Leading from the Source

In this chapter, the authors ask how a leader should connect to his or her source, and how to couple this connection to acts of taking leadership. Connecting to one’s source of leadership means taking a stand on a defined set of questions. It involves process and content and may be understood as an on-going process of individuation, self-reflection, and development – a leader’s attempt to create, and recreate, his- or her-self. This is the self that regulates the interior condition of the intervener, on which the success of the intervention depends. In addition, if leaders and change agents want to develop they must train their will. The will is the innermost essence of people’s selves; therefore, the discovery of the will means the discovery of people’s true beings, which is the key to leading from the source.

Traveling the U

Otto Scharmer’s Theory U is not difficult to grasp conceptually. Not so easy to enable is the effective capacity to activate the U’s enormous potential to shift individuals and organizations from a mindset entrenched in a business-as-usual paradigm to one of creativity, disruptive innovation, and sustainable repositioning. Does a systematic process exist that may facilitate the suspension of Scharmer’s notions of judgment, cynicism, and fear so that organizations may free up a more effective range of human faculties in order to solve problems and drive change? The authors propose that such a process is indeed available and can be found in contemplative practices of purposeful meditation. In this chapter, they offer a series of meditations designed to work at each level of the U. This begins with a contemplative practice intended to help suspend habitual patterns of thinking or “downloading,” the first stage in the U, followed by meditations focusing and integrating the heart and will. This initial phase of the process expands the individual’s capacity to truly “let go” old ways of thinking and to make possible the co-creative state of “presencing.” This stage, the downswing of the U, is followed by a collective meditation designed to facilitate the “letting come” or upswing of the U, which translates into the creative, collaborative crystallization of new ideas, leading to prototyping and mainstreaming of innovations.

Accessing the Blind Spot

The complexity of our current social, environmental, and economic realities requires conceptual frameworks that help us chart transformative pathways of collective action. Otto Scharmer’s Theory U is one such framework, offering a profound synthesis of relevant theories and practices related to systems thinking, organizational learning, and leadership. Theory U is also a rich, multi-layered framework that is challenging to apply in action due to its conceptual complexity and because of the demands it makes of both facilitators and participants. As a means of facilitating the skillful use of this theory and its practices, the authors find it helpful to examine and explore Theory U through the lens of a distinct, yet related framework: Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry (Torbert, 2003, 2004). CDAI is a methodology based on action science that integrates adult development theory, first, second, and third person inquiry, and transforming action.

Presencing Our Absencing

This chapter raises awareness of the persistent need in the majority of group participants to avoid publicly exposing in their conversations the vulnerability generated by their profound human need for each other’s acceptance and approval. A willingness to risk this exposure is required for successfully creating the open interpersonal field critical to the effectiveness of Scharmer’s Theory U methodology. Scharmer recognizes this resistance in his description of the “Voices of Judgment, Cynicism, and Fear,” and in participants’ avoidance of exposing their vulnerability to each other. However, he does not offer an adequate methodological remedy. In this chapter, the group participants’ egos are identified as the source of all forms of avoidance of the interpersonal risks required if conversations are to be open, creative, and transformative. A collective method is presented which a group can use to diminish the negative impact of their egos on their conversations, increase interpersonal safety, and strengthen the group’s capacity to sustain “presencing conversations.” This method, called “Presencing Our Absencing” follows the format of Scharmer’s U model for group conversations.

Theory U

The recent Carnegie report (Colby, et al., 2011) characterizes the goal of business education as the development of practical wisdom. In this chapter, the authors reframe Scharmer’s Theory U as an attempt to develop practical wisdom by applying certain European philosophical concepts. Specifically, they trace a genealogy of social sculpture, Schwungspiel, poetic creation, and spiritual science, and suggest that Scharmer’s work integrates these concepts into a pragmatic pedagogy that has implications for business practice as well as business education.

Theory U Applied in Transformative Development

In this chapter, the authors demonstrate how Theory U can be integrated into a long-term transformative learning context that involves both individual and collective processes of development and growth. They begin by examining the theoretical underpinnings of Theory U and how they relate to and inform other theories and practices. They then go on to share more specific practical knowledge of how this model informs Pacific Integral and its Generating Transformative Change (GTC) program in each of these three areas. Finally, the authors explore some of the research that has resulted from the use of Theory U.

Promoting Presence in Professional Practice

This contribution focuses on the connection between Scharmer's Theory U and individual coaching. How can Theory U be used in coaching for supporting transformational learning in coachees? First, the authors present an approach called Core Reflection. In this approach, Theory U is linked to specific levels of reflection and awareness, described by the so-called “onion model.” Through the use of Core Reflection, the personal and professional aspects of both inner processes and performance become connected. Two research studies on the use of coaching based on Core Reflection with teachers show its strong impact on practitioners, clarifying how it can promote deep learning and strengths-based performance, even in situations experienced by the coachee as problematic. The authors conclude that the Core Reflection approach is a practical and effective method for helping people move through Scharmer’s U model and for transformational learning. The research also sheds light on an overlooked area within Theory U: The illumination of people’s core qualities.

Theory U and Emergent Innovation

One of the big challenges in the field of innovation is to create something radically new and at the same time something that has been “waited for,” although nobody has explicitly known or seen it, something that—despite its newness—appears just in the right time at the right place (“kairos”) and organically fits in the existing environment (be it a market, an organization, a culture, or society). This chapter introduces an alternative approach to innovation and presents both its theoretical foundation and a concrete well-proven innovation process: Emergent Innovation. Besides other concepts from the fields of innovation, cognitive science, and epistemology, this approach is based on C. O. Scharmer’s Theory U. It is shown that a new kind of “cognition and epistemology of potentiality” is necessary in order to accomplish such processes as “learning from the future” and “listening to the future as it emerges.” It involves a whole new set of cognitive abilities, attitudes, and epistemological virtues, such as radical openness, deep observation, and understanding skills, reframing, etc. The second part of this chapter presents the Emergent Innovation approach that applies these theoretical concepts in a concrete process design. It is a socio-epistemological innovation technology bringing forth profoundly new knowledge and innovations having the qualities explicated above. The practical concepts, the implications, as well as the learnings for Theory U are discussed.