EP 142: Theory U & Social Transformation | Otto Scharmer, PhD

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. My name is Fleet Maul, your host and in this episode I'm having a talk with Dr. Otto Swarmer, senior lecturer at MIT and co founder of the Presencing Institute, most famous for his Theory U Model. And we had a deep conversation about what it really takes to transform society at the global level and how we can make our individual contributions to that. In his Theory U Model they talk about leading from an emergent future and it's an in depth way to really drop into what is and let something new emerge from what wants to be, what needs to be. So stepping out of our kind of egoic system and our dominant systems to really open up to what wants to be, what the future is calling from us. We also talked about that in the context of the current war in Ukraine and many other situations that are going on right now. So fascinating conversation with one of the brilliant minds on the planet.

Welcome Dr. Sharma, how are you?

Very good, how are you?

I'm doing great and I'm really excited to be having this conversation with you today. Our focus is on sense making and resilient systems and of course Otto Swarmer is well known for his theory you and all of the global work you've been doing around that. So this is a perfect conversation for today. So I'm going to share a bit of your bio and then we'll get started with the conversation. All right, so Otto Schwarmer, Dr. Otto Schwarmer is a Senior Lecturer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT Sloan School of Management and co founder of the Presencing Institute. He chairs the MIT Ideas Program for Cross Sector Innovation and introduced the concept of learning from the emerging future in his bestselling books Theory youy and Presence, the latter co authored with Peter Senge and others. He is co author of Leading from the Emerging Future, which outlines eight acupuncture points for transforming capitalism. His most recent book, the Essentials of Theory youy, which came out in 2018, summarizes the core principles and applications of awareness based systems change. In 