Iceberg 10% Above

Many people feel-- and maybe you do-- that we live in a time of disruption, where something is
ending and dying, and something else is wanting to be born.
This picture here is expressing this feeling of disruption, by placing us on two sides of the
chasm.
On the one side is our current self and current reality, and on the other side is the other part of
ourselves that already today begins to connect with future possibilities that maybe we can
bring into reality in our journey forward.
The journey of the U and the journey of u.lab is basically to help the current self to better
connect to the emerging future possibilities waiting here.
So before we embark on that journey, I would like to share two key concepts with you that
underlie the u.lab and the U process.
The first one is the Iceberg model, an idea you have probably come across many times already,
and it's the simple distinction between 10% of the iceberg visible above the waterline, and yet,
there is another 90% that also matters, that significantly contributes to the behavior of the
system.
And when you go around across places and countries today and talk to people, I'm actually
amazed to see how many people basically agree on that the current system is broken, and that
we face significant challenges in our societies today that require some profound change.
We probably don't agree on the solutions, but when you talk about the problems, many people
agree on that there are these three main buckets, the ecological divide, the social divide, and
something that I call the spiritual divide.
And the ecological divide probably is best summarized by the number 1.5.
We, as a global economy today, use resources 1.5 time the regeneration capacity of planet
Earth.
So that's the first divide, very familiar to us.
The second divide, the social divide, also not unfamiliar, so it is manifesting in increasing levels
of inequity, of social tensions, of fragmentation.
According to a recent Oxfam study, 62 billionaires today own more than the bottom half of
mankind.
So on the one hand, you have 62 people, as many as you can fit into a single bus.
On the other hand, 3.7 billion, so more than 10 times the population or 11 times the population
of the United States.
And that's the level of inequity you have.
And the problem is it's getting worse, it's not getting better.
While the ecological divide is basically arising from a disconnect between self and nature, and
the social divide is basically arising from a disconnect between self and other, the spiritual
divide is basically arising from a disconnect between self and Self, between who I am today and
who I could be tomorrow.
And if these two selves are not well-connected, it results in a feeling of loss of energy,
symptoms of burnout, symptoms of depression, or even, in some cases, risk for suicide.
In 2010, more people killed themselves than were killed by war, murder, and natural disasters
combined.
So think about that. In spite of all the violence going on across the planet, more people killed
themselves than are being killed by others.
So that's the level of gravity of the problem we have on this side.
So if we look at this, we can summarize the current situation with a sentence that, today, is a
applicable to many bigger systems we are working in, which is, we collectively create results
that no one wants.
We collectively create results that no one wants, but the question is, why?
No one, not you, not I, is getting up in the morning and looking into the mirror and saying, OK, I
will put in another day of destroying more of nature, inflicting harm and violence on other
people, and also increasing my own degree of unhappiness.
No one is doing that.
Yet, collectively, that's exactly what we are doing today.
And that's the investigation that the Iceberg model is inviting into.
What are the structural factors that actually make us doing these things that are so misaligned
with our real intentions?
Before we go there I would like to invite you to watch an evocative video clip, and after that, to
share a little bit of your own observation of the key changes that you see going on in your
environment right now.

Turning the camera around

[MUSIC PLAYING]
In 1968, Apollo 8 went to the moon.
They didn't land, but they did circle the moon.
And I was watching it on television.
And at a certain point, one of the astronauts casually said, we're going to turn the camera
around and show you the Earth.
And he did.
That was the first time I had ever seen the planet hanging in space like that.
And it was profound.

I think that for me, like for many other people, it was quite a shock.
I don't think any of us had any expectations about how it would give us such a different
perspective.
I think the focus had been, we're going to the stars.
We're going to the other planets.
And suddenly, we look back at ourselves, and it seems to imply a new kind of self-awareness.

One of the astronauts said, when we originally went to the moon, our total focus was on the
moon.
We weren't thinking about looking back at the Earth.
But now that we've done it, that may well have been the most important reason we went.
I can only describe what I've seen. Looking down at the Earth, and you see that line that
separates day into night, slowly moving across the planet-- thunderstorms on the horizon,
casting these long shadows as the sun sets, and then watching the Earth come alive.
And you see the lights from the cities and the towns.
The events you see from space, like flying over thunderstorms, looking at them from the top,
are spectacular-- like a fireworks show going on.
And you're looking at it from the very top.
Shooting stars going below us or dancing curtains of auroras.
It's just very hard to describe all the colors, the beauty, the motion.

My job is lunar module pilot, was to be responsible for the lunar module itself and responsible
for the science on the moon.
So when we started home, I had a little more time to look out the window than the other guys,
because most of my responsibilities were completed.
We were in a particular mode called a barbecue mode. So we were flying like this and rotating
like that.
What that caused to happen, was every two minutes-- a picture of the earth, the moon, the
sun, and a 360 degree panorama of the heavens, appeared in the spacecraft window.
And I had studied astronomy, and I had studied cosmology, and fully understood that the
molecules in my body, the molecules of my partners' bodies and in the spacecraft had been
prototyped in some ancient generation of stars. In other words, it was pretty obvious from
those descriptions, we're star dust.
Well, that was pretty awesome and powerful, particularly since I had a little more time, at this
point, to be reflective and to think about it.

When we look down at the Earth from space, we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful
planet.
It looks like a living, breathing organism.
But it also, at the same time, looks extremely fragile.

Because you go outside on a clear day and it's the big blue sky.
It's like it goes on forever, right?
And how could we possibly put enough stuff into it to fill it up with things that really change it?
And yet, you see it from space, and it's this thin line which is just barely hugging the surface of
the planet.

