VOLUME 5, NUMBER 7

Reflections
The SoL Journal

on Knowledge, Learning, and Change
FEATURE ARTICLE

Awakening Faith inan Alternative FuturePeter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer,
Joseph Jaworski, and Betty
Sue Flowers

Commentary
Darcy Winslow

Commentary

Elena Diez Pinto

Commentary
Robert Fritz

Published by The Society for Organizational Learning

ISSN 1524-1734

4reflections.solonline.org

FEATURE

Awakening Faithin an Alternative Future

A Consideration of Presence:
Human Purpose and the Field of the FutureWith so many social systems – families, compa-

the Field of the Future – have concluded that innies, governments, communities and societies – inorder to “create the world anew” we will be called

disarray, it often seems that the future does not

to participate in changes that are both “deeply per-look promising. The scenarios we imagine mostsonal and inherently systemic.” Given SoL’s mis-easily reveal our worst fears rather than the legacy

sion to support the interdependent development of

to which we aspire. What can we do? Based on

individuals and their institutions, we are delighted

extensive research, first-hand experience, and ato share highlights of the authors’ exploration into

multi-year dialogue, Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer,

the essence of generative learning. The article that

Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers – authors

follows is based on the introductory chapters ofof the new book Presence: Human Purpose andtheir book.1

Peter M. Senge

Joseph Jaworski

C. Otto Scharmer— Sherry Immediato, Publisher

Betty Sue FlowersAlthough the four of us came from quite different backgrounds, we did share one thingin common: we had all experienced extraordinary moments of collective presence orawakening, and seen the consequent shifts of large social systems.
One of those moments occurred in South Africa in 1990. Peter was in the hill country
north of Johannesburg, coleading a three-day leadership workshop that had been offered for
15 years, but never in South Africa. His colleagues included a black South African and awhite South African who were being trained to lead the program on their own in the future.
There were 30 people attending; half were white business executives and half, black community organizers. Many took personal risks to participate in the program.
On the last day of the program, the group heard that President F. W. de Klerk was goingto give a speech, so they took a break and gathered in front of a television set to watch. This

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Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers � Awakening Faith in an Alternative Future 1© 2004, Society for Organizational Learning. All Rights Reserved.

By Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer,
Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers

turned out to be the famous speech that set into motion the ending of apartheid. In the
middle, de Klerk began to list all the previously banned black organizations that were now
being “unbanned.” Anne Loetsebe, one of the community leaders, was listening with rapt
attention. Her face lit up as de Klerk read the name of each organization: the African
National Congress (ANC), the Pan Africanist Conference, and so on. Afterwards, she said
that as each organization was mentioned, she saw in her mind’s eye the faces of different
relatives who would now be coming home.
After the speech the group reconvened and completed the program as usual. Later thatafternoon, they watched, as was the custom in the program, a video of Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. This had been banned in South Africa and many of the participants had never seen it before. Finally, the program closed with a “check-out” that gave
each person a chance to say whatever he or she wanted. The first four people made lovely
comments about how meaningful it had been for them to be there and what they had learned
about themselves and about leadership. The fifth person to speak was a tall Afrikaans business executive. This man, like many of his business colleagues, had been reserved and shown
little emotion during the program. He now stood and turned to look directly at Anne. “I want
you to know that I was raised to think that you were an animal,” he said. And then he began
to cry. Anne just held him in her gaze and nodded.
“As I watched this,” says Peter, “I ‘saw’ a huge knot become untied. I don’t know how to
describe it except to say it was as if a rope simply became untied and broke apart. I knew
intuitively that what had been holding him and so many others prisoners of the past was
breaking. They were becoming free. Even though Nelson Mandela was still in the Robben
Island prison and free elections were still four years in the future, I never had any doubt fromthat moment that significant and lasting change would occur in South Africa.”
The four of us shared a common desire to understand better how such moments and theunderlying forces for change they signal come about. We felt that what we had written in thepast, at best, described the words but left the music largely in the background. Contemporary
theories of change seemed, paradoxically, neither narrow enough nor broad enough. Thechanges in which we will be called upon to participate in the future will be both deeply personal and inherently systemic. The deeper dimensions of transformational change represent
a largely unexplored territory both in current management research and in our understandingof leadership in general. As Otto puts it, “This blind spot concerns not the what and how –not what leaders do and how they do it – but the who: who we are and the inner place orsource from which we operate, both individually and collectively.”

