About the Authors
Peter Senge is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the founding chair of SoL, the Society for Organizational Learning, a global network of learning communities addressing profound institutional change. A renowned pioneer in and writer about management innovation, Peter is the author of the widely acclaimed The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Doubleday/Currency 1990).
C. Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at MIT and a founding co-director of ELIAS, a joint leadership development initiative of the UN Global Compact, SoL, and leading global companies. ELIAS uses the U process to help executives create profound systems innovations for a more sustainable world. He is the author of Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges. More information about Scharmer and his work can be found at: www.ottoscharmer.com
Joseph Jaworski is the chairman of Generon Consulting and cofounder of the Global Leadership Initiative, founder of The American Leadership Forum, and author of the critically acclaimed Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (Berret Koehler, 1996).
Betty Sue Flowers was a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and an international business consultant prior to her current role as the director of the Johnson Presidential Library and Museum.
Peter Senge is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Founding Chair of SoL, the Society for Organizational Learning. He is the author of the widely acclaimed book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), which has sold a million copies worldwide and was identified as one of the seminal management books of the last seventy-five years by Harvard Business Review in 1997. He is coauthor of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (1994), with colleagues Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith, and Art Kleiner; a second fieldbook on sustaining change, The Dance of Change (1999), with George Roth as an additional coauthor; and the award-winning Schools That Learn (2000), coauthored with Nelda Cambron-McCabe, Timothy Lucas, Bryan Smith, Janis Dutton, and Art Kleiner.
Peter is widely known as one of the most innovative thinkers about management and leadership in the world, translating the abstract ideas of systems theory into tools for better understanding economic and organizational change. His work today focuses on fostering collaboration among diverse business, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations in order to address long-term systemic change that is beyond the reach of individual organizations.
He received a B.S. in engineering from Stanford University, a M.S. in social systems modeling, and a Ph.D. in management from MIT. He lives with his wife and children in central Massachusetts.
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Dr. C. Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and the founding chair of ELIAS (Emerging Leaders for Innovation Across Sectors), an initiative focused on developing profound system innovations for a more sustainable world. ELIAS links twenty leading global institutions across the three sectors of business, government, and civil society. He also is a visiting professor at the Center for Innovation and Knowledge Research, Helsinki School of Economics, and the founding chair of the Presencing Institute, a research initiative on developing and advancing social technologies for leading innovation and change. Scharmer has consulted with global companies, international institutions, and cross-sector change initiatives in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He has co-designed and delivered award-winning leadership programs for client organizations including DaimlerChrysler, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Fujitsu.
Scharmer holds a Ph.D. in economics and management from Witten-Herdecke University, Germany. His article “Strategic Leadership within the Triad Growth-Employment-Ecology” won the McKinsey Research Award in 1991. A synthesis of his most recent research has resulted in a theoretical framework and practice called presencing, which he elaborates in Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges, 2007) and in Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society (2005), co-authored with Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. With his colleagues, Scharmer has used presencing to facilitate profound innovation and change processes both within companies and across societal systems. He lives with his wife and their two children in Boston, Massachusetts. More information about Scharmer and his work can be found at: www.ottoscharmer.com.
Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges
In this ground-breaking book, Otto Scharmer invites us to see the world in new ways. Fundamental problems, as Einstein once noted, cannot be solved at the same level of thought that created them. What we pay attention to, and how we pay attention - both individually and collectively - is key to what we create. What often prevents us from "attending" is what Scharmer calls our "blind spot," the inner place from which each of us operates. Learning to become aware of our blind spot is critical to bringing forth the profound systemic changes so needed in business and society today. Read More...
Presence In Action: An Introduction to Theory U
Presence in Action is a DVD featuring C. Otto Scharmer's keynote address prepared for the opening session of SoL's Second Global Forum in September of 2005. Scharmer spoke to the question of how we can be more present to our experience, using the Forum as an immediate opportunity for the participants to experiment with the U process. Read More...
Thought Leader Interview Project: Dialog on Leadership
Many of the interviews that are quoted or referred to in Presence are available at www.dialogonleadership.org/. The site includes interviews with dozens of thought leaders (free pdf downloads) and a set of papers documenting an ongoing inquiry into leadership and social change.
