1. Otto Scharmer: What Wants to Emerge?

Leadership Between Sensing, Resonance, and Open Futures

How does the future emerge?

At first, this may sound like an unusual question. We are accustomed to talking about the future as something that lies ahead of us. We try to predict it, develop scenarios, formulate visions, and design strategies to prepare ourselves for what is to come.

With Theory U, Otto Scharmer offers a different approach. Rather than deriving the future solely from past experience, he invites us to open our perception and sense what is beginning to emerge.

His thinking has significantly enriched the conversation about leadership and change. Two of his ideas seem particularly relevant to me when considering leadership in a complex world: Sensing and Downloading.

At the same time, engaging with Scharmer's thinking leads me to a question that goes further:

Is there actually a future that is emerging and that we can learn to sense? Or do futures only come into being through the dialogue between ourselves and the world?

This distinction fundamentally changes how we think about leadership.

The Danger of Downloading

Scharmer uses the term “Downloading” to describe a mode of perception in which we rely on existing patterns of thought and experience.

We see what we already know.

At first, there is nothing unusual or inherently problematic about this. Human beings need experience, categories, and routines in order to navigate their environment and remain capable of acting.

It becomes problematic when we no longer notice that we are perceiving the world through these patterns.

We begin to mistake our interpretation of reality for reality itself.

A new situation is quickly categorized:

We’ve seen this before.

This is how we solved it last time.

That doesn’t work in our organization.

There’s a best practice for this.

But something more is happening here than simply making a potentially inaccurate assessment.

We give a situation shape before we have truly explored it.

And that shape then influences what we are still able to perceive.

Downloading therefore does more than reproduce the past.

Downloading limits possible futures.

Because the moment we view a new situation exclusively through familiar categories, we reduce the space of what might emerge from it.

Sensing – Perceiving Before We Respond

This is where I see one of the great strengths of Scharmer's thinking.

Sensing requires a different quality of attention.

Rather than observing a situation from the outside and categorizing it as quickly as possible, we try to immerse ourselves more deeply in it. For a moment, we suspend our habitual interpretations and open our perception to what is actually happening.

For leaders, this is a demanding capability.

Because organizations often reward the opposite.

Leaders are expected to understand quickly, decide quickly, and provide solutions quickly.

Yet speed can lead us to respond to a situation before we have truly perceived it.

Under complex conditions, this becomes particularly dangerous.

When cause and effect cannot be clearly connected and developments cannot be reliably predicted, experience from the past is only of limited help.

What we need instead is the ability to perceive without immediately defining.

Sensing creates an important space for this.

And yet, for me, this is exactly where another question begins.

What happens within us while we perceive?

Perception is not a neutral process.

Something we observe touches us, irritates us, awakens our curiosity, or triggers resistance.

An inner response emerges.

I would like to use the term resonance for this.

Resonance means more than emotion. It describes what happens in the encounter between ourselves and the world.

Something stands out.

• Perhaps we do not yet know why.

• Perhaps we cannot yet give it meaning.

• Perhaps there is simply an inkling:

• There is something here.

This resonance can be the beginning of development.

Not the idea.

Not the goal.

Not the vision.

But a perception that causes something within us to resonate.

Development May Begin Before There Is an Idea

Our conventional understanding of development often begins with an image of what could be.

We have an idea of what should become better. From this, we derive goals, concepts, projects, and actions.

This form of development makes sense as long as we have a reasonably clear understanding of what we want to achieve.

But what happens when the new cannot yet even be imagined?

Then an existing idea may actually reduce the space for development.

Unconsciously, we begin searching for what fits our idea. Other possibilities disappear from our perception.

Perhaps, then, we need to think differently about development.

Development could begin with resonance.

At the beginning, we do not yet know what will emerge.

• We perceive something.

• Something responds within us.

• We stay with that perception.

• We explore.

• We ask questions.

• Perhaps we experiment.

• Gradually, an initial shape begins to emerge.

The crucial difference is that we do not limit the space of possibility from the outset by imposing a fully formed idea upon it.

Openness Is Not Inaction

At first, this may sound passive.

But openness does not mean waiting.

Quite the opposite.

It takes courage not to explain a situation immediately. It takes courage to stay with uncertainty. And it takes courage to follow an inkling when we do not yet know where it might lead.

Perhaps openness is therefore one of the most demanding capabilities of leadership.

Openness means holding our interpretations provisionally.

We are allowed to interpret. In fact, we need to interpret in order to become capable of acting.

But we do not have to declare our interpretation to be reality.

This leaves space.

And that space is anything but empty.

It is a space of possibility.

Is There Such a Thing as “The” Emerging Future?

At this point, I would like to take Scharmer's thinking one step further.

For me, the idea of an “emerging future” contains a receptive quality: we open ourselves to something that wants to emerge, sense it, and then bring it into the world.

Increasingly, however, I find myself asking whether the future can emerge independently of us at all.

Because the moment we perceive, we already change our relationship to the situation.

• Our perception creates resonance.

• Resonance shifts our attention.

• We ask a question, begin a conversation, change something, or conduct an experiment.

• And in doing so, we change the situation.

• The changed situation, in turn, responds to us.

• We perceive again.

• Something else creates resonance.

• New possibilities emerge.

  
  

This is why I would not speak of the future.

I would speak of futures.

Futures Emerge Through Dialogue

Dialogue, in this sense, means far more than a conversation between two people.

Dialogue can emerge between one person and another, between a person and an organization, between a person and technology, between a person and an idea, or between a person and their environment.

We bring something into the world.

The world responds.

Its response changes us.

And we respond again.

Within this interplay, possibilities emerge that may not even have existed before.

This also changes our understanding of shaping.

Shaping no longer means exclusively:

I have an idea, and I turn it into reality.

It can also mean:

That is a fundamental difference.

Shaping and openness are no longer opposites.

Quite the contrary.

Shaping without openness easily reproduces what has already been thought.

Shaping with openness makes room for what has not yet been thought.

Leadership as a Dialogue With What Is Possible

This ultimately changes one of the central questions of leadership.

It is no longer only:

What wants to emerge?

Perhaps the question becomes:

Leadership, then, means neither predicting the future nor simply sensing an emerging future as early as possible.

Leadership means creating conditions in which new possibilities can emerge.

For this, we need Sensing.

We need to learn to perceive more carefully.

We need to recognize Downloading and become capable of interrupting our familiar patterns of thought.

But beyond that, we need the capacity for resonance.

The ability to notice what a situation evokes within us without immediately turning that inner response into a finished explanation.

And we need shaping.

Not as the implementation of a preconceived idea, but as a response within an ongoing dialogue.

Perhaps this is one of the central leadership capabilities for a complex world:

Because being future-ready does not mean knowing the future.

It means remaining open to resonance and creating conditions in which futures can emerge – perceiving what begins to show itself, responding to it, and through that response allowing new possibilities to come into being.

Perhaps the future, then, is less something that lies ahead of us.

Perhaps it is something that continually emerges anew.

Also through us.