Anybody else who's ever gone to a space says the same thing.
Because it really is striking and it's really sobering to see this paper-thin layer, and to realize
that little paper-thin layer is all that protects every living thing on Earth from death, basically,
from the harshness of space.
There's this very poetic concept that a lot of people express that there are no boundaries from
space.
And I've heard a lot of my astronaut colleagues say that unfortunately, it's not true.
You do see boundaries.
They're mostly the result of human impact.
You can see erosion, clear-cutting of forests.
And it's a long litany of environmental impact that we've had on our planet.
And that's something which, when you see it from the cosmic perspective, makes you really
appreciate the concept of Spaceship Earth and that we're all here together.

We humans are responsible for ourselves.

And if we are endangering our future, then we've got to learn how to do it differently and to go
forward into a sustainable period.
And right now, that seems very difficult, very difficult to see how it's going to be.
But we've got to work on it.
When I was above the space station, looking down at the space station,
and looking down against the Earth, and seeing this amazing accomplishment, I was thinking,
wow.
There were 15 nations that worked together to build this amazing orbital complex in space.
And if we can take these 15 nations and do this amazing accomplishment, imagine what we can
do by working together, by setting aside our differences for a common goal, to overcome some
of the challenges facing our planet.

We have this connection to Earth. It's our home.

And I don't know how you can come back and not, in some way,
be changed. It may be subtle.
You see differences in different people in the just general response when they come back from
space.
But I think collectively, everybody has that emblazoned on their memories, the way the planet
looks.
You can't take that lightly.
You realize that you've been blessed by the opportunity to see that.
It really does look like this beautiful oasis out in the middle of nothingness.
And if you have a chance for your eyes to adjust, and you can actually see the stars and the
Milky Way, it's this oasis against the backdrop of infinity-- of this just enormous universe behind
it.
And it's really a very moving experience to be able to see that with your eyes.

You look back at it and it's placed perfectly from the sun to take care of us.
And you take that reverse roll on about, OK, well, we need to be taking care of it too, so that it
can continue to do that for us.
And I don't know how you can't have a greater appreciation for it after you see it that way.

Journaling questions

The journey that the clip took us on is not only a journey of a few individual astronauts, in many
ways, it's also representing the collective journey that we have been on as humankind.
So we are the ones who created science and technology, who created an amazing amount of
progress. We went out into space.
And at some point, late in the 20th century, shooting for the stars, shooting for the moon, we
started to turn the camera back onto planet Earth, back onto ourselves.
And we were in awe by the beauty of the planet that we saw, and in shock by the unintended
collective impact that we are about to have.
And in many ways, this journey is also applicable to the individual lives to many of us.
So we get an education.
We make a career.
We shoot for the stars.
We climb the ladder.
And at some point, we face new challenges, new situations, that invite us, that require us to
stop and to turn around the camera and to ask the two root questions of creativity, which is,
Who am I? Who is my Self? And what am here for? What is my real Work?
And that's a question that no one can be teaching to you.
And that's a question, yet, that requires, in order to be explored, a deep conversation and
listening context.
And that is a key aspect of the work we are doing here in the u.lab.
So for now, I would like to invite you to do just that, to take a moment to turn around the
camera and to look at the own experience that you just had and that you bring into this
situation, by journaling on these two questions.
Watching this video clip, what touched you?
So what was it that connected with you not only here, but also here?
And then, turning the camera back on planet Self and earth, where are you experiencing a
world that is ending and dying?
And where are you experiencing a world that is wanting to be born?
And you can apply that to the world out there, as I was talking about the three divides.
You can apply it to what's going on
in your own organizational context.
But you can also apply these questions to, maybe,
what's most challenging, but also most
interesting to your own self.
So sometimes, I am exhibiting old patterns,
old behaviors that I actually think
need to go out of the window.
And where is it that, in my own life and in my own work,
I connect to the sources of the new.
So take your pick and write down your reflections
on these two questions.

Iceberg 90% Below

So we have been talking a little bit about the problem symptoms here, but to really create
change starts with inquiring into the deeper structural and systemic issues that make us re-
enact the same problems, the same three divides, time and again.
So what are some of these underlying structures and forces that make us operate this way?
And on a first level, we see a set of structural disconnects in the form of eight different specific
structural disconnects that I'm not going through in all detail today, but that we will cover later
on in u.lab.
I just want to give you three quick examples.
It's the disconnect between finite resources on planet
Earth and infinite growth.
That's one example.
It's the disconnect between the financial economy, the financial casino economy, you could say,
on the one hand, and the real economy, on the other hand.
And it's also the disconnect between GDP and well-being.
So the fact that, in all developed countries today, more GDP, more output and consumption of
products and services, does not translate into more well-being.
So those would be like three exemplary disconnects here.
But then, there are five more.
And we'll cover them all.
At this point, I would like to invite you to fast forward, and then ask the deeper question which
is, what actually are the root causes that make us re-enact all of the above?
And in my view, the most important root cause originates right between our ears.
It originates in our quality of thinking, in our paradigms of thought, particularly in our
paradigms of economic thought.
Thinking creates the world.
And that is nowhere more visible than in the economy.
If we look at the evolution of the economy and the evolution of modern economic thought, we
can differentiate between three main stages.
This is exactly the moment where I tend to lose my audience.
Who wants to hear about economic history and history of economic thought?
So bear with me just for three minutes, and I will walk you through 300 years of modern
economic history and history of modern economic thought.
So if we look into that, then we can differentiate between three main stages.
The state centric economy creates some stability, but is lacking dynamism, which then leads to
the 2.0 market economy, which is the free market economy, which gives rise to the
entrepreneurial class, gives rise to the market forces and uses market and competition as a
more decentralized way of coordinating the economy, creating great progress, but also a lot of
externalities, which then leads to the 3.0 economy, the social market economy, or as we say
here in the United States, stakeholder capitalism, with an evolved framework that is taking care
of some of the domestic externalities and has worked well for many people throughout the
20th century, particularly in the OECD countries.
However, as we move into the 21st century, and as we have been moving into the 21st century,
this system clearly is hitting a wall, because we are unable to deal with global externalities, like
climate change, global rising levels of inequity, and so forth.
We believe the current crisis of our economic and social system is actually a transition period
for us to move into a 4.0 economy in which the three sectors of society: business, government,
and civil society, are no longer conflicting, working against each other, but begin to co-create
and collaborate in a way that allows us to innovate at the scale of the whole system, and to not
only innovate in small pockets of the system.
The main point I want to make is this: that we can see the evolution, the development of the
economy and the evolution of economic thought as an embodiment of an evolving human
consciousness that is moving from traditional awareness, 1.0, to ego-system awareness 2.0--
something we still teach today at business schools around the world, homo economicus-- to a
3.0 stage of awareness, which is stakeholder awareness, which is what you need to do to be
successful in all real organizations, in business, in government, in civil society, operating on a
stakeholder awareness that takes care of the key needs and requirements for the key
stakeholders you are dealing with.
And then, what we believe is that we should be moving towards something that we call eco-
system awareness.
And what I mean by eco-system awareness is an awareness that is focusing on the well-being of
not only a few, but the well-being of all.
So you could say that, in many ways, the key challenge today, in many systems, is to bring
together diverse stakeholder groups that need each other in order to change the system, and
make them move from a silo perspective that operates based on an ego-system awareness, to a
more holistic systems view that operates based on an eco-system awareness.
That shift, that "ego" to "eco" shift, in multi-stakeholder groups, in my view, is the most
important leadership challenge today.
And it's the same across countries and across systems.

