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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.
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.
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.
AI Summary
Leading From the Emerging Future by Otto Scharmer et Katrin Kaufer presents key insights from the contemplative tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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