> [!summary] Progressive Summary > This book is the origin story of Otto Scharmer's Theory U. It was developed over a year-and-a-half during conversations between 4 friends: Otto Scharmer, Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers. I didn't realise how spiritual the thinking behind Theory U was. They were inspired by complexity, vision quests, David Bohm, Buddhism, Goethean science. The only drawback I found was that their work was mostly with corporations, which I found a bit dissonant. They gave examples from HP, Harley Davidson, an Air France division, etc. # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Introduction > It's common to say that trees come from seeds. But how could a tiny seed create a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the resources needed to grow a tree. These must come from the medium or environment within which the tree grows. But the seed does provide something that is crucial: a place where the whole of the tree starts to form. As resources such as water and nutrients are drawn in, the seed organises the process that generates growth. In a sense, the seed is a gateway through which the future possibility of the living tree emerges. ### Sychronicity: The Field Knowing Itself Christopher Bache refers to "Sacred Mind": > the unbounded awareness within which all individual experience occurs, the living matrix where minds meet and engage. We can experience sacred mind when we participate more consciously in dialogue with an unfolding universe. ### A Reflexive Science of Living Systems Maturana: > Love, allowing the other to be a legitimate other, is the only emotion that expands intelligence. # Quotes - Unlike machines, living systems, such as your body or a tree, create themselves. They are not mere assemblages of their parts but are continually growing and changing along with their elements. Almost two hundred years ago, Goethe, the German writer and scientist, argued that this meant we had to think very differently about wholes and parts - To appreciate the relationship between parts and wholes in living systems, we do not need to study nature at the microscopic level. If you gaze up at the nighttime sky, you see all of the sky visible from where you stand. Yet the pupil of your eye, fully open, is less than a centimeter across. Somehow, light from the whole of the sky must be present in the small space of your eye. And if your pupil were only half as large, or only one quarter as large, this would still be so. Light from the entirety of the nighttime sky is present in every space—no matter how small - When we eventually grasp the wholeness of nature, it can be shocking. In nature, as Bortoft puts it, “The part is a place for the presencing of the whole - Even as conditions in the world change dramatically, most businesses, governments, schools, and other large organizations, driven by fear, continue to take the same kinds of institutional actions that they always have. This does not mean that no learning occurs. But it is a limited type of learning: learning how best to react to circumstances we see ourselves as having had no hand in creating - As long as our thinking is governed by habit—notably by industrial, “machine age” concepts such as control, predictability, standardization, and “faster is better”—we will continue to re-create institutions as they have been, despite their disharmony with the larger world, and the need of all living systems to evolve - In reactive learning, our actions are actually reenacted habits, and we invariably end up reinforcing pre-established mental models. Regardless of the outcome, we end up being “right.” At best, we get better at what we have always done. We remain secure in the cocoon of our own worldview, isolated from the larger world. - Our actions are most likely to revert to what is habitual when we are in a state of fear or anxiety. Collective actions are no different - In short, the basic problem with the new species of global institutions is that they have not yet become aware of themselves as living. Once they do, they can then become a place for the presencing of the whole as it might be, not just as it has been. - Reactive learning is governed by “downloading” habitual ways of thinking, of continuing to see the world within the familiar categories we’re comfortable with. We discount interpretations and options for action that are different from those we know and trust. We act to defend our interests - If awareness never reaches beyond superficial events and current circumstances, actions will be reactions. If, on the other hand, we penetrate more deeply to see the larger wholes that generate “what is” and our own connection to this wholeness, the source and effectiveness of our actions can change dramatically - As W. Brian Arthur, noted economist of the Santa Fe Institute, put it, “Every profound innovation is based on an inward-bound journey, on going to a deeper place where knowing comes to the surface - The key to the deeper levels of learning is that the larger living wholes of which we are an active part are not inherently static. Like all living systems, they both conserve features essential to their existence and seek to evolve - Virtually all indigenous or native cultures have regarded nature or the universe or Mother Earth as the ultimate teacher. At few points in history has the need to rediscover this teacher been greater. - our awareness presents itself to us as immediate and unmistakable. A table. A book. A sentence or word. Yet there is always much more than we “see.” In the table are also a factory and workers, a tree, a forest, water and soil, and rain clouds. Indeed, a book contains all of these as well. And a simple word or sentence that moves us speaks of a lifetime—of schools and teachers, of questions and dreams, of current problems and possibilities. With just the slightest pause, we can begin to appreciate the symphony of activities and experiences, past and present, that come together in each simple moment of awareness - William Isaacs, founder of the Dialogue Project at MIT, says that the first opportunity to shift the quality of conversation in a working group often arises when people are confronted with an opinion with which they disagree and find they must choose whether or not to defend their views - Many people recognize the problem of low trust levels, but trust is not something that can be created by fiat. Efforts to get people to trust one another often produce the opposite effect by drawing attention to the lack of trust that currently exists. - The principle of the container as transformative vessel is present in nature, too. Within the cocoon, just as within the alchemist’s container, something “melts” in order to transform itself into something new. The creation of new life often requires a specialized “container” because established systems are naturally hostile to the “other,” the “outsider,” the “alien - What’s funny about suspension is that when many people do it, nothing much happens,” said Varela. “That’s why most people would say, ‘This introspection thing doesn’t work. I look, and nothing happens.’ Nothing happens at the beginning because the whole point is that after suspension, you have to tolerate that nothing is happening. Staying with it is the key, because suspension then allows for redirection. Suspension leads to seeing emerging events, contents, patterns, whatever. Then, you can actually redirect your attention to them. That’s where the new is.” - Redirecting attention “toward the source” encompasses empathy but goes further. Dissolving the boundaries between seer and seen leads not only to a deep sense of connection but also to a heightened sense of change. What first appeared as fixed or even rigid begins to appear more dynamic because we’re sensing the reality as it is being created, and we sense our part in creating it. This shift is challenging to explain in the abstract but real and powerful when it occurs. - We all internalize the cultures of which we are a part. If that were not so, they would not exist, because cultures exist only as we bring them into being moment by moment - Edgar Schein, one of the most respected scholars of organizational culture, says, “If you want to understand an organization’s culture, go to a meeting.” Who speaks and who does not, who is listened to and who is not, which issues are addressed directly and which are ignored or addressed by innuendo are powerful clues to how an organization actually functions. These clues become still more “real” when we also pay attention to our own reactions. Schein believes that we can always learn much more about organizational culture through careful observation and reflective participation than from reading mission or value statements. - Like the inner work required for learning to suspend, building the capacity for redirecting attention to seeing from the whole is deeply connected to spiritual practices. In particular, many meditation practices have the common aim of developing the capacity to quiet the mind and to move beyond rigid subject-object separation. - By reinforcing the separation of people from their problems, problem solving often functions as a way of maintaining the status quo rather than enabling fundamental change. The problem-solving mind-set can be adequate for technical problems. But it can be woefully inadequate for complex human systems, where problems often arise from unquestioned assumptions and deeply habitual ways of acting - “Guatemala has the highest percentage of indigenous people in the Americas. The sacred book of the Mayans is called the Popol Vuh, and there’s a line in it that says, ‘We did not put our ideas together. We put our purposes together. And we agreed. Then we decided.’ - “In that special silence, you can hear, or see, or get a sense of something that wants to happen that you wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise.” - we all must spend our lives learning to ‘hear the silence.’ The Indian teacher Krishnamurti said that this is why real communication is so rare: ‘Real communication can take place only where there is silence.’ - There was silence for a moment—not the absence of words but the presence of understanding. - There were tears in Otto’s eyes as he finished his story. “You can see that even after all these years, this moves me still—that little scene of my grandfather walking by, ignoring the ruins of his home, and focusing all his remaining life energy on shifting my father’s attention from reacting to the past to opening up to what might emerge from the future. “It also evoked a question in me that still remains: What does it take to connect to that other stream of time, the one that gently pulls me toward my future possibility? It was that question that eventually prompted me to leave Germany to do my postdoctoral research at MIT several years ago and that later drew me to working with Joseph.” - But the U theory suggests a different stance of “cocreation” between the individual or collective and the larger world. The self and the world are inescapably interconnected. The self doesn’t react to a reality outside, nor does it create something new in isolation—rather, like the seed of a tree, it becomes the gateway for the coming into being of a new world. Ultimately, it becomes impossible to say, “I’m doing this” or “We’re doing this” because the experience is one of unbroken awareness and action. This sensibility was beautifully expressed more than two thousand years ago in the Bhagavad Gita: “All actions are wrought by the qualities of nature only. The self, deluded by egoism, thinketh: ‘I am the doer.’” - It may just be that part of the process of moving through the bottom of the U is becoming aware of the incredible beauty of life itself, of becoming reenchanted with the world. - “Moving down the U does not guarantee that you will move up. Some groups hit a real wall and aren’t able to quit looking outside themselves, at their ‘external’ world. They must begin to see, as Joseph says, from the point of view of the higher self and a larger intention, which is always conscious of who you are, and what your work is.” “And when you do that, when you discover what you’re here for, the forces of nature also operate in your service,” said Joseph. “Then, as you move back up the U, all sorts of things start to happen that aid in the realization of your aims, things you had no right to expect. Somehow, when you’re acting from this place, you’re not alone—and I think this is just as true for a collective as for an individual.” - “When you see what you’re here for, the world begins to mirror your purpose in a magical way. It’s almost as if you suddenly find yourself on a stage in a play that was written expressly for you.” - The transformation of will that arises from presencing was beautifully articulated by George Bernard Shaw: “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose you consider a mighty one, the being a force of nature, rather than a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”