Iceberg – Refugee Crisis

So let us take a quick example that is drawing the attention of many of us these days, and that's
the refugee and migration challenge that we face in many countries, not only in Europe, in
many countries around the world.
And from this angle that I just described to you, we can say, if you respond to the refugee
situation and the migration challenge, from the level of symptoms within the Western
countries, so you can come up, for example, with Donald Trump or the European right kind of
attitude, which is let's build a wall that separates us and them.
And let's blame all the problems that we see on others, rather than something else.
So that's bring the wall up.
That's one response.
More from a structure or system perspective, you could say, well, how can we develop and
create agencies, professional agencies, that deal with the refugee situation and create the right
kind of approaches of a professional response to that.
If we take it one level deeper, paradigms of thought would be a little deeper.
Paradigms of thought means that I not only give some services to them, but I begin to see
myself into the mirror of the whole.
I begin to reflect on the situation that the current challenge, the refugee and migration
challenge, is actually the result of our global actions of the past.
So it's very closely connected to our own history.
And you know, I begin, in other words, to become aware of the interdependency, that we
cannot just separate by ignoring the interdependency that we all are connected with across the
planet.
And finally, if we take it even one deeper level, at the source level, we can say, well, the source
level is really the sources of my own identity, of my own energy, my sense of who I am.
And if we respond from a source level, we really need to tap deeper into the sources of our
own, the deeper sources of our own humanity.
And so it would result in really opening the doors of our families and of our communities and
evolving the sense of the "we", moving from us versus them to the cultivation of a new we
that's more diverse, more global, and more situated in the realities of this century.
So that's a yet deeper-- that's a response that not only looks into the mirror, but also connects
to the deeper sources of our own humanity, not only who we are today, but who we could be
tomorrow.
On a practical level, of course, the question is, OK, if we're facing these big systems challenges
that we have across all the countries, if the number one leadership challenge, as I said, is to
move stakeholder groups from ego-system to eco-system awareness, how do you do that?
How do you take a group and move them from a silo or ego perspective to one that's situated
in the multi-perspective reality of the whole?
And what we learned in doing there is that it takes a journey. -> U shapped
A journey that I want to introduce you to in the next videos.

