Sensing the Emerging Future

This week I joined a MOOC (a free online course) run by Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute out of MIT. It’s called U.Lab: Transforming Business, Society, and Self. Over 7000 people from all over the world are registered. I pause to just take it in. That many people are joining together for this??

There was a live session yesterday with our instructor, Otto Scharmer, and his team. It was about establishing the context, setting intentions, and providing inspiration. You can see the whole session here.

Otto asked us to bring a mindfulness practice into setting our intentions for the course. He asked us to first tune into our bodies and move into the present moment. From that place he asked us to sense into several questions:

In your community, what seems to be waiting to die?

In your community, what seems to be wanting to be born?

You can see a word cloud of the class answers if you watch the video of the session. At one point Otto stood there speechless as he watched our answers in real time.

What was inspiring to me was the way Otto used mindfulness as an intuitive process to tune into what is wanting to emerge in our communities and in our lives.

Here are some related thoughts from his book:

This inner shift, from fighting the old to sensing and presencing an emerging future possibility, is at the core of all deep leadership work today. It’s a shift that requires us to expand our thinking from the head to the heart. It is a shift from an ego-system awareness that cares about the well-being of oneself to an eco-system that cares about the well-being of all, including oneself.

This shift in awareness from ego-system to eco-system is something that we are approaching and living through not only as groups and organizations, but also as a global community. Pioneering the principles and personal practices that help us to perform this shift may well be one of the most important undertakings of our time.

Otto Scharmer in Leading from the Emerging Future