Theory U, renewing leadership

Aith Theory U, Otto Scharmer invites change agents to adopt a new form of leadership. He renews collaborative approaches and project management methods.

Drawing on his experience with some of the world's most prominent leaders and innovators, the author has modelled a process that unfolds along a U in five steps: observe, perceive, be present, crystallize, deploy, in order to bring a deep awareness of the situations and issues enabling teams to lead from the emerging future.

 

The U-shaped process invites us to revisit our vision of complex systems to meet the transformation challenges of today's organizations. It makes the quality of presence a support point for implementing profound transformations. It brings a better understanding of the patterns of the past and the meaning of our present to lead us towards our best future.

Otto Scharmer proposes innovative practices of collecive intelligence and a five-step support (co-initiate, co-sense, presence, prototype, perform), accompanied by numerous practical cases. He takes charge of organizational complexity and offers a powerful method of Collective Intelligence for leaders, consultants, coaches, managers of organizations who want to take action, as tens of thousands of change actors around the world are already doing.

 

"The new millennium brings us into a phase of growing tension between two great antagonistic dynamics. On the one hand, we are witnessing a dramatic acceleration of fundamentalism, manipulation and destruction [...]. On the other hand, we are witnessing an intensifying process of openness all around the planet, where more and more individuals and groups are becoming aware of and connected to the deep meaning of their life courses. New social networks and fields of living presence are coming into being. Every day and every week, these two dynamics are growing in parallel. Their fundamental difference is that the first - fundamentalism, manipulation, destruction - diminishes the degree of freedom of the parties involved. Bombing a population, for example, plunges it into a future that is very much like a caricature of the past.

In contrast, the other dynamic increases freedom because it leads individuals to function from other inner spaces, to pay attention to the world and to react differently to existing problems [...]. 

Will we, as a species, move towards a mechanisation of the global field - as depicted in the film Matrix - where our evolutionary perspectives will be frozen in a dark space of anti-emergence? This scenario would cut us off from sources of goodness, beauty and truth. Or will we deepen our connection to the world and co-create it from our inner sources? »

 

A real invitation to take a break, to perceive our automatisms, then to transform them in order to revitalize our individual and collective action.