(From ego-system to eco-system awareness)
This inner shift, from fighting the old to sensing and presencing an emerging future possibility, is at the core of all deep leadership work today. It’s a shift that requires us to expand our thinking from the head to the heart. It is a shift from an ego-system awareness that cares about the well-being of oneself to an eco-system awareness that cares about the well-being of all, including oneself. When operating with ego-system awareness, we are driven by the concerns and intentions of our small ego self. When operating with eco-system awareness, we are driven by the concerns and intentions of our emerging or essential self—that is, by a concern that is informed by the well-being of the whole.
The book addresses what we believe to be a blind spot in global discourse today: how to respond to the current waves of disruptive change from a deep place that connects us to the emerging future rather than by reacting against the patterns of the past, which usually means perpetuating them.
requires us to suspend our judgments, redirect our attention, let go of the past, lean into the future that wants to emerge through us, and let it come.
The ability to shift from reacting against the past to leaning into and presencing an emerging future is probably the single most important leadership capacity today.
(Three divides underlying the current crisis)
Symptoms: Landscape of Pathologies Like the tip of an iceberg—the 10 percent that is visible above the water-line—the symptoms of our current situation are the visible and explicit parts of our current reality. This symptoms level is a whole landscape of issues and pathologies that constitute three “divides”: what we call the ecological divide, the social divide, and the spiritual-cultural divide.
United States, the top 1 percent has a greater collective worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
Exploring the edges of the self means shifting the inner place from which one operates. It means opening the mind, the heart, and the will. It means suspending old habits of judgment. It means empathizing. And it means letting go of what wants to die in oneself and letting come what is waiting to be born.
A new type of awareness-based collective action is emerging from this line of experimentation and work. It doesn’t use the old collectivization model in which the common DNA is imposed from above, the old top-down pyramid that we all know only too well. In this more horizontal model, each individual node is mindful of the well-being of others. It is this shared awareness that allows for fast, flexible, and fluid coordination and decision-making that are far more adaptive and co-creative than any other organizational model currently being used in major societal institutions.
(Form follows consciousness, not function)
The gist of this framework is simple: The quality of results produced by any system depends on the quality of awareness from which people in the system operate. The formula for a successful change process is not “form follows function,” but “form follows consciousness.” The structure of awareness and attention determines the pathway along which a situation unfolds.
The essence of our view concerns the power of attention: We cannot transform the behavior of systems unless we transform the quality of attention that people apply to their actions within those systems, both individually and collectively.
seemed to require something quite different: letting go of the past in order to connect with and
Presencing is a blended word combining sensing (feeling the future possibility) and presence (the state of being in the present moment). It means sensing and actualizing one’s highest future possibility—acting from the presence of what is wanting to emerge.
(The U process: observe, retreat, act)
- Energy follows attention. Wherever you place your attention, that is where the energy of the system will go. “Energy follows attention” means that we need to shift our attention from what we are trying to avoid to what we want to bring into reality. 2. Follow the three movements of the U. We refer to this as the U process because of the “shape” of the journey. In order to get to the deep point of transformation (at the bottom of the U), it is necessary first to go down the U (the left-hand side) by opening our minds, hearts, and wills, and then, after passing through the “eye of the needle” at the bottom, go up the U (the right-hand side) to bring the new into reality (see figure 4). In the words of our colleague, economist Brian Arthur, the three main movements of the U process are: a. Going down the U: Observe, observe, observe. Stop downloading and totally immerse yourself in the places of most potential, in the places that matter most to the situation you are dealing with. b. At the bottom of the U: Retreat and reflect; allow the inner knowing to emerge. Go to the places of stillness where knowing comes to the surface. Here you share and reflect on everything that you have learned from a deep place of listening, asking, “What wants to emerge here?,” “How does that relate to the journey forward?,” and “How can we become part of the story of the future rather than holding on to the story of the past?” c. Going up the U: Act in an instant. Explore the future by doing. Develop a prototype. A prototype explores the future by doing something small, speedy, and spontaneous; it quickly generates feedback from all the key stakeholders and allows you to evolve and iterate your idea. 3. Go to the edges of the self. To apply this process in the context of institutions, we have to power it with a new leadership technology. The core of this technology focuses on tuning three instruments: the open mind, the open heart, and the open will. With an open mind, we can suspend old habits of thought. With an open heart, we can empathize, or see a situation through the eyes of someone else. With an open will, we can let go and let the new come. 4. Pass through the eye of the needle. At the deepest point of each U journey is a threshold. Crossing that threshold, passing through the eye of the needle, can feel like dying and being reborn. According to the Bible, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”21 The phrase “eye of the needle” refers to a gate in ancient Jerusalem: For a man to fit his camel through Jerusalem’s gate, he had to remove all the bags from the camel’s back. Likewise, if we want to go through the eye of the needle at the bottom of the U, we have to let go of everything and offload all the baggage that isn’t essential. Going through that gate means encountering the two root questions of our journey: “Who is my Self?” and “What is my Work?” The capital-S Self is our highest…
Imagine what our world would look like if we could create a vibrant web of spaces where this living link between local and global could be felt and experienced in creative ways. Where, through co-sensing, people could become aware of the larger emerging movement that their projects already were part of, and become inspired by its evolution. Imagine that we could create these places, that each would integrate the seven above elements in their own way and on a massive scale, enabling local-global communities of practice, of learning, and of knowledge creation, resulting in collaborative online field books that would capture and further disseminate what we are learning, and so on.
COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIP CAPACITY BUILDING At PI and MIT, we created and prototyped several high-impact capacity-building environments that embody and blend many of the above-mentioned principles. They include IDEAS China, IDEAS Indonesia, U-Lab (all MIT Sloan), Mel King Community Fellows (MIT CoLab), Global Classroom, the Presencing Foundation Program, and PI’s master class offerings. These programs have graduated several thousand participants globally since the early 2000s.
The inauguration of the Global Well-Being and GNH Lab in January 2013 brought together some of the leading innovators who are pushing us “beyond GDP”—people in governments, civil society, and the business sector from countries as different as Bhutan, Germany, India, the United States, Sri Lanka, China, Brazil, and Scotland. They include the core team of the GNH Centre in Bhutan, a state governor and First Lady from the United States who seek to increase the social and ecological well-being in their state; key change-makers from Natura (Brazil), Eileen Fisher (United States), BALLE (North America), OECD (Paris), Oxfam UK, and SEWA, the Self Employed Women’s Association in India, which, with its 1.7 million members, builds capacity for entrepreneurship and local economies inspired by Gandhian principles.
(Three strategies for shifting to collective action)
This brings us back to the third question: What strategies can help us to function as vehicles for the future that wants to emerge? We know that we need to 1. bend the beam of attention back to its source in order to cultivate generative relationships and advance the movement of institutional inversion as individuals, groups, and organizations; 2. focus on all eight acupuncture points to update the economic and societal logic of operating to 4.0; and 3. shift the global field of entrepreneurship by creating a multiregional network of “hubs” that support the capacity of the next generation of entrepreneurs to build intentional eco-system economies on a scale that meets the challenges of our time (U.school).
As Peter Senge put it at the end of our 2012 forum in Berlin: “Obviously, many have been involved in bringing these remarkable accomplishments to reality, but without the vision and commitment [of this community], these many streams would never have come together to form the river we now all see.” It feels as if we all have come a long way to get to the current place of possibility. The door seems wide open. Now it’s up to us—me and you—to cross the threshold from self to Self, from ego to eco, to make the stream join the river—every day, every moment, ever more intentionally, ever more collectively, and ever more aware.
JOURNALING QUESTIONS What do you see when you turn around? What is the seed of the future or the sprout that you see in your field? Here are twelve questions for you to ponder in your personal reflection. Take a journal and a quiet moment to write for a minute or so on each of them: 1. What do you feel is wanting to transform within yourself? 2. What do you want to bring into being? 3. What do you need to let go of? 4. While reading this book, what has been your most important insight? 5. While reading this book, what has been your most important insight about yourself? 6. While reading this book, what has touched you and why? 7. While reading this book, what precious seed of the future (intention) did you become aware of? 8. How can you pull people together from across different systems in order to do something inspiring, fun, and meaningful—your version of a GNH or Society 4.0 Lab? 9. Who is your coaching circle—your circle of five or seven? 10. What practices (moments of stillness) do you use to connect to Source? 11. How do you balance beauty and truth in your life and work? 12. What are your most important next steps? Your action items for the next three days? CIRCLE CONVERSATION With other people in your circle, reflect on these points: 1. Each shares where you feel the crack (opening) to a field of the future. 2. Each shares an observation on your own opening over the past few weeks (open mind, heart, or will). 3. Share your observations on a conversational shift in your group that you may have noticed. 4. Share how all these observations relate to the institutional inversion around you. 5. What initiative, if taken on jointly, could help to shift the field of your system to 4.0? 6. Who needs to be involved to make it work? 7. Dialogue on and determine your next steps. 8. Use the www.presencing.com website as a resource to get tools, share stories, and link up with a global community of other circles that are “joining the river.” Let’s meet at one of the upcoming forum events that will allow us to connect online or in person.