Intro to Theory U

I came here to MIT from Europe 22 years ago in order to learn how to support and facilitate
such a deep cycle of innovation and learning.
One of the first things that I learned and picked up when getting involved in more practical
projects and change initiatives is that there are two very different sources of learning.
One is learning by reflecting on the past.
And the other one is learning by sensing and actualizing emerging future possibilities.
While most of the existing learning methodologies are based on the first source of learning--
learning by reflecting on the experiences of the past-- I became more interested in how to
develop a supporting social technology that enables not only individuals, but complex systems,
to learn from the emerging future by sensing and actualizing emerging future possibilities.
And a first step to inquire that space has been to do an interview study with 150 innovators and
thought leaders and entrepreneurs and creative people that each in their own field had been
creating something new, in order to listen to their journey and to their practices and find out
what is the deeper process these people are actually doing?
One of them was Brian Arthur, formally of Stanford University and then later the head of the
economics department at the Santa Fe Institute.
And it was Brian Arthur, actually, who very succinctly summarized a deeper innovation and
learning process that I have heard many other practitioners describing in a variety of ways.
And the way he summarized it was that he said that there are two types of cognition.
One is downloading, which is basically acting based on habits of the past in your thinking-- and
in your way you interact with your environment.
And the other one is a deeper innovation process that he referred to with the word knowing.
And when I and my colleague Joe Jaworski asked him, so what actually is the process that
allows you to access this deeper source of innovation that really is at the root of all profound
innovation in science and also in business?
He said, basically, that you have to go through a three stage process that begins with observe,
observe, observe-- which really means to go out, to experience the system you are dealing with
from the edges, to look at it and observe it from very different angles and then as you do that
and as you move into the places of most potential that can teach you most about how to come
up with creative responses given the situation or the challenges that you face.
The second stage is to retreat and reflect and allow the inner knowing to emerge.
He also said go to the place of stillness-- of inner stillness-- where knowing comes to surface.
So it's really about accessing the deepest sources of our intuition, both as an individual and also
as a team, as a group, as a system. And then, from this process one or two or three-- a few
ideas and sparks of the future begin to emerge, you explore them by acting in an instant, by
rapid cycle prototyping, by moving into a fast cycle process where you prototype something
very local, very fast, but sufficient enough to generate feedback from relevant stakeholders to
the situation.
And then given that feedback, you iterate and iterate and iterate.
It's basically a way of accessing the intelligence that is situated around your prototype idea, in
the ecosystem that is holding the prototyping idea that you want to bring into reality.
So that was the first learning-- that there is such a deep learning cycle that is going through
these different stages that can be described in this way.
The second thing that I learned is that this kind of process really only works if you, as an
entrepreneur, as an innovator, going onto that journey engage in some inner leadership work.
And the moment I really stumbled into that insight was by talking with the late CEO of Hanover
Insurance, Bill O'Brien, who after conducting and leading many processes of transformation and
change summed up his own experience with the following word,
"The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor."
Let me translate.
The success of what I do as a leader, as an innovator, as a change maker, depends on the inner
place-- depends on the source from that I operate.
So it's not what I'm doing, or not only what I'm doing, it's not only how-- the process I'm
applying to a situation-- but it's the source that I am operating from.
It's that quality of attention and intention and presence that I bring into a situation. That is, he
says-- what makes all the difference.
When I heard these words, I realized that I had no idea about this third dimension, this source
level.
All I knew was about the what and the how.
But the source level I really never considered or reflected upon.
And I also realized that this is not only a blind spot for myself, but really a blind spot for the
entire field of leadership research and most of social sciences.
So it brought me onto this pathway of developing Theory U as a social field theory that not only
looks at the what and the how, but that really makes visible the source dimension that we're
operating from as individuals, as teams, as organizations, as larger systems, and the impact it
has depending on which source we're operating from.
So, today, I would summarize the source dimension that Bill O'Brien was pointing me towards
by differentiating between three inner places or three capacities that we need to cultivate as
change makers, innovators, and leaders.
The first one is the open mind, by which I mean the capacity to suspend our old habits of
judgment-- basically, to see with fresh eyes.
The second one is the open heart, by which I mean the capacity to empathize to redirect our
attention-- to look at a problem not just from my angle, but also from the angle of the other
stakeholders that are involved in the situation.
And number three, to cultivate the open will, which is essentially the capacity to let go and let
come-- let go of the old and let come of the emerging new possibilities.
These two insights basically summarize the two foundation stones of the U theory and the U
process.
So it's a process on the one hand.
But it's this inner cultivation work related to the opening of the mind, the opening of the heart,
and the opening of the will, on the other hand, that in our view really makes all the difference.
The question of course now is-- OK, if that's the framework, right, how do you apply it?
How do you really make it practical?
Theory U really is these two things.
It's on the one hand a framework, on the other hand, is it's a method which is a set of tools and
practices that actually allows you to move from one state of the social field that's operating,
say, in a very reactive way, to another state of the social field that's more generative and more
co-creative.

TU – Real World Examples

The question, of course, is how do you apply a process like that to a practical situation like an
innovation process in an organization or a company or a transformation and change initiative in
a larger system?
And that has been, over the past 15 plus years, very much
the key focus of our action research that we have been conducting here with many colleagues
around the world.
And what emerged from that is a five-stage process.
The first stage is about co-initiating, which means bringing together all the multiple
stakeholders that need to work together in order to change the system.
So in this case, it was a Namibia health care transformation initiative around maternal health.
And it involved all the key players in the system and making them connect with each other and
understanding the system, the bottlenecks are forming an intention about the change they
wanted to make happen together.
And then when the project team was launched, they went into the second stage, which is the
co-sensing.
The co-sensing is really walking in the shoes of all the different stakeholders and going to the
places of most potential.
So in this case, for example, they went out in these multi-stakeholder groups and walked in the
shoes of the most remote users, of women in remote villages with no access to health care
services and feeling the situation and experiencing the system from their angle and so on and
so forth.
And then the third stage is about sense making and co-inspiring, bringing together all the
insights that come here from the learning and the sensing activities into a retreat where all
these insights are viewed at together in order to understand where the current system is at,
where the bottlenecks are, and where the high-leverage potentials are for transformative
initiatives.
And then, as some of these ideas got generated and result from here, then these ideas get, in
the fourth stage, explored through prototyping, through moving into rapid cycle, small-scale
experiments that generate feedback from all the other relevant stakeholders, which then
further helps you to evolve the idea.
So which, in this case, resulted in developing new ideas and approaches, which then later on
have been applied and scaled in different ways throughout all the other provinces of the
country.
Impact of that process over multiple years was a significant change in the outcomes at issue,
maternal health.
But more importantly—throughout this prototyping stage and then the co-evolving, the scaling
stage, more importantly, what you see here is that both on this side of the cycle, the co-
sensing, and then the co-creating side of the cycle also, what are we dealing with?
We are basically dealing with people.
That means with relationships across institutional and sector boundaries.
And that's really what changed, how people connect and communicate with each other, how
they connect to the larger system, but also to themselves.
And in a simplified version, you can say they moved through a mindset shift, where initially they
saw the system like this, which is basically something out there, towards another perspective
that is seeing the system in a way that is including the self.
In which the system is not something separate, you begin to reflect about the intertwined
relationship between the self and the system that you're dealing and engaging with.
So that mindset shift from this kind of perspective, the system is out there, to this kind of
perspective, which includes myself and my relationship to others, is really what makes all the
difference.
And on the level of the individual, that shift, we refer to usually as mindfulness or as a self-
reflective capacity.
Mindfulness is the capacity to connect to the now and to pay attention to your attention.
To not just be absorbed by the objects around you, but switch on this meta awareness, where
you not only see something outside of you, but you also see your own seeing.
So that meta awareness, meta-level awareness is really what we refer to as mindfulness, the
self-navigation capacity.
And when we go through the same process from here to here on the level of the group and on
the level of how groups are communicating, what do we call that?
We call that dialogue.
Dialogue is not people talking with each other.
Dialogue is the capacity of a system to see itself, to move from a debate style of conversation
this way, to a more self-reflective conversation this way, where you begin to see your own
assumptions that are driving the conversation.
And as you all know, that shift from here, this kind of mindset and type of conversation to this
kind of mindset and conversation, that's more than 50% of all change management. To move
people from a mindset where the source of the problem is really all these idiots around me
towards a view of the system that includes my own contribution to the current situation, the
problem, and thereby makes available leverage points, how we can affect change.
So in my view, the essence of Theory U and systems thinking is about making a system sense
and see itself.
That's really the central leverage point of intervening in any kind of system because the
moment you succeed in making a system sense and see itself, the consciousness is switching to
a higher level of awareness.
So let's look at a few quick examples, like a preview.
There will be many more examples later on that we share in the u.lab, and we'll get into more
detail, but just to give you a few pictures of what that looks like.
So IDEAS Indonesia Coral Triangle Initiative,
probably the biggest multi-stakeholder initiative on this planet right now focusing on the
second most important after the Amazon ecosystem area of this planet.
So lots of conflicts and different views.
So first you form a little bit subset of that system.
And you form a little bit like a container so this group is going on a journey together.
And here on the 'observe, observe' you go on sensing journeys, in this case, with the Bajau
people, a tribe living on the sea, and sensing the system from their perspective to many other
stakeholders in order then to come back together and to synthesize everything that was
learned, in this case, it's a 4D mapping.
So 4D because first, you map-- each person is representing one of the key stakeholders in the
system.
And in this case, his role here his mother Earth.
So in his real life, he is a banker in one of the biggest banks in Indonesia.
But the role he is representing here is mother Earth and that role in the first stage of this
mapping process depicting current reality was very much at the periphery.
And then as it moved to Sculpture 2 which is the emerging future, more moving into the center
of that constellation.
Here is another example, ICBC China, the biggest state-owned enterprise in China, using the
same process to reinvent themselves around big data and, therefore, re-mapping and re-
cultivating the relationships with their larger ecosystem in which they operate. Alibaba, the
biggest internet commerce company today worldwide.
In this case, their top 50 people, the business unit leaders, looking at the larger system, all their
interdependencies across all these business units that operate semi-autonomous.
And you see here that they have a mapping, a 3D mapping.
So they map the system with objects and then they change it according to emerging future
possibility. But they do that on many different tables here and then share with each other what
came out of that.
Novos Urbanos Brazil, it's a group of 150 people.
It's a lab that is focusing on really advancing sustainable and healthy food in the Sao Paolo
region, particularly for the underserved areas that have food deserts, that have no access to
sustainable and healthy food at this point.
And from more than 40 organizations, people come together and in various small groups, go
through the same mapping process here and then share it with each other.
So there are many more examples.
The bottom line is that we learned that actually profound innovation and change in
organizations and larger systems is possible.
But in order to make it work, you need a high quality container and holding space.
That means it's a lot of effort, it's a lot of attention, and also, therefore, not cheap.
So it takes a lot of resources to bring all that into place.
Therefore, my question always was, OK, we saw it here, we saw it there, and I know many of
you probably have similar examples of your own.
But can that ever go to the level of scale that is necessary today, given the big challenges that
we talked about in the beginning?
That was always my big question-- and question mark-- in my mind.
And it was only last year that for the first time in my life,
I saw a way how we could address that level of change at scale.
That means: in a way that's accessible to everyone.
And that is the story of u.lab that brings to us to our journey here that we are on.
And that's what I'm going to share with you in our next clip.

TU – The new university

This clip basically talks about two transformations that currently reshape the landscape of
education.
The first transformation is shifting the outer place of learning from the classroom into the real
world.
And the second transformation is shifting the inner place of learning from the head to the
heart, and from the heart to the hand.
So that was at the outset.
We had no idea whether anyone was interested or responding to that.
We had quite a significant response that really gave rise to the formation of a globally
distributed community which then asked us later that year to do a repeat, a first iteration of the
u.lab x1.
And between these two, we shot another clip that is exploring a little more where we are going,
what the new architecture is that we are organizing around.

Enjoy the clip and then we'll reconnect.

[MUSIC PLAYING]
We're here at MIT next to a sculpture called the Alchemist, which since its installation in 2011
has quickly become a popular and iconic symbol on campus.
Part magician, part scientist, and part philosopher.
The Alchemist seems to be in contemplation, but at the same time the structure is open,
inviting people to go in.

Now look at the area surrounding the sculpture.

You might notice something familiar.
The benches are made from the limestone salvaged from the original MIT dome.
As you may remember from the last video, the MIT dome was built in 1916.
It reflects how universities thought about education at the time-- abstract knowledge at the
top, and applied knowledge at the bottom.
In the new MIT that's emerging now, the dome opens up, and the process of learning is moving
out into the real world to a more collaborative structure that allows people to connect more
freely.
You might be surprised that this transformation of learning and leadership has deep roots here
at MIT that go back to at least the 1940s.
We are now inside the Sloan School of Management, and on this wall you see the lineage of
some path-breaking action researchers here at MIT.
Here you see Kurt Lewin, one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century.
He summarized his approach by saying,
"You cannot understand a system unless you change it."
One researcher who picked up Lewin's ideas and developed them further was Ed Schein.
When he arrived here at Sloan as a young faculty, he pioneered a new model of learning, one
that puts the learner into the driver's seat of change and the educator in the role of coach.
Meanwhile next door, Jay Forrester was creating the field of system dynamics, from which in
1972, the study and book Limits to Growth emerged.
While some of Jay Forrester's students were working on the limits to growth study,
Peter Senge joined the group and became interested in how to link system dynamics with real-
world change.
It was that integration that drew me here 21 years ago.
[I was in a system dynamics class here at MIT.]
Since then, Peter and I together with other colleagues further developed this approach by
exploring the deeper dynamics of social systems from the viewpoint of an evolving human
consciousness.
What emerged from this line of work is a concept called Theory U. That's the lineage of Kurt
Lewin, Ed Schein, and Peter Senge.
Which brings us back right here to the Alchemist.As you step inside the Alchemist, what do you
see? You see a bunch of mathematical formulas.
It reminds me of the picture that I kept on my desk for the past 20 plus years, The School of
Athens by Raphael.
It is said that at the entrance door there was a sentence engraved that said, "Let no one
ignorant of math and geometry enter here."
Now 2,400 years later, what should mark the entrance of such a school that we are aspiring to
create?
That sentence, I believe, should deal with a threshold that we need to cross in order to
experience the remaking of the world from within. It could read, "Let no one enter who cannot
see that the issues outside are a mirror of the issues inside."
The entrance to this university is not in any one place. It exists wherever you are.
And that is ultimately what the u.lab is. It's a vehicle to help you catalyze change locally, and to
connect you with the many of us who work towards similar change globally.
So join us. The journey through u.lab begins now.

