> Leading from the future as it emerges

Synchronizität: Kurz nach meinem letzten Eintrag (19. März 2008) zum Thema “Ent-scheiden" aus verschiedenen Bewusstseinsebenen, bin ich auf eine sehr schöne Beschreibung schöpferischen Handelns aus der gegenwärtigen Verbundenheit mit dem Feld der emergierenden Zukunft gestossen. Dies im neuen Buch „Theory U“ des am MIT in Boston wirkenden deutschen Organisationsentwicklers Otto C. Scharmer: eine inspirierende Anleitung zur Kreativität aus dem schöpferischen Urgrund - zum Wohle des Ganzen, praktische Spiritualität ohne jeden Weihrauch.
(Theory U. Leading from the Future as it Emerges. Cambridge, Mass., USA, 2007)

To deal with the enormous institutional challenges of our time, organizations and larger Systems need to embrace and activate a superior governance mechanism: seeing and operating from presencing the emerging whole.

• Think of a master educator who looks at her Student, who is at one with her and the presence of her highest future potential, and then acts very quickly in ways that help the Student to progress on her journey of realizing that Potential.
• Or think of a farmer who takes a walk in his field on Sunday and who uses that as a mechanism to establish a direct connection to the living presence of his fields and then tries to tune into what that living ecosystem wants him to do next.
• Think of a physician who takes into account not only the technical-scientific aspects of her patient-physician relationships, but also the deeper mental, social, and spiritual layers of those relationships, connecting to the authentic presence of each patient’s self, and then starts to act from that, trying to be in service of that authentic self.
• Think of leaders who, like Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, have operated by connecting with a much larger collective field and who through their actions began operating from the presence of that collective field, serving as a vehicle for the best future possibility of that field to come into being.
• All of these examples are performed by individuals. But the fundamental challenge of our time is to learn to do exactly the same thing: operate from the presence of the evolving whole - collectively, not just individually. Almost all of the major challenges of our time require us to operate this way. Yet we haven’t yet learned how to do it.