Of Parts and Wholes
Presence offers a theory of profound change that is both radical and simple, based first onunderstanding the nature of wholes, and how parts and wholes are interrelated. Our normal
way of thinking cheats us. It leads us to think of wholes as made up of many parts, the way
a car is made up of wheels, a chassis, and a drive train. In this way of thinking, the wholeis assembled from the parts and depends upon them to work effectively. If a part is broken,
it must be repaired or replaced. This is a very logical way of thinking about machines. But
living systems are different.
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

2 Awakening Faith in an Alternative Future � Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers

Reflections � Volume 5, Number 7their elements. Almost 200 years ago, Goethe, theGerman writer and scientist, argued that this meant we
had to think very differently about wholes and parts.
For Goethe, the whole was something dynamic andliving that continually comes into being “in concrete
manifestations.”2 A part, in turn, was a manifestation of
the whole, rather than just a component of it. Neither
exists without the other. The whole exists through continually manifesting in the parts, and the parts exist as
embodiments of the whole. The inventor Buckminster
Fuller was fond of holding up his hand and asking people, “What is this?” Invariably, they would respond, “It’sa hand.” He would then point out that the cells thatmade up that hand were continually dying and regenerating themselves. What seems tangible is continuallychanging: in fact, a hand is completely re-created within
a year or so. So when we see a hand – or an entire bodyor any living system – as a static “thing,” we are mistaken. “What you see is not a hand,” Fuller would say.
“It’s a ‘pattern integrity,’ the universe’s capability to create hands.”3
For Fuller, this “pattern integrity” was the whole ofwhich each particular hand is a “concrete manifestation.” Biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls the underlying
organizing pattern the formative field of the organism. “In self-organizing systems at alllevels of complexity,” says Sheldrake, “there is a wholeness that depends on a characteristicorganizing field of that system, its morphic field.”4 Moreover, Sheldrake says, the generative
field of a living system extends into its environment and connects the two. For example,
every cell contains identical DNA information for the larger organism, yet cells also differentiate as they mature – into eye, heart, or kidney cells, for example. This happens because
cells develop a kind of social identity according to their immediate context and what isneeded for the health of the larger organism. When a cell’s morphic field deteriorates, its
awareness of the larger whole deteriorates. A cell that loses its social identity reverts to blind,
undifferentiated cell division, which can ultimately threaten the life of the larger organism.
It is what we know as cancer.
To appreciate the relationship between parts and wholes in living systems, we do not needto 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 acentimeter 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, thiswould still be so. Light from the entirety of the nighttime sky is present in every space – nomatter how small. This is exactly the same phenomenon evident in a hologram. The threedimensional image created by interacting laser beams can be cut in half indefinitely, and eachpiece, no matter how small, will still contain the entire image. This reveals what is perhaps
the most mysterious aspect of parts and wholes: as physicist Henri Bortoft says, “Everythingis in everything.”5

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Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers � Awakening Faith in an Alternative Future 3

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.”6 This is the awarenessthat is stolen from us when we accept the “machine” worldview of wholes assembled from
replaceable parts.

The Emergence of Living Institutions
Nowhere is it more important to understand the relation between parts and wholes thanin the evolution of global institutions and the larger systems they collectively create. Ariede Geus, author of The Living Company7 and a pioneer of the organizational learning movement, says that the twentieth century witnessed the emergence ofa new species on earth – that of large institutions, notably, global
corporations. This is a historic development. Prior to the last hunIt’s common to say that trees come fromdred years, there were few examples of globe-spanning institutions.
seeds. But how could a tiny seed create
But today, global institutions are proliferating seemingly without
a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the
resources needed to grow a tree. Thesebound, along with the global infrastructures they create for finance,
must come from the medium or environdistribution and supply, and communication.
ment within which the tree grows. But
This new species’ expansion is affecting life for almost all otherthe seed does provide something that is
species on the planet. Historically, no individual, tribe, or evencrucial: a place where the whole of thenation could alter the global climate, destroy thousands of species,
tree starts to form. As resources suchor shift the chemical balance of the atmosphere. Yet that is exactlyas water and nutrients are drawn in, theseed organizes the process that generwhat is happening today, as our individual actions are mediated andates growth. In a sense, the seed is amagnified through the growing network of global institutions. That
gateway through which the future posnetwork determines what technologies are developed and how theysibility of the living tree emerges.
are applied. It shapes political agendas as national governments
respond to the priorities of global business, international trade, andeconomic development. It is reshaping social realities as it divides the world between those
who benefit from the new global economy and those who do not. And it is propagating a
global culture of instant communication, individualism, and material acquisition that threatens traditional family, religious, and social structures. In short, the emergence of global institutions represents a dramatic shift in the conditions for life on the planet.
It may seem odd to think about titanic forces such as globalization and the information
revolution as arising from the actions of a new species. But it is also empowering. Rather than
attributing the changes sweeping the world to a handful of all-powerful individuals or faceless “systems,” we can view them as the consequences of a life form that, like any life form,
has the potential to grow, learn, and evolve. But until that potential is activated, industrialage institutions will continue to expand blindly, unaware of their part in a larger whole or of
the consequences of their growth, like cells that have lost their social identity and reverted toundifferentiated growth for its own sake.
The species of global institutions reshaping the world includes non-business organizations
as well. Today, for example, it’s possible to enter an urban school in China or India or Brazil
and immediately recognize a way of organizing education that has become completely taken
for granted in the West. Students sit passively in separate classrooms. Everything is coordinated by a predetermined plan, with bells and whistles marking time, and tests and grades tokeep things moving like one giant assembly line. Indeed, it was the assembly line that inspired
the industrial-age school design, with the aim of producing a uniform, standardized product4 Awakening Faith in an Alternative Future � Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers

Reflections � Volume 5, Number 7

as efficiently as possible. Though the need to encourage thoughtful, knowledgeable, compassionate global citizens in the twenty-first century differs profoundly from the need totrain factory workers in the nineteenth century, the industrial-age school continues to expand, largely unaffected by the new realities within which children are growing up in thepresent day.
As Buckminster Fuller pointed out, a living system continually re-creates itself. But how
this occurs in social systems such as global institutions depends on both our individual andcollective level of awareness. For example, each individual school is both a whole unto itself
and a part, a place for the “presencing” of the larger educational system. So, too, is eachindividual member of the school: teachers, administrators, students, and parents. Each of us
carries the memory and expectations of our own experience as schoolchildren. The same
holds true for the way business organizations, and their members, are places for the presencing of the prevailing systems of management. 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 increasing disharmony with the larger world.
In short, the basic problem with the new species of global institutions is that they have notyet become aware of themselves as living. Once they do, they can then become a place forpresencing the whole as it might be, not just as it has been.

New Ways of Thinking About Learning
When any of us acts in a state of fear or anxiety, our actions are likely to revert to what
is most habitual: our most instinctual behaviors dominate, ultimately reducing us to thereflections.solonline.org

Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers � Awakening Faith in an Alternative Future 5

“fight-or-flight” programming of the reptilian brain stem. Collective actions are
no different. Even as conditions in theworld change dramatically, most businesses, governments, schools, and otherlarge organizations continue to take theReenacting"Downloading"same kinds of institutional actions that
habitsmental models
they always have.
This does not mean that no learning
Doing
Thinking
occurs. But it is a limited type of learning:learning how best to react to circumstances we see ourselves as having had no
All learning integrates thinking and doing. In reactive learning,
hand in creating. Reactive learning is
thinking is governed by established mental models and doing isgoverned by “downloading” habitual
governed by established habits of action.
ways of thinking, of continuing to see theworld within the familiar categories
we’re comfortable with. We discountFigure 2: Deeper Learninginterpretations and options for actionthat are different from those we know
Doing
Thinking
and trust. We act to defend our interests.
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. (See Figure 1: Reactive Learning.)
But different types of learning are possible. More than seven years ago, Joseph
and Otto began interviewing leading scientists, and business and social entrepreneurs. The interviews – which now total
Deeper levels of learning create increasing awareness of themore than 150 – often began by asking
larger whole – both as it is and as it is evolving – that leads
each person, “What question lies at theto actions that increasingly serve the emerging whole.
heart of your work?” Together, the twogroups illuminated a type of learning that
could lead to the creation of a world not governed primarily by habit.
All learning integrates thinking and doing. All learning is about how we interact in theworld and the types of capacities that develop from our interactions. What differs is the depthof the awareness and the consequent source of action. 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. (See Figure 2: Deeper Learning.)
Increasing awareness of the whole

Action that increasingly serves the whole

Figure 1: Reactive Learning

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Reflections � Volume 5, Number 7

In talking with pioneering scientists, we found extraordinary insights into our latentcapacity for deeper seeing and the effects such awareness can have on our understanding, oursense of self, and our sense of belonging in the world. In talking with entrepreneurs, wefound extraordinary clarity regarding what it means to act in the service of what is emerging
so that new intuitions and insights create new realities. But we also found that for the mostpart, neither of these groups talks with the other. We came to realize that both groups arereally talking about the same process – the process whereby we learn to “presence” anemerging whole, to become what George Bernard Shaw called “a force of nature.”

