We live in an era of intense conflict and massive institutional
failures, a time of endings and of beginnings. It is a time that feels as if
something profound is shifting and dying while something else, as Vaclav Havel
put it, wants to be born: ŇI think there are good reasons for suggesting that
the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through
a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and
something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling,
decaying, and exhausting itself— while something else, still indistinct,
were rising from the rubble.Ó[i]
The crisis of our time isnŐt just a crisis of a single leader, organization, country, or conflict. The crisis of our time is about the dying of an old social structure, an old way of institutionalizing and enacting collective social forms.
When talking with frontline practitioners—managers, teachers, nurses, physicians, laborers, mayors, entrepreneurs, farmers, and business and government leaders—I feel that they share a sense of the current reality: the heat of an ever-increasing workload and pressure to do even more. Many describe this as running on a treadmill or spinning in a hamster wheel.
Recently I participated in a leadership workshop with one hundred leaders of a well known U.S. Fortune 500 company. The speaker before me had a great opening. He reminded us that only 20 years ago we were having serious discussions about what we should do with all of the extra free time that we would soon gain through the use of new communication technologies. Laughter erupted around the room. Painful laughter— for the reality that has come to pass is very different.
As we perceive our pressures to rise and our freedoms to be diminished, our concerns about the unintended side effects and consequences multiply. We all recognize the growing dark side of our current way of operatingÉ
Across the board we collectively create outcomes (and side effects) that nobody wants. But the key decision-makers do not feel capable of redirecting this course of events in any significant way. They feel just as trapped as the rest of us in what often seems to be a race to the bottom. The same problem affects our massive institutional failure: we havenŐt learned to mold, bend, and transform our centuries-old collective patterns of thinking, and institutionalizing to fit the realities of today.
á The social structures that we see decaying and crumbling—locally, regionally, globally—are built on traditional or industrial ways of thinking and operating that were first quite successful but are now hitting the wallÉ
We all know enough about what isnŐt working today—about the dying of the old social body of collective behavior. We also know that we live on a thin crust of order and stability (as a society or civilization) that could blow up at any time.
But where are the sources of the new? What is rising from
the rubble?
WhatŐs rising from the rubble is a new form of connection among small spheres or networked communities of people. ItŐs a different social field of thinking, conversing, and acting together that starts happening when people begin to connect to their source. When that shift happens, people enter into an experience of ŇpresencingÓ by noticing tangible changes in their social space (a decentering of the spatial experience), social time (a slowing down of the temporal experience to stillness), and the self (a collapsing of the boundaries of the ego, experiencing a different quality or state of self).
A group that has entered this zone of operating once usually finds it easier to do so a second time. It is as if an unseen, but permanent, communal connection or bond has been created. It even stays on when new members are added to the group.
That form of deepened presence in groups provides access to another whole dimension of power and creativity. The outcomes of such a subtle field shift include a heightened level of individual energy and awareness, a greater level of authentic presence, a clearer sense of direction, and usually profound long-term personal and organizational changes and innovations.
Copyright © Otto Scharmer 2006 [Early pre-pub version excerpt
from Introduction of Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges – Printed with author permission, book is now
available and highly recommended by Dr. Michael Picucci]