Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and society - Hardcover

Senge, Peter M.; Scharmer, C. Otto; Jaworski, Joseph; Flowers, Betty Sue

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 038551624X ISBN 13: 9780385516242

Verlag: Crown Businss, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Four pioneers in the field of organizational learning--Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers--explore the concept of transformational change, from how it comes about to its influence on people and their institutions, as it relates to collective change and its implications. 35,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Senge is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the founding chair of SoL, a renowned pioneer, theorist, and writer in the field of management innovation, and the author of the widely acclaimed book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Doubleday/Currency, 1990). C. Otto Scharmer is a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a Visiting Professor at the Helsinki School of Economics, and international action researcher, and author of the forthcoming book Theory U: Leading from the Emerging Future. Joseph Jaworski is the chairman of Generon Consulting, cofounder of the Global Leadership Initiative, and author of the critically acclaimed Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (Berrett-Koehler, 1996). Prior to her current role as director of the Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, Betty Sue Flowers was a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and an international business consultant.

SoL (The Society for Organizational Learning, Inc.), an outgrowth of the former MIT Center for Organizational Learning, is a nonprofit international membership organization that connects researchers, organizations, and consultants in over thirty countries in building knowledge for systemic change. A portion of the net proceeds from SoL publishing sales are reinvested in basic research, applied learning projects, and building a global network of learning communities.

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1

The Requiem Scenario

November 2000

T he four of us were sitting in a circle in the study of Otto’s home on Maple Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Outside, a light snow was falling. Inside, under the windows, Otto had placed bright red poinsettias. The walls were covered with charts, several with a large U drawn on them. Books were neatly stacked everywhere, and in one corner a computer hummed quietly.

“When Otto said that Jurassic Park was written in this house, I couldn’t help thinking how ironic it was, given our conversations,” said Betty Sue. “Now here we are sitting in the ‘house of the dinosaurs’ talking about a real-life nightmare scenario: the destruction of our environ­ment; the growing social divide between rich and poor; the potential dangers of things like biotechnology; and escalating violence around the world.”

“Isn’t it ironic the way people talk about dinosaurs?” Peter said. “Today we say an organization is ‘just like a dinosaur’ when we mean it’s slow and can’t adjust to change. But you know, the dinosaurs did manage to survive over a hundred times longer than humans have so far. Whatever beings might take our place here in the future will prob­ably say, ‘Just like the human beings–too bad they didn’t have the adaptive capabilities of dinosaurs!’”

Betty Sue shuddered. “Hearing human beings talked about in the past tense like that is terribly chilling. I guess we all know that since we have the means to destroy ourselves, it’s possible that we will. The unthinkable is possible, but it’s still very difficult to consider. The poet Auden said, ‘We must love one another or die.’ No one thinks we’re very close to loving one another just yet, but we also don’t seem will­ing to consider the consequences of not doing so.”

“And that’s why we don’t change,” Peter replied. “I was speaking at a conference on business and the environment last week, and stayed at a conference center that I first visited twenty years ago. This center hosts a conference every year at which a prestigious environmental sustainability award is given, so you would expect it to be a showcase for environmentally sound practices, but I'm sure this place generates more waste per customer than they did twenty years ago.

“Everything is individually wrapped–coffee, sugar, shampoo– and each container will be thrown away. The materials used in the room were no more environmentally sound then they had been twen­ty years ago–the wood hadn’t been sustainably harvested, the plas­tics and materials couldn’t be recycled, and the appliances couldn’t be remanufactured. I had asked for a room where I could open the windows. They didn’t have any because they relied on central air-conditioning and heating. The electricity that drove the air condition­ing undoubtedly came mostly from power plants that burned coal and other fossil fuels–heating up the earth in order to cool off our rooms. Then I saw this silly little bar of soap, individually wrapped. Somehow it epitomized the whole situation.

“Those soaps end up being ninety percent wasted–waste that is completely unnecessary. They could easily be replaced by liquid soap dispensers that create almost no waste. There are even biodegradable liquid soaps now. One is manufactured by a supplier in Sweden, partly owned by Scandic, which has gone from a mediocre, financially strapped business to one of Sweden’s most financially successful hotel chains, in part through its commitment to ‘the sustainable hotel room.’ There’s no reason being environmentally smart can’t be good for business as well–at least in Sweden.

“So I stood there looking at this little bar of soap, listening to my air conditioner whir in the background, feeling angrier and angrier, and wondered why this American conference center still hadn’t learned in twenty years what the Swedish hotel chain had learned in a few years. Why were we even still bothering to hold conferences about environmental business practices? Do we Americans care at all about the effects we’re having on the natural environment that all life must share? Then I saw the only artifact of environmental conscious­ness in the whole room–a little card that said, ‘In order to help the environment, we won’t do your linens if you don’t ask us to.’ Give me a break! After twenty years, all we’ve accomplished is they won’t wash our linens if we don’t ask them to!”

“We’ve all known the frustration and discouragement you were feeling,” said Betty Sue. “At least I have. But are you saying that we avoid these issues to avoid the discouragement?”

“Not quite.” Peter paused and continued quietly, “I had a difficult meditation this morning. It was very disturbing, as sometimes they are. I seemed to be in touch with an extraordinary fear–just the fear by itself, no thoughts or associations.

“This fear is probably present more than I’m willing to see, except when it suddenly pokes through like it did this morning. The anger I felt at the hotel came from this deeper fear. I’ve known about the threats to the environment for so long–but the changes we’ve made are so small, given what’s needed and what we’re capable of achieving.

“If the future is going to be different, we have to go far beyond these little piecemeal gestures and begin to see the systems in which we’re embedded–and I guess I have doubts if we’re up for this. The ques­tion isn’t, ‘Do you want your bed linens changed?’ It’s more like, ‘Do you want to change the way you live?’ But this question sits on top of an immense fear, and I think that, Betty Sue, is one reason we prefer not to think, or talk, about these things.”

Joseph leaned forward. “But isn’t that why we’re here? Haven’t we come together to answer one fundamental question: Why don’t we change? What would it take to shift the whole?”

“We don’t change because we think we’re immortal.” Otto’s tone was matter-of-fact. “Like teenagers, we might be afraid, but we still think we’ll go on forever.”

“Perhaps that’s true,” said Joseph, shaking his head. “I recently read an article that’s been circulating in the foundation community written by a man named Jack Miles, a senior adviser to the J. Paul Getty Trust, called ‘Global Requiem.’1 It’s a speculation about what would happen if we started to realize that humankind might not overcome these problems, that we might not develop a sustainable society–that the human race might perish. It’s an exploration of the unthinkable.”

“But don’t scenarios like that evoke the very fear Peter is talking about?” Otto asked. “As he showed, this sort of fear is usually met by denial or simply makes us feel hopeless.”

“But that doesn’t have to happen,” Joseph replied. “I’ve seen many instances where imagining alternative futures, even negative futures, can actually open people up.”

“Scenarios can alter people’s awareness,” Betty Sue agreed. “If they’re used artfully, people actually begin to think about a future that they’ve ignored or denied. The key is to see the different future not as inevitable, but...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown Businss
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 038551624X
• ISBN 13: 9780385516242
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 289
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar