Meet Lili Xu, Presencing Practitioner in China
By: Zoë Ackerman
Tags: Leadership Development, Business, China, Practitioners, Sustainability

Lili Xu found her way to the Presencing Institute in 2012 through the IDEAS program, which brought together MIT, Tsinghua University, and high-profile cross-sector leaders to find pathways to action for sustainable solutions to pressing issues in China.

Lili Xu (left) and colleague at Zhejiang University. Photo: Lili Xu.

“In a way, Theory U elegantly articulated what Chinese traditional culture has expressed for thousands of years.”

When she first learned about Theory U, Lili resonated with “the bottom of the U”, connecting to the source. “It’s like a bow to Daoism,” she says. “The left side of the U is about reducing complexity and confusion, to practice Dao. And then the right side is about learning, about expanding one’s knowledge.” She continues: “Theory U is like the Dao and learning, or the yin and yang. It’s resonating with a lot of Chinese people.”

Members of the u.lab China team at an Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, Zhejiang University. Photo: Lili Xu.

After meeting Otto Scharmer at the 2012 conference, Lili helped him translate his books into Chinese. By 2015, she had become a full partner at the Presencing Institute (PI), overseeing many projects linking PI with universities, government, and business in China.

“China is a system of its own. It’s a very different operating system.”

One of the early challenges of doing Theory U work in China was dealing with the different role that non-profits play in the East and West. “In the West,” Lili explains, “there is a clearly identified non-profit sector, but in China, that part is kind of implicit. It’s part of the bigger government function.” Lili and her colleagues in China also worked with government and the social sector, and eventually realized that working with businesses would be the most effective path, as they are one of the “most innovative forces in society.”

Theory U Framework. Photo: WeChat.

Lili found working with business to be about opening the heart, being empathetic, and listening deeply to business leaders’ needs to empower them. She works with large-scale companies like Alibaba and ICBC Financial Services, as well as business schools, to help them identify and work through challenges around innovation. Theory U’s reach has been wide in China: it has served as a framework for the Shanghai 2030 Vision and ICBC’s Big Data Initiative, for example.

Lili and her team also work with smaller companies to help them sense what is emerging and develop flexible organizing structures to “face the disruptive age.” Some of these stakeholders were brought into Theory U work through the u.lab massive open online course (MOOC), which first launched in China in 2015. The Chinese u.lab community has hundreds of hubs across the country. In addition, u.lab China has offered a co-created lab format in seven cities to also provide an in-depth offline experience of the U.

Lili (second from left) and other participants at the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition at Zhejiang University. Photo: Lili Xu.

“Technology is extended intelligence. It’s not artificial intelligence. It’s the extended intelligence of human collective creativity.”

One of the ways that Lili supports businesses to clarify innovation challenges is linking the social technologies of Theory U with other forms of technology, such as engineering. Technology, as Lili explains, “is perfect, instant, and free. It’s almost the opposite of how an organism or plant or human being grows.” Humans, unlike technology, have the capacity to sense and “be the vessel for this creative force that Earth is offering us.”

Combining the two — technology and social technology like Theory U — allows human collective creativity to evolve to more co-creative operating systems. Lili’s own educational background spans these two ways of knowing and learning, as she studied art and engineering in college.

Lili explains that this marriage is most alive in Presencing Institute’s work in Bali, where she is collaborating with Tsinghua University to build a creative campus on Kura Kura Island that incubates “sustainability action labs.”

“I like the word regenerative a lot more than sustainability. I think the real power is in the regenerative field. And it’s a dormant field, in many cases.”

Tshingua and Presencing are conducting work at the intersection of social technology and technology with Nev House in Bali. Nev House is a company that builds affordable homes out of recycled plastic. Nev Hyman, an avid surfer, founded the company in 2013. Hyman discovered that no matter where he surfed, the ocean was completely polluted by plastic waste. As a result, he worked with researchers to build a machine that converts plastic into bricks for homes. Tsinghua and Presencing are capturing learnings from this case with the goal of supporting incentivization schemes that activate entrepreneurs to recycle garbage and turn it into something useful.

“Nev House,” an affordable home built out of recycled plastic. Photo: Ken McBryde.

Tsinghua and Presencing also host an action lab around fashion, the second most polluting industry in the world. In the Balinese context, the tourism industry forced many local artisans out of business and pushed them to work in high-end hotels and restaurants away from home.

The fashion action lab involves a collaboration with the brand Stelar. According to The Financial Times, British designer and Stelar founder Lorna Watson, became intrigued by the island’s artisan weaving which, in her view, was dying out. Watson began working with these artisans to create higher-value bags out of local materials, including leather and ata grass, which acts like steel wire. Lili and her colleagues at Tsinghua see Stelar as a vertically literate brand. Artisans are being honored, receiving higher pay, and able to return “to the communities that are the source of their creativity.”

Local Balinese artisan creates handmade leather goods. Photo: Stelar.

A third action lab involves Green School Bali, a learning environment that abides by principles of sustainability. It uses hydropower and solar power; the gym floor is made out of recycled airplane tires. There are 500 children and 700 parents involved in the school, and the lab is finding ways for the Indonesian government to support these kinds of projects, as well as link Kura Kura and Green School Bali to support sustainable community projects.

“The world is in an inversion motion. Some of the hotspots are occurring where the East meets the West and the young are meeting the old. Old institutions are freezing up, and there are interesting things linking together and forming something interesting on the edge of the system.”

Throughout 2019, Lili has felt a powerful shift occurring, including the youth climate strikes, friends and colleagues going through major life transitions, and transformations occurring in her social and private sphere. In the near future, she wants to continue to cultivate her own awareness of what is emerging through mindfulness meditation and the “ability to sense out.” Lili is also looking forward to working with Jayce Pei Yu Lee, another member of the Core Team China, on social arts.

Personally, she is curious about how to embody fun, or “getting back in touch with the baby and the child” to “truly live lightly.” Lili hopes to continue learning alongside younger generations who, in her words, “naturally care about the environment, each other, and whether they’re doing the right thing.”