Otto Scharmer speaks about Presence
Otto Scharmer, MIT professor, organizational consultant, and co-author of Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future , believes we must shape our future by responding to it now. In this Voices From the Edge presentation recorded in Boston, Scharmer discusses the power of presencing, his developmental model he calls the "U-Theory," and his vision for consciously evolving ourselves and our global society.
The talk is in four parts:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Blind Spot of Leadership
Part 3: Three Global Shifts
Part 4: Seven Propositions for Emergence
View a free 5-minute clip of the presentation here: (files are in quicktime format)
Watch the excerpt now
Watch the excerpt now (Higer Resolution)
Listen to the audio only
You can find audios and videos of Otto Scharmer speaking about Presence and Presencing on What Is Enlightenment? magazine's online multimedia service, WIE Unbound.
Joseph Jaworski is the Chairman of Generon Consulting and cofounder of the Global Leadership Initiative. Joseph has devoted much of his life to exploring the deeper dimensions of transformational leadership. He began his professional career as an attorney, specializing in domestic and international litigation at Bracewell & Patterson, a large Houston-based law firm where for fifteen years he was a senior partner and member of the executive committee. In 1975 he was elected as a fellow of the American College of Trial. In addition, he ran a successful horse-breeding operation (Circle J Enterprises), and helped found several organizations, including a life insurance company and a refining company.
In 1980, Joseph founded the American Leadership Forum, a non-governmental organization responsible for developing collaborative leadership. Ten years later, he was invited to join the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of companies in London, to lead Shell's renowned team of scenario planners. Thereafter he returned to the U.S. as a senior fellow and a member of the Board of Governors of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, and was a founding member of the Society for Organizational Learning.
Joseph is the author of the critically-acclaimed book Synchronicity (Berrett-Koehler, 1996), an explication of generative leadership based upon his lifelong work and experience. He and his family divide their time between Boston's north shore and rural Vermont.
Betty Sue Flowers is the Director of the Johnson Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, a position she was appointed to in 2002. Prior to that, she was the Kelleher Professor of English and member of the Distinguished Teachers Academy at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a Senior Research Fellow of the IC2 Institute, an Honorary Fellow of British Studies, a recipient of the Pro Bene Meritis Award, and a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Texas. She is also a poet, editor, and business consultant, with publications ranging from poetry therapy to the economic myth, including two books of poetry and four television tie-in books in collaboration with Bill Moyers, among them, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. She hosted “Conversations with Betty Sue Flowers” on the Austin PBS-affiliate and has served as a moderator for executive seminars at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, consultant for NASA, member of the Envisioning Network for General Motors, Visiting Advisor to the Secretary of the Navy, and editor of Global Scenarios for Shell International in London and the World Business Council in Geneva (on global sustainable development and, most recently, on the future of biotechnology).
Betty Sue received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Texas and her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of London. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and son.
About the Organizations
SoL, the Society for Organizational Learning, is a nonprofit global membership organization that connects researchers, organizations, and consultants in more than thirty communities of practice. Founded in 1997, SoL's purpose is to create and implement knowledge for fundamental innovation and change. By providing a variety of forums, projects, capacity building opportunities, and virtual infrastructures, SoL enables individuals and institutions to expand their capacity for inspired performance, creating results together that they could not create alone.
SoL publishes an e-journal, Reflections, ten times per year, that is available by subscription or as a benefit of membership. A portion of the net proceeds from SoL publishing sales are reinvested in basic research, leading-edge applied learning projects, and building a global network of learning communities.
More information about SoL's organizing principles, membership, professional development opportunities, events, resources, and publications can be found at www.solonline.org.
The Global Leadership Initiative (GLI) is a nonprofit that creates living examples of successful innovation by applying the U theory of social change to vital global challenges. Founded in 2002, GLI is launching ten international Leadership Labs—focused on critical issues like AIDS, water, malnutrition, sustainable food production, and climate change—over the next five years.
The organizers of GLI—from Generon Consulting, SoL, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—bring extensive experience in dialogue-and-action projects, scenario planning, leadership development, and action research. By simultaneously engaging leaders from corporations, government, and civil society, GLI is dedicated to building leadership capacity while producing concrete results.
For more information on programs, projects, and research see www.globalleadershipinitiative.org.