when you enter them, you feel a different sense of connection. There’s something that happens on the level of our vibrations of the mind and the heart when you… We know that.
You know when you enter an organization. You know when you come back to a group. You can feel the vibe. You don’t need anyone to explain. There is an embodied knowing that’s accessible for us. So what is a good school? A good school is a school that is activating generative fields. Because if I experience that as a learner, it awakens up the seeds of generative awareness and action that are already within me, but that if not awakened, if not put into a soil… We all know, you take seeds, you put it on fertile soil, and then a miracle happens. You take the same seed, you put it on a stone, nothing is going to happen. So the difference… What is the soil? It is being in a field. I have seen that often.
The way we as humans wake up to our deeper and higher possibility in life is by seeing one other person who does it. There’s some transmission going on. If you see people operating from a deeper place, it’s not that you may think, “Oh, now I’m indoctrinated. Now I’m running behind whatever this person has been…” No. I see that someone can be a social entrepreneur, can be someone else. So I see someone really operating from their deeper sense of purpose, and what I experience in myself is I’m suddenly waking up to something that’s present within me that I wasn’t aware of before. So sometimes you are in front of these people. Sometimes someone is listening to you in a way that is actually much deeper than you ever listened to yourself. I remember as a student, I was doing an interview with a philosopher. I was studying economics. I had no idea of philosophy. So yet I read all these books, or some of them, I interviewed him. He granted me an interview. For me, it was like a big event. In my own mind, there’s Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and then this guy. I was halfway in shock that he even gave me an appointment. He was very kind, answered all my questions. And then as I was packing up my recorder and was almost on my way out, he turned to me and said, “I expect a lot of you in the future. I expect a lot from you in the future.”
So out of the blue. And I almost thought, “Well, he must be talking to someone else.” But I knew there was no one else in the room. It was me. But he addressed me in a way that I would have never allowed myself to think about myself, right? Because it would be arrogant, whatever, whatever. And so it felt like it uplifted my own sense of self into a direction that I never went. So when I went out of that, I was puzzled by that and I was a little bit less sure about my own certainties about what I could do and couldn’t do, right? So I was more open. And the gateway in his case is listening, attending to me in a way, and perhaps giving me feedback or irritating me with that question that invited me to let go of some of my old certainties.
And so that, it was very subtle, but it always stayed with me. So not as an exclamation mark, as a question mark, right? I was less sure about, more open to, “Maybe there’s something else.” And so it was that question mark that allowed… What is letting go? It’s a question mark, right? An exclamation mark turns into a question mark. That’s letting go and letting come or the beginning of letting come. So all of these are examples of soil. How do you improve the quality of the soil? Deep listening, loving attention, moving from debate to dialogue, creating and inviting people into holding spaces.
In my case, I needed to see it once and immediately it shifted my sense, my entire sense of the future of what was possible. So sometimes you just need to see one person who is embodying something different. That was for me the case early on as a student in Berlin when I met this peace researcher, [inaudible 01:18:44]. The whole place was a disappointment, that whole university. But that one person, that was enough. So you know if one person can do it, something else is possible so you can do it too. I think it’s small things. It’s interesting that these deep shifts and the quality of the social soil, it can be small things that make such a huge difference for others.
TS: Otto, thank you for sharing that about the transmission power, if you will, that can come from an interaction with a person where you kind of catch something that’s a fire in them. It catches inside of you. And I was reflecting before our conversation, “Why am I so excited to talk to Otto Scharmer? This is the 800 plus interview I’ve done here on the Insights at the Edge.” And it’s something about that that I feel from you, which is pushing me now to ask you yet a further question that’s personal in nature and a little mysterious, which is at Sounds True we inquire quite a bit into identity. Who are we anyway as these individual human beings, part of an ecosystem? And I’m wondering, how do you experience your own “identity”?
OS: I’m a white, northern European, German male, German American who lived half his life over there, half his life here in New England. Being born as a German puts your whole identity… There’s the Holocaust, there’s all these, World War I, World War II and so on. So there’s a very difficult history, collective history. What it does to you as a young person is there’s never this naive identity with your collective, right? It’s broken. There’s space in between. So it’s a complex relationship with many different levels. What I experience is as I have been working and engaged in a number of projects in different parts of the world over many years, so I’m not kind of the person who goes to many places once or twice. So I go to very few places forever, for many years because it’s kind of these long-term relationships in different parts of the world that really allow the deep learning. And it makes you essentially a misfit everywhere. Because there’s a part of me that feels… No, it’s funny to say, but that feels Chinese. So that’s something not very popular these days here, but it’s true.
It’s basically through your friends and personal experiences, you can with your heart… I think it’s the more your heart relates. It’s not like, “I am them,” right? So it’s not that kind of identity. But the identity becomes more porous and more distributed and less really related to the parts. And so I would say what we live through with mass migration in this century just beginning is this kind of blended multiple identity. Essentially you are a misfit wherever you go. And it’s a process also of individuation that yet has deep community roots. So it’s kind of that. I once read a Japanese philosopher and he was talking about the spiritual experience or the experience of God, I think he said. And he referred to it as the alien part in myself. So in your own experience, there is an alien part. It shows up in your experience, but it’s not of you. It’s coming through you. I thought that always that was a very interesting way of framing it and what I today believe.