Journaling
If you remember the Bill O'Brien quote, which is "The success of an intervention depends on
the interior condition of the intervenor," think about a challenge you are currently facing that
may invite you or require you to shift the inner place that you are currently operating from.
So take a moment. Take a pen. And write down what comes to your mind.
What are one or two challenges that you are facing in your work or your life or your community
right now that, in order to be addressed and responded to successfully, requires you to
somehow shift the inner place that you are operating from, either on the level of the mind, or
the level of the heart, or the level of will?

How U Lab works

So here are three things that we learned from the first year of u.lab.
Number one, there is an enormous potential dormant around the world that is actually quite
ready to engage in the deeper process of learning and innovation that we were talking about
before and that with the u.lab platform we tried to activate.
One of the invitations was that we asked participants to form hubs, which are places where
they go through the seven-week process of the u.lab together as opposed to individually, so
where in some cases you invite your colleagues, your friends, your network.
And often it's smaller groups. Sometimes it's also larger groups.
We know about more than 500 that formed these types of hubs-- mostly place-based
communities. I want to show you a few pictures.
In fact, this global map is representing the hubs at the very first beginning of u.lab where all
these hubs have been located-- Chengdu, China; Mumbai, India; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Oakland,
California.
So we learned that there is not only a big level of interest
but also a significant, if not amazing, capacity to self-organize in these local communities.
The second learning is that in some cases, institutions already in the first year started, in a
strategic way, to use u.lab for innovation or change initiatives.
So here you see Alibaba in China using u.lab for their internal capacity-building processes.
This is a picture of Scotland, where we have seen that in the u.lab, there were five participants,
most of them members of the Scottish government.
And they came out of the u.lab in the of the beginning of the first year with the same idea,
which is, we should actually make that accessible to everyone—not only the government, also
the NGOs and other partners-- which is what they did.
So they conducted two, three pre-meetings-- in this picture you see one of them that happened
in a church in Edinburgh-- and invited changemakers from across communities to come in and
to use u.lab as a tool-- as a tool to crystallize your own change initiative, find partners, and
make it happen in your own context.
So an interesting way of moving from a centralized government to a more current-state
government, which is delivering services to beneficiaries, to a new model in which the
communities are self-organizing around their own aspiration and needs and taking action
around that.
And then here we see an initiative from an NGO that's one of the foremost NGOs in China in the
field of education, Adream, with whom we launched an initiative to apply the u.lab process to
reinventing education not only in China, but also in other regions around the world. So that's an
initiative that is now starting and another example how u.lab is being used as a tool.
A third learning we had and that maybe is also the most interesting is that it is fascinating to see
how the global u.lab community is coming together in live sessions and is focusing, can be
engaged around the creation of knowledge and a global awareness and actions as a
community.
In the exit survey, we asked people, self-reported, what was it like for you?
And so we heard for many it was inspiring, and also for a third of the participants it was even
life-changing.
Now that's self-reported.
We don't know exactly what it means.
But let's say many people had a significant learning and developmental experience as a result of
the u.lab.
So why did that happen?
And we believe it did not happen because people were watching videos. Maybe that's kind of a
small part of the experience.
But what we believe really makes all the difference is the self-organizing in small groups like this
one—case clinic groups that for some people in hubs happen in person, for other people
happen virtually, online, with video-based meetings.
That can be equally transformative, because both of these groups are using the same kind of
seven-step case clinic process.
And the other transformative moment that we heard from many participants is the hubs and
the global live sessions that we conducted across the entire community where you see that, in
this picture here reflected, each time, we use, among others, a little mindfulness practice that
helps us to not only connect to my experience here and to our experience in our local
community but also to our global community of changemakers that we constitute in u.lab.
There are a number of fellow activists and people who have been supporting the global u.lab
infrastructure worldwide, and we would like to invite you to meet them in the next clip.

Meet fellow activists

Right now my sense is that the world is changing like never before. There are these big seismic
shifts taking place, both in Scotland where I live and work, and around the world.
And I think that u.lab explicitly acknowledges that and supports you to bring about changes that
respond to those conditions. Currently, in Africa, we are training young people for jobs that
there are not, for situations that there are not.
How about if we use the learning we are getting through the u.lab, applying Theory U to real life
situations in order for people to think about the challenges they are facing, the systemic forces
that are holding those challenges in place, and what success would look like through
experimentation.
Transforming education on the African continent is something I'm dedicated to and committed
to doing in the next five years. China is experiencing a lot of disruptions and changes right now.
And it is definitely not a time that you can learn from the past or learn from other countries. So
the message of learning from the emerging future is very relevant.

So my aspiration for the u.lab going forward would be that we look at it as a tool, a language, a
collection of methods that we can go and apply back in our own context. By hearing the stories
behind the u.lab around the world, that really motivates me to uplift and to refine my work in
Brazil.
We're using u.lab in Scotland as a public participation and learning platform.
And we're using it as a way of encouraging communities to bring to life changes that they want
to see.

