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Otto Scharmer keynote on Presencing

November 6, 2007 By Being, Leadership

Otto Scharmer’s keynote was yesterday evening and here is our harvest of that…

Otto began by talking about The Blind Spot of Leadership…missing the deeper way we human beings relate to one another in the social field. What is missed here is the deeper dimension that is always there but usually not attended to.

  • Why can’t we see this blind spot, that is the source of all of our doing?

  • What can we do about being blind to this source?

We are blind to this because we focus on results and process, and not the sources of these two things. Organizational development has not yet moved to understanding the spot.

We just watched a short video of Zuben Mehta conducting an orchestra with Placido Domingo. Mehta plays the orchestra as an instrument, Domingo and him are actually engaged in a duet. There is this scene at the end of the piece where the two of them join seamlessly and become a duet. Mehta is playing his instrument and responding directly to Domingo’s timing. To do this, the orchestra has to be completely selfless, submerging its identity into the whole, and the players (Mehta and Domingo have to hold space, for each other and responding to the whole instead of to a disconnected set of objects.

Scharmer is giving a very visceral demonstration of holding space, seeing that we have moved from perceiving objects, to perceiving the whole, to holding space. It’s the move from Downloading to factual analysis to empathy to generative listening.

Sources of learning, learning cycles

One model is learning by reflecting: act, observe, reflect, plan, act. Another model is learning from the future as it emerges, and this is based on feeling, not mind, because mind is only capable of seeing now. Presencing is about connecting to future possibility and connect to the now.

While Otto is talking about the way the Open Mind, Open Heart, Open Will version of the U theory at our table we are having a little back chat about how to move to empathic learning and then on through to acting into and then out of a field. Mark Moir, Tenneson Woolf and I are throwing a pad around with several questions that are flowing as we explore presencing in a field. Here are some of the questions that have emerged since we had a little table conversation on the Mehta/Domingo video:

  • How do we develop courage to stay in the empty space? Trusting in the integrity and reality of the field?

  • How does one (how do we) sustain the position with the source in the face of (unhealthy) systemic forces? And what if we are unhealthy? How do I set aside my interests even if being perceived as being beneficial to the whole?

  • Creating a field of trust, experiencing emergence? We don’t submerge, and don’t disappear – we empathize and create a field. We need each other to be there so we can step into each other’s fields.

  • How would life, relationships, work be different if we committed to the simple even temporary experiment to welcome all life in learning and all learning as life?