The Field of the Future
The key to the deeper levels of learning is the recognition that the larger living wholes of which
we are an active part are not inherently static. Like all living systems, they both conservefeatures essential to their existence and seek to evolve. When we become more aware of the
dynamic whole, we also become more aware of what is emerging and our part in it.
Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, spoke of tapping into the continually unfolding“dynamism” of the universe, and experiencing its evolution as “an active process that . . . I canguide by the choices I make.”8 He felt that this ability had enabled him to reject common wisdom and develop a vaccine that eventually saved millions of lives. Many of the entrepreneurs
we interviewed had successfully created multiple businesses and organizations. Consistently, eachfelt that the entrepreneurial ability was an expression of the capacity to sense an emerging
reality and to act in harmony with it. As one of our interviewees, W. Brian Arthur, a noted
economist of the Santa Fe Institute, told us, “Every profound innovation is based on an
inward-bound journey, on going to a deeper place where knowing comes to the surface.”
This “inward-bound journey” lies at the heart of all creativity, whether in the arts, in business, or in science. Many scientists and inventors, like artists and entrepreneurs, live in aparadoxical state of great confidence and profound humility – knowing that their choices
and actions really matter and feeling guided by forces beyond their making. Their work is to“release the hand from the marble that holds it prisoner,” as Michelangelo put it. While theyknow that their actions are vital to this accomplishment, they also know that the hand“wants to be released.”
Can living institutions learn to tap into a larger field to guide them toward what is healthy
for the whole? What understanding and capacities will this require of us individually andcollectively?

Presence
We’ve come to believe that the core capacity needed to access the field of the future is presence. We first thought of presence as being fully conscious and aware in the present moment.
Then we began to appreciate presence as deep listening, of being open beyond one’s preconceptions and historical ways of making sense. We came to see the importance of letting go ofold identities and the need to control and, as Salk said, making choices to serve the evolutionof life. Ultimately, we came to see all these aspects of presence as leading to a state of “letting
come,” of consciously participating in a larger field for change. When this happens, the field
shifts, and the forces shaping a situation can shift from re-creating the past to manifesting or
realizing an emerging future.

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Through our interviews, we’ve discovered similarities to shifts in awarenessthat have been recognized in spiritual
traditions around the world for thousands of years. For example, in esoteric
Christian traditions such shifts are associated with “grace” or “revelation” or“the Holy Spirit.” Taoist theory speaksof the transformation of vital energy(qing, pronounced “ching”) into subtle
life force (qi, pronounced “chi”), andinto spiritual energy (shin). This process
involves an essential quieting of the mind
that Buddhists call “cessation,” wherein
the normal flow of thoughts ceases andthe normal boundaries between self andworld dissolve. In Hindu traditions, thisshift is called wholeness or oneness. In
the mystic traditions of Islam, such as
Sufism, it is known simply as “opening
the heart.” Each tradition describes thisshift a little differently, but all recognize
it as being central to personal cultivationor maturation.
Despite its importance, as far as we know there is relatively little written in spiritual or
religious traditions about this shift as a collective phenomenon or about collectively cultivating the capacity for this shift. Yet many of our interviewees had experienced dramaticchanges in working groups and, in some cases, in larger organizations. Some of the theorists
had even developed ways of thinking about this that transcended the dichotomy between
individual and collective.
In the end, we concluded that understanding presence and the possibilities of larger fields
for change can come only from many perspectives – from the emerging science of living
systems, from the creative arts, from profound organizational change experiences – and fromdirect contact with the generative capacities of nature. 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.

It All Starts with Seeing
In a SoL leadership workshop several years ago, Fred, a Jamaican man from the World Bank,
told a remarkable story. A few years earlier he had been diagnosed with a terminal disease.
After consulting a number of doctors, all of whom confirmed the diagnosis, he went throughwhat anyone would in that situation: for weeks he denied what was happening. But gradually, he came to grips with the fact that he was only going to live a few more months.
“Something amazing happened then,” he said. “I simply stopped doing everything thatwasn’t essential. I didn’t do anything that didn’t matter. I started working on projects, with

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Reflections � Volume 5, Number 7