The big deal is that the online course is connecting us with real human beings, real challenges,
real problems, and opportunities that people are facing.
So when you have the fortune of receiving learning, reflection, connection through online, the
next bit is that all around me and you there are people, there are institutions, there are
opportunities and challenges.
People are actually now working differently and changing public service, changing how they're
working, changing the local economy, actually, through things that they learned in u.lab.
And that's just so energizing to see.

Presencing and Absencing

We started with the question what does it take to basically move from current reality to that
emerging future possibility that many of us can feel but don't know how to quite access? And
what I have been basically saying is that, number one, what it takes is a process that we
described a little bit.
And number two, it takes a cultivation of inner conditions that I summarize with these three
words-- the open mind, the open heart, and the open will. But what we haven't talked about so
far is that this is-- there are many examples, actually.
You probably have many examples. We have many examples.
This is-- when the new is coming into the world, those are the conditions that we need to
cultivate. And we know many examples of that. But at the same time, in the current moment of
global disruption, what do we see?
We also see an amplification of the exact opposite, which is not the cycle as presencing but the
cycle of absencing. And the cycle of absencing is based on the exact opposite. So it's not the
opening of the mind, it's the closed mind or ignorance. It's the closed heart, the greed, or de-
empathizing, the rigid walls between us and them that we see moving up around us.
And then, of course, it's the closed will. It's the fear that makes us holding onto what is as
opposed to opening up to what is wanting to emerge.
So instead of moving through this cycle of seeing, sensing, and presencing, we move into
exactly the opposite. It's denial instead of seeing, its de-sensing instead of sensing, it's de-
empathizing.
And of course, then its absencing, which is cutting the vertical connection to my emerging self.
And whenever that happens in a community, we do not see this here happening, which is the
co-creation of the new. But we see this happening, which is the destruction of others and
eventually of ourselves. So certainly I don't need to give you many examples.
We see this happening around us not only in the form of fundamentalism-- so if you want a
definition of fundamentalism, you could just go to this definition here.
Systems that operate on a closed mind, a closed heart, and a closed will are systems that
usually we refer to as fundamentalist. Because of the way they interact with people outside of
this community.
And as we all know, it's not limited to religious community. It's happening across all systems. So
that's a little bit what we went through.
The two learnings that it takes a process and it takes these interior conditions.
But the last thing I'm leaving you with is that as this opening, this deepening of the social field,
is actually happening, that's indicated on the lower half-- the yellow half of this—we at the
same time also see an intensification of this field of absencing that is operating on exactly the
opposite principles.
And in a way, the interesting thing about our time is it's not like us vs. them. It's not like I am
down here and someone else is some other space. The reality how I perceive it is more like
sometimes in my good moments, I'm operating way down here.
And I know many examples of that together with collaborators, with our teams. But then, the
next moment, before I know it, I am maybe operating from my blind spot, enacting patterns
also here.
So unintentionally, I participate in creating collective results that no one wants like the 1.5 we
talked about earlier.
So if that happens, leadership means and my job as a leader is to become aware of that,
noticing that I'm getting off track, and to move myself back on track-- to realign my attention
with my intention.
And that's, I believe, really the leader's work. It's not just good people vs. evil people.
It's more like the cultivation of this self-navigation capacity that allows us, when we get lost in
this blue territory, to bring ourself back on track.
To recap, three things.
So first, we shared with you the two fundamental concepts that underlie the u.lab
architecture-- the Iceberg Model of systems thinking and the U model of transformative
change.
Second, we shared with you a little bit of what's possible in the context of the rapidly growing
u.lab community that could be a resource for you to bring in your own entrepreneurial
initiative.
And lastly, we would like to invite you to now set your own intention for your continued u.lab
journey in case you choose to do so. And also to apply some of the principles that we shared
with you over the past 90 or so minutes onto your own situation by a journaling process of
which we already took the first step, and will take the remaining steps in the next clip.

Final guided journaling

As we are approaching the end of our u.lab 0x introductory session, we would like to offer you a
practice that allows you to integrate and to ground the concepts that we have been working on
a little more with your own experience. And we also hope you like the background here, the
MIT dome. But you also see the construction cranes there.
So actually, MIT is a real construction site. And that's a perfect little image for our journey here.
So the old MIT you see here. The new MIT is being born as we speak. And the cranes, what's
operating these cranes, this construction of the new? That's actually you and your question and
your relationship to the whole u.lab community. So that's what this practice will be focusing on
to give you the possibility to not only ground the key concepts in your own experience, but also
to set your own intention and to put forth and crystallize and clarify your questions that you are
holding that you might want to bring into the u.lab 1x session that's going to start in
September.
So the practice that we are going to use for that is called journaling.
And you need two things for that. It's a journal or a pad of paper and a pen. If you don't have
that now handy, now would be the moment to hit the pause button and to equip yourself with
these two tools. And then when you have, here is the main trick about journaling. It's about
this. You take the pen. You put it on paper. And you just start writing. In other words, journaling
is not let me think about a really brilliant idea. And once it's fully hatched in my mind, I put it
down on paper. That's not journaling.

Journaling is: you don't know what you're going to write. You take a pen. You put it on paper.
You just start writing, and that triggers another quality of thinking within your mind that is
including the intelligence of your hand. So in this case, I'm going to give you a set of 10
questions, 10 focusing questions, one at a time. And for each one, I will give you about a minute
or so. So what you do is you just number your response. There is no need to write down the full
question. You number your response. And then you just write down whatever comes to your
head in terms of your own response. And then we will take it from there.
All right. So the first two questions will refer to the two key concepts that we went through in
this introductory module and session, which is about absencing and presencing. Number one,
where in your environment and context do you see examples of absencing? That means people
operating on a closed mind, a closed heart, and/or a closed will, in other words, people
operating on prejudice or downloading old habits of thought, operating on anger or blaming
others or not seeing your own part and/or operating on fear or lack of courage or lack of risk
taking. So just identify one of two examples from your own context or environment and put
them down on paper.

