I first came into touch with Otto Scharmer’s ‘Theory U’ through the Pioneers of Change network in about 2002, and my friends at Engage! InterACT in the Netherlands. Reading Scharmer’s excellent summation of ten years developing this model of transformational learning, I realise how influential this learning has been and how resonant this work is with approaches from human ecology, integral theory, and mind-body practice in the meditative/mystic traditions…

In short, I’m excited by this stuff and it’s great that it’s now available and so clearly communicated. Over the next six months I’m helping a small team from WWF UK bring the ‘U’ process together with learning history approach and other action research methods to ‘pre-sense’ how their work might step up its impact.

So what is presence?

“The field structure of attention describes the realm between the visible world (what we see) as it meets the invisible world (the source of place from which we perceive it). When we change the way we attend, a different world is going to come forth.” (Scharmer, 2007 p.114)

I enjoy Scharma’s emphasis on the challenge to become present to a collective highest potential, and his questions about the nature and structure of awareness; the phenomenology of perception:

“The challenges we face right now are pressuring us to look differently, to sharpen and deepen our attention. We need to cultivate the collective capacity to shift the inner place from where we operate… you cross the threshold by transforming the structure of your attention, by seeing and tuning into the crack [in reality].” (ibid. p. 116)

I see transformational change happening as I find space in myself and with others (sometimes in contexts that I consciously facilitate to this end) to deepen my/our sense of being present and facing directly my/our realities. Through this gateway of ‘being here, now’, it becomes possible to touch into aliveness of the moment, to reach beyond the rut of patterned responses and projections. It becomes possible to sense something fresh and find new words that enable that space to breathe, to breathe into expanded life.

The heart of action research is, for me, all about opening this space, and inquiring into what helps the space to emerge. This question has led me to an exploration of my own habits of mind, body and profession as a facilitator; a sense that the quality and depth of space I am able to hold is directly related to my the depth and quality of spaciousness I am able to rest in, in the moment, as I do this work.

Or, put differently… an inquiry into William O’Brian’s proposition that “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener” (quoted by Otto Scharmer 2007).

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