groups of kids, that I’d always wanted to do. I stopped arguing with my mother. When someone cut me off in traffic, I no longer got upset. I just didn’t have time to waste on anything
like that.”
Near the end of this period, he began a wonderful relationship with a woman who thoughtthat he should get more opinions about his condition. He consulted some doctors in the
United States and soon got a phone call telling him, “We have a different diagnosis.” The
doctor told him he had a rare form of a very curable disease.
“When I heard that,” Fred told us, “I cried like a baby, because I was so afraid my life
would be back to the way it used to be.”We’ve learned from years of scenario-planning exercises that imagining alternative futures,
even negative futures, can actually open people up. Used artfully, scenarios can alter people’s
awareness of their present reality and catalyze profound change. In the mid-1980s, five years
before Nelson Mandela was released from jail, citizens in public forums throughout South
Africa confronted “the low road” and “the high road” – two scenarios about the consequences of, respectively, maintaining or stopping the country’s apartheid policies. The key tomaking potentially fearful futures generative is to see that we have choices, and that our
choices matter.
Early on in our work with Presence we received a remarkable article from Surdna
Foundation president, and good friend, Ed Skloot. The piece, “Global Requiem” by religion
scholar Jack Miles, was a speculation about potential cultural impacts if society started torealize that humankind might not overcome the global problems it faces, that we may notdevelop a sustainable society, and that, in fact, the human race might perish (see sidebar,“Global Requiem: The Apocalyptic Moment in Religion, Science, and Art”). Predictions ofenvironmental or social collapse almost inevitably evoke denial, fear, and even paralysis.
Given that their authors’ intent is usually to mobilize action, they can actually be counterproductive. But what if, instead, facing a global requiem scenario led us to “wake up,” as happened for Fred when he faced his mortality? What would happen if such an awakening
occurred and, instead of inducing denial, led us to realize that our future as a species cannot
be taken for granted, that there is a real urgency to our present situation, and that the time
to start living together differently is now?
We believe such an awakening may be occurring around the world. This is based on theinterviews we’ve been doing for more than seven years; on direct experiences we’ve had withprofound change; and on coming to understand better how change occurs in living systems.

The key
to makingpotentiallyfearful futuresgenerative
is to seethat wehave choices,and that
our choices
matter.

One of the most important books in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition is The Awakeningof Faith.9 Written in (or about) 500 AD, it provided a crucial bridge in bringing Buddhist
philosophy and practice from India to China and hence, throughout the Asian cultures. The
faith of which the book speaks is a deep conviction that enlightenment is possible, that
we each carry within ourselves immense possibilities for connecting to the universe andparticipating in its generative process. In more religious terms, you could say the book’s aim
is to show that the infinite or absolute and the phenomenal, God and human, are inseparable,
and that we have the potential to co-create our realities. But to do so we must first transcend
the myth of separation that modern culture has taught us – separation from one another,from our highest selves, and from the generative processes of nature. Awakening our faiththat the future can be different from the past will take nothing less than rediscovering ourplace, and that of our modern societies and institutions, in life’s continual unfolding.

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Global Requiem

The Apocalyptic Moment in Religion, Science and Art
If the first generations that assimilated Charles Darwin’s
thought were concerned with the origin of species, ourown is concerned in an unprecedented way with the extinction of species and, above all, with the threat of extinction that faces the human species. During the 1850s,
while Darwin was concluding The Origin of Species, therate of extinction is believed to have been one every five
years. Today, the rate of extinction is estimated at one
every nine minutes. This raises the question, Will thehuman species be extinguished in its turn? The statistical question, perhaps the statistical likelihood, is complicated, morally, by the probability that human extinction,
if it comes about soon, will prove to have been species
suicide.
“Human reproduction,” veteran foreign correspondent
Malcolm W. Browne wrote in his memoir Muddy Bootsand Red Socks,10 “has some disturbing similarities tocancer…. [Humankind] will most likely destroy its planetary host before dying out itself.” He cites the work ofanthropologist Warren M. Hem, who compared satellite
images showing the growth of Baltimore and the colonization of the Amazon basin side by side with picturesof cancer cells. As Hem put it: “The human species is
a rapacious, predatory, omniecophagic [devouring its
entire environment] species.”
As voices like Browne’s are increasingly heard, the causethat until now has been presented as the defense of theenvironment, as if the environment were an importunate
relative whom long-suffering mankind was being asked
to support, is beginning to be presented as the selfdefense of the human species itself. The environmentis, after all, the human habitat, and time after time,
extinction has followed on loss of habitat when thespecies at risk was not able to adapt in time. Despite
our large numbers, we are an endangered species.
As this paradigm shift takes place in the realms ofpolitics and activist science, another change looms
in the realm of the imagination and, perhaps also,
in the practice of religion. If the earth is failing as a
viable habitat for our species, then we can no longer
imagine our individual deaths, as we have so long
been accustomed to do, against a backdrop of continuing life. As we cease to do so, as we recontextualize our personal deaths in the emerging prospectof species death, can there – should there – be areligious wisdom that will accept species death as
if it were personal death?
Such a prognosis, if it comes, surely will not comeas it does in the disaster movies that are now sostrangely popular; namely, with a warning that unlessa given action is taken within ten days or ten hours,
the world will end. No, it will come rather as an accumulation of ignored warnings from scientists and science journalists and an ensuing consensus that theopportunity to take the action that would have saved
the species has come and gone. At that scientifically
apocalyptic moment, should it be reached, and we cancertainly imagine it being reached, actual extinction
may still be far enough in the future that there will
be time for a new kind of religion and a new kind ofart to develop. These will be, no doubt, a religion andan art born of despair, but religion and art – far morethan politics or commerce or science – are precisely
those products of the human spirit to which we turnin times of despair. The last days of the human race
may be, not to speak at all flippantly, our finest hour.
— Jack Miles