So what is shaping my identity? None of the parts. I think what’s shaping my identity is actually more a sense of awakening planetary connection that I experience on a deep human level in so many places and that has my attention. So I also think that all of us who deal with social change, who deal with human relationships have a much deeper level, a profound spiritual experience in many of these deeper social changes that usually we are completely unaware of. So it happens more on a subconscious level, kind of on a… But what I learned is if you create holding spaces where we slow down, where we attend, where we allow what is more in the background, allow more to rise to the surface of our awareness, that the sense of connection and interconnectedness without really… I think it is just intensifying.
So it gets more complicated. So you can no longer say where one, say the individual is ending and kind of where another one is beginning. So there is I would say the deeper levels of experience that for example, when you are in a deep generative dialogue, when you move into a process of thinking together, these are experiences where the boundaries between us collapse and where something is emerging that is coming through us, but not necessarily from us.
And that’s I think an experience that even though as cultures, as histories and through all different other forms of different identities, we are very different from each other. That’s also true. But there’s kind of this universality of the deeper layers of connection that we in these special moments and that when we activate a generative social field can experience together. And in fact, the word has the same word root than the word soil. So soil is humus, and humanity and humility all share the same in European word root. So it’s essentially the same. And so just as the soil requires cultivation and attention and intention, I think the social soil also requires that. And that’s why these holding spaces, how we pay attention to our, not only the results, what’s above the ground, but to the quality of connection is so critical these days.
So I would say the most important condition for how we improve the quality of the soil is our capacity to how we attend, how we become aware, how we slow down, how we allow the deeper layers of our own intentionality of our own calling. If you want to come to the surface and guide our actions forward. I think that’s what so many people are looking for these days. And yet the way we organize our everyday reality is the complete absence of that. So we have the downloading, we have kind of all the… But I think the awareness that we really want to connect with one another in very different spaces, but we don’t know exactly how to hold these spaces. That awareness is quite developed. And I think that is wonderful news and why I am… I don’t like to be optimistic. Optimism is [inaudible 01:29:55]. No, but I’m hopeful.
So I like that word better. So I’m hopeful. And the reason why I’m hopeful and why I really believe in our agency is that the human spirit, what is always in all these linear predictions of everything that’s going to hell is not accounted for is the awakening of the human spirit. And when you look at how transformation works in human history, the awakening can happen in the moment. It’s not kind of one drip at a time over 50 years. So our story as humans is we first, we screw up everything pretty thoroughly. We can put a check on that part and then we realize when we are lucky what we did and that we need to look into the mirror. We see and sense ourselves. And from that slowing down of the attention from really connecting with not only what is, but what is wanting to emerge in this moment, we begin to operate very differently.
And this is a process we see in so many examples right now. It’s not okay. I need to go to Latin America for that. I only gave that example because it happens there, what anyway happens in many places in a variety of more distributed forms. There is where it comes together and where really in a quite natural way is beginning to form a larger shared holding space. And we are now beginning to initiate similar developments over the next few months kind of Asia Pacific, in Africa and beginning also in other places.
So I think this is just kind of one of many examples underway right now. But there’s a lot that’s happening. But usually the primary narrative is the other one as we discussed before. And that’s why it’s worth placing our attention onto that phenomenon because that’s how we create the future. We grow in the direction of the question we ask, right? Probably many know this line. We can also say we grow in the direction we turn our attention, we grow in the direction where we succeed in realigning attention and intention. Not just on a personal level, but also on the level of the social field.
TS: Otto, what a terrific conversation. What a terrific opportunity this has been for me to connect with you and for the Insights at the Edge listeners to connect with you. Thank you so much for all the work you’re doing. If people want to get a hold of you and learn more about the Presencing Institute, what’s the best way?
OS: Well, if you type in you-school.org or Presencing kind of, you end up at the U School website. There’s lots of great resources there. You can also just type in OttoScharmer.com. It’s just my name, OttoScharmer.com. That’s my homepage there. That’s where I have a bunch of blogs and little pieces. And then I think if you think about a book, the one that may be usable and readable that I would recommend is Essentials of the one that has been published. But largely what we talked about is really also the evolution of Theory U into really an evolved concept of awareness-based systems change. And that’s kind of the new book is really… So the working title is Presencing: Seven Practices for Transforming the Social Field. And that will come out in March 2025, so in a few months.
TS: And for those of you who are interested, check out innerMBA.com. Otto’s part of our guest faculty. Our next cohort starts in September. We run the nine month online immersion once each year. Otto, thank you so much.
Otto Scharmer: Thank you, Tami.
TS: Thank you. Thank you. Big heart embrace. Thank you so much.
OS: Thank you so very much. Very nice connecting to you. Look forward to reconnecting otherwise soon.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
