A Little About Theory U

The New Century Summit at the Berkeley UU Church this weekend used the principles of Theory U, which was refined by Otto Scharmer, a senior lecturer at MIT. He collaborated on a book about the process (with Peter Senge, Betty Sue Flowers and Joseph Jaworski) called Presence. It is a leadership model with a difference.

Scharmer has observed four different types of listening: downloading, factual listening, empathic listening and generative listening. You know you're downloading when you say, "Yeah, I know that already." With factual listening, you might say, "Ooh, look at that." You switch off your inner voice of judgment and focus on what is different from what you already know. Empathic listeners might say, "Oh, yes, I know exactly how you feel." It requires an open heart to really feel how another feels. We can begin to see the world through the other's eyes. And generative listening is listening from the emerging field of future possibility. "I can't express what I experience in words. Everything slows down. I am connected to something larger than myself."

Another way to say it is that to listen in this new way, we need to 1) observe, observe, observe; 2) retreat and reflect -- allow our inner knowing to emerge; and 3) act in an instant. (This means to prototype the new in order to explore the future by doing, to create a little landing strip of the future that allows for hands-on testing and experimentation.)

Scharmer says that connecting to one's best future possibility and creating powerful breakthrough ideas requires learning to access the intelligence of the heart and the hand -- not just the intelligence of the head.