ABOUT THE AUTHORJack Miles is senior advisor to the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust and author of God:A Biography (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1995). This excerpt was adapted and reprinted withpermission from Jack Miles, “Global Requiem: The Apocalyptic Moment in Religion, Science,and Art,” Cross Currents, Fall 2000, Vol. 50, Issue 3.

10 Awakening Faith in an Alternative Future � Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers

Reflections � Volume 5, Number 7

Endnotes
1 Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers, Presence: Human Purpose
and the Field of the Future (Cambridge, MA: SoL, Society for Organizational Learning, 2004).
2 According to physicist and philosopher of science Henri Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s
Way Towards a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1996.
3 Amy Edmondson, A Fuller Explanation, 56-59 (Birkhaeuser, Boston, 1987) and Buckminster Fuller,
Synergetics: the Geometry of Thinking (NY: Macmillan, 1976).
4 See “Conversation with Rupert Sheldrake: Morphic Fields,” interview by C. O. Scharmer (London,
September 23, 1999), www.dialogonleadership.org.
5 See “Conversation with Henri Bortoft: Imagination Becomes an Organ of Perception,” interview by
C. O. Scharmer (London, July 14, 1999), www.dialogonleadership.org.
6 Ibid.
7 Arie de Geus, The Living Company (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1997).
8 The New York Times, June 24, 1993, 1, 9.
9 The Awakening of Faith, attributed to Asvaghosa, translation and commentary by Yoshito S. Hakeda(New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).
10 See Malcolm W. Browne, Muddy Boots and Red Socks: A Reporter’s Life (New York: Times Books,
1993).

To access reader
resources or to order
ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Presence, please visitPeter M. Senge is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, andwww.presence.net.

the founding chair of SoL. A renowned pioneer in management innovation, Peter is theOrder the book direct

author of the widely acclaimed The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learningfrom the site to receive

Organization (Doubleday/Currency 1990).

the complementary

C. Otto Scharmer is a Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Visiting
Professor at the Helsinki School of Economics, co-founder of SoL and the Global Leadership

40-page Presence
Workbook free.

Initiative, and author of the forthcoming book Theory U: Leading From the Emerging Future.
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 criticallyacclaimed Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (Berret Koehler, 1996).
Betty Sue Flowers was a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin andan international business consultant prior to her current role as the director of the Johnson
Presidential Library and Museum.

If you would like to contact the authors about this article or about
their new book Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future,please email them at presence@solonline.org.

reflections.solonline.org

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Commentary
By Darcy Winslow

Darcy Winslow

This article (and even more so the book, Presence)

To be sure, most of what happens in mostis remarkable in at least three ways. First, thecompanies is driven by the financial pressureauthors’ work has extraordinary emotional as well

to reward shareholders. But I see an increasing

as intellectual impact; it continued to affect me

yearning among people and their organizations

long after my initial reading of it. Second, I foundto be part of something greater than them-that the insights I gleaned from the work depended

selves. We tapped that yearning at Nike toon what was happening around me. I suspect

develop new, environmentally friendly womens-

I will take away different messages each time I

wear products. We wanted to inspire people toread it. Third, the authors somehow opened me

think differently about the products they buy or

to unexpected messages and opportunities insell, and ultimately we wanted every productmy own life. Perhaps because they speak so elo-

to advance our goals for environmental, social,quently of the need to sense one’s own connec-

and financial sustainability. However, I soon dis-

tions to the world, my reading of Presence coin-covered how complex the process of develop-

cided with many seemingly chance encounters

ing sustainable products would be. We had tothat in very real and specific ways reinforced

establish a new set of design principles, engage

my connections with others.

our supply chain, and build a network of tech-

One of the book’s themes, suggested in the article,
is the idea of crystallizing intent – disciplining
oneself to retreat and reflect, to listen to themoment. That is something I have done over andover again in my own work. It was essential anical experts (many of whom we found through
SoL and other outside partners). It was anorganic process of learning and building acrosswhole systems – something that the authors
capture vividly in their work.

few years ago when I started thinking about how

From the authors’ thinking, represented incorporations could create a more sustainableboth their article and book, I take with me two

future. I first had to crystallize my own goals,

lessons in particular:

intentions, and actions – for the year, the next
three years, and the rest of my career. That process helped me find new ways to connect withcolleagues, customers, and the larger community.
I then found that there are always people in organizations, often far from the top or entirely beyond
the walls of the enterprise, who are actively engaged in the “right” work – practicing their values,
building connections, and actively pursuing ashared vision.