Where in your own environment or context right now do you see examples of absencing going
on? Could be society, could be organizational.

Number two, where in your environment or context do you see examples of presencing?
That means people operating based on the opening of their mind, opening of their heart,
and/or opening of their will? In other words, people based on operating by accessing their
sources of curiosity, of empathy or compassion, and/or of courage.

The next two questions, now will turn the camera around so that we now apply the same set of
these two questions on to our own behavior. Number three, where in your own behavior do
see examples of absencing, that is, examples where in your own behavior, you showed some
judging or downloading, prematurely jumping to judgment or downloading old habits of
thought, where you showed some example of a lack of empathy or overly blaming others or
also tapping into your own anger and/or a lack of courage, so where the response was more
driven by fear than it was by taking risks and accessing the sources of your own courage.
So just identify one or two examples of your own behavior over the past few days or weeks.

Number four, where in your own behavior do you see examples of presencing, in other words,
examples where you were tapping or accessing the power of your own curiosity, really inquiring
into questions, tapping into your sources of empathy and compassion, and/or tapping into the
sources of courage, of risk taking.

Number five, so the first four questions basically demonstrated that outside of us but also in
our own behavior, we have examples of both presencing and absencing.
Now in number five and six, we want to inquire into the deeper conditions that give rise to
either of these types of behaviors and patterns.
Number five, what in your current work and life frustrates you the most? What in your current
work and life are your most important sources of frustration?
Number six, what in your current work and life are your most important sources of energy?
What are situations in your life where you feel your heart is opening, where you can access
your best energies, where you can access the power of love?

Number seven, where in your work and life right now do you feel the future? So try to scan, not
only your life experience with your mind but with your heart, because the future shows up in
our own experience first on the level of feeling, very often. So when you sense and scan your
own feeling experience, where in your work and life right now do you experience the sense of a
real future possibility that maybe wants to talk to you, that maybe is connected with your own
future path that's waiting for you to make happen?
And if that sense of future possibility is totally vague, that's perfectly fine. Just try to identify,
could be a place, a person, an opportunity, a community, a recent experience you had, that
opened up some of that space or sense of future possibility. Just name these moments when
you felt that.

So number seven-- in number seven, you described a little bit like a spark of a future possibility.
And number eight is now that you take that spark, and you move it a little bit forward by
answering the question what are-- from where you are right now, what is your sense of your
highest future possibility?
So if you just allow your imagination to move a little bit forward into that space of future
possibility that maybe is waiting for you to make it happen, what are some of the images that
come to your mind? You can draw it. You can write it out with a sentence or a few sentences or
words or so.
Just put yourself into that space of imagined future possibility. And then allow that to flow
through your hand. What's the highest future possibility that you can feel and sense for you
right now moving forward?

Number nine, number nine is about setting your intention for u.lab 1x that's starting in
September and that will run for seven weeks followed by another seven weeks of prototyping.
So if you chose to participate in that more collective experience that's ahead of you and if you
consider it a tool that would allow you to explore the space of future possibility that you sense
is maybe waiting for you, is ahead of you, what then is the intention and the question that you
could bring or that you might bring into such an experience? So number nine, in a sentence or
two, define the intention that you might want to bring into the u.lab 1x starting in September
and maybe one or two specific questions related to that intention that you might want to
explore as you go through that seven week experience that will be followed by another seven
weeks of prototyping.

Number 10, and lastly, given what you just wrote in number nine, intention and questions you
would like to explore, who might be other friends or collaborators that you could invite into this
journey that could go with you through that experience in September until October or
November, December with you together. So potential friends or partners or collaborators that
if connected with, maybe could help you to bring your intention of the future into reality more
fully. Just put down the names, people you might want to invite into the space of possibility.

So that is completing our little reflection and integration practice. We hope you have been
enjoying it. And the remaining activity, the one remaining activity, would be for you to put the
essence of that intention and maybe also the question you are holding either on a little very
short video that you would upload to the site that's indicated below this video clip or simply a
picture, could be a drawing, could be any kind of picture with some little text you would upload,
because it would serve two purposes: Number one, it would inform us and also other people in
the community what-- who is actually joining for the upcoming u.lab 1x and what are the
intentions and questions being brought into this community. That will help us to prepare to set
the right kind of learning environment for all of us together. And number two, it would be also
a wonderful reference point for you so as you then in September would be joining this journey
of exploration and possibility to have that as a reference point for your own learning process.
So take a moment to create such a little video or image. And then upload that into space
indicated below this clip. And we look forward to connecting with whatever you are going to
share with us and then connecting with you more directly and more interactively when you
choose to join the u.lab 1x in September and beyond.

Resources
Books
Theory U - The second edition of the book was just published (August 15, 2016), by Otto
Scharmer

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies (2013), co-
authored by Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaeufer 

Presence (2008), co-authored by Scharmer, Senge, Jaworski, Flowers

Links
Planetary - Watch the feature film by the team behind The Overview Effect (the astronaut
video)

Blogs
Otto's Huffington Post blog - new posts every few weeks.

Websites
u.lab 1x community site (currently under construction, will re-launch in September 2016)
Otto's website
Presencing Institute

Related courses
u.lab 1x: Leading From the Emerging Future
Just Money: Banking as if Society Mattered - a course on transforming the financial system, co-
developed and led by Leading From the Emerging Future co-author Katrin Kaeufer

Related media
Fire in the Blood - This documentary illustrates a theme that will recur throughout u.lab: the
disconnect between our institutions and societal needs, and the new cross-sector leadership
that it takes to transform this situation for the better.

The House I Live In - A powerful example of "collectively creating results that nobody wants".

Inside Job - Academy award-winning documentary on the 2008 financial crisis.