• Changing demographics are a force forchange. I have found in my own work thatwomen and youth are leading many of thebest efforts to achieve sustainability. Whether
due to an ability to connect, a sensitivity tosocial and natural imbalances, or a mindset
that is less tied to the structures of the past,
women and young people are natural carriers
for the message of long-term, systemicchange. However, to build bridges to theseemerging constituencies we must all be-� Darcy
12
12 Commentary
Awakening Faithin anWinslow
Alternative Future � Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers

Reflections � Volume 5, Number 7

come better listeners and open ourselves

Peter, Otto, Joseph, and Betty Sue call us toto ideas from remote and unexpectedreflect, individually and with one another, aboutsources.

what we share and where our future lies.

• We need to measure what matters. The “softstuff” – values, aspirations, commitment – isthe hardest to measure. But it is what forms

Presence ends with a powerful line: “If we find ourplace, we will find our purpose.” I think that is thereal work for all of us.

a culture and enables change. By contrast,
the metrics that drive most companies –revenue, growth, return on investment – are

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

not very inspiring. I have found that embrac-

Darcy Winslow heads the Global Footwear,

ing people’s deeper purposes and principles

Women’s Performance division for Nike, Inc. andcan drive a lot of decision making in an

is a member of SoL’s Sustainability Consortium.

organization. Within my own division, fordarcy.winslow@nike.com

example, we have four guiding principles.
One of them is “Live and lead in favor of the
future.” We constantly ask ourselves howthat is manifest in our operations, processes,
and products. It is a much better way tomanage: decisions that flow from a clear setof principles are almost always better andmore widely honored than those based on
purely financial metrics.

reflections.solonline.org

Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers � AwakeningDarcy
Faith Winslow
in an Alternative
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Commentary

COMMENTARY

Commentary
By Elena Diez Pinto
In “Awakening Faith in an Alternative Future,” theallowed the people in the room to step backauthors articulate a message that is fundamental

from the abyss and create an alternative future.

to people everywhere: the connectedness of all

We saw what the authors have called “anthings. Their discussion of parts and wholes reso-

emerging future that depended on us.”nates both intellectually and emotionally; it confirms what I have found in my conversations withpeople around the world, and in my own work.
Elena Diez Pinto

Peter, Otto, Joseph, and Betty Sue remind us
that there are powerful processes for translating
our aspirations into reality. They suggest that by

In my seven years of work supporting civic dial-

opening ourselves to the world and to the living

ogue in Latin America, I have come to understandsystems that sustain us, we can create meaning-that social and personal transformations take place

ful and lasting change. This may sound idealis-through a conscious process of connecting people

tic, but it is extremely practical. I have learned

with each other, and with themselves. In Presence,that when I have to make a decision or want tothe book from which this article was drawn, theknow what to do in the future, I need to listen

authors tell the story of Vision Guatemala, a team

to myself. If I listen with my heart and my body,of government officials, human rights activists,

not just my mind – if I am fully present and notbusinesspeople, and military officers that came

distracted from what my senses and intuition

together in 1997 in the wake of a brutal, 30-year

tell me – I gain deeper understanding andcivil war. That group, with which I was involved,

arrive at better, more viable decisions.

sought to develop a shared understanding of thecountry’s present and to create plausible scenarios
for the future.

This way of being in the world is a matterof survival – for individuals, organizations, andsocieties. Listening, thinking together, and trying

In our first dialogue, one of the participants de-to understand the whole comprise the essence

scribed witnessing an exhumation of a mass graveof dialogue and the extraordinary opportunity(one of many hundreds) from a massacre inthat the authors have revealed. They makeRabinal, a Mayan village. The grave included thevisible the connectedness among people, andremains of a mother and her unborn child. Whencall on us to get much better at seeing it.

he finished talking, everyone in the room wassilent and many of us wept. Later, many recalledthat moment as a “large communion”; everyone

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

understood that the tragedy of Rabinal was a

Elena Diez Pinto is the director of the United

manifestation of the whole of our society. We

Nations Development Programme’s Democratic

discovered that day that when we listened to one

Dialogue for Latin America and the Caribbean,

another, putting aside our usual fears and preju-

and a member of Vision Guatemala.

dice, we were able to connect deeply and see theelena.diaz@undp.org

world differently. Our connection with one another� Elena
14
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Commentary
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Commentary
By Robert Fritz
Among the many discoveries within this brilliant

when we are in the habit of comparative

new work by Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph

thinking.

Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers, one, perhaps
not obvious at first, is nonetheless particularly
radical. It is a shift of fundamental orientation.

Robert Fritz

Comparative thinking is most common in oursociety. It is a this-is-like-that act of categorization. We compare our “database” of previous

If we are to move from relating to the world as

experiences, theories, models, concepts, orfragmented parts to systemic wholes, we mustworldviews with what we are observing. There-change our basic way of thinking. Not just what

fore, we bias our perception and create what

we think, but how we think. The change is:

Otto Scharmer calls “blind spots.” When we• from abstract and symbolic conception
to acute and profound observation;• from metaphorical thinking to original anddirect inquiry;

think we know, we don’t ask vital questions, wesettle for easy answers, and we live in a worldof presumption rather than a world of dynamic
inquiry.
Deep listening is a long tradition for those who• from the habit of not looking freshly to theforged new insights. Newton, much reproacheddiscipline of finely tuned investigation; andthese days as proposing a mechanical universe,• from reliance on concepts to bring a senseof order to the world, to an open quest to see
what’s really there, even if it makes us feel
uncomfortable, unsure, insecure, and mystified.
To make this shift, we must move from presuming
to know before we look, to looking freshly without
the limitation of a concept, metaphor, theory, or
history of previous experiences. Another way to
say this is: start with nothing, e.g., without anidea of what we might find.

was not a metaphorical thinker. He did not thinkin terms of mechanical, or any other, metaphors.
Others, who were not as original, did.
Newton was a deep listener, a creative mind,
a man who invented calculus in order to further
his inquiry. Those who made his work into metaphor misunderstood the creative process thatwas central to his work. He looked without atheory. If he were living in this day and age, hewould be using his deep listening to observe
reality freshly, and, perhaps, come to different

This is the essence of deep listening. How caninsights. He said, “Hypotheses have no place

we hear if we are filling ourselves with the soundin science.” In his book, A History of Knowl-of our own concepts? How can we hear the musicedge: Past, Present, and Future, Charles

that is playing if we are singing our own song in

Van Doren describes Newton’s gift this way:

our minds? Originality comes from deep listening,“…a mind entirely free of traditional prejudicesand deep listening comes from focusing on reality

and capable of seeing the universe [in] awithout an agenda, something that is difficult

new way.”reflections.solonline.org

Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers � Awakening Faith
Robertin anFritz
Alternative
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Future 15

COMMENTARY
Descartes said, “To understand some phenom-

reality it is, rather than simply a concept toenon or set of phenomena, first rid your mind

adopt, gives us a chance to have an activeof all preconceptions.”role in the emerging creation of our world.

Deep listening can lead us to a deeper and often

Without such a revolution, we are trapped by

new understanding of reality. Composer Karlheinz

our outmoded, and now dangerous, styles ofStockhausen has written, “We need to close ourthinking and acting. At this moment in history,eyes for a while and listen. There is always some-technology, the politics of identity and world-thing unheard of in the air.”view, environmental conflicts, and the harsh

In the arts, students must learn to see what
is before their eyes without a concept in mind.
Painter and teacher Arthur Stern said, “…thebasic problem that every painter must face [isthat] the mind stands in the way of the eye.
That’s why most beginning painters don’t paintwhat the eye sees, but what the mind lets theeye see. They paint what they expect to see.”consequences of not understanding the actualinterrelatedness of our paths, cannot be addressed with the limitations of our traditional,
fragmented thought processes. This is why theideas explored by the authors can lead to new
possibilities of hope, and can move us awayfrom a precipice and toward a vastly wiser
civilization.

If the universe is, indeed, a living system, and if
we look deeply enough, we will see it for what it

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

is – parts in relationship to each other and to theRobert Fritz, composer, filmmaker, andentire whole – a dynamic, with an organic nature,organizational consultant, is founder of Tech-that is always shifting, evolving, and emerging.

nologies for Creating,® and author of Your Life

It is from deep listening, rather than from an

as Art and the international bestseller, The

imposition of theory or concept or metaphor, that

Path of Least Resistance.

our understanding becomes immediate, direct,

robert_fritz@robertfritz.com

and authentic. Living systems, as the authors
point out, are capable of change and selfcreation. Understanding this principle as the� Robert
Commentary
16 Awakening
Faith
in an Fritz
Alternative Future � Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers

Reflections � Volume 5, Number 7

Reflections
The SoL Journal

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Volume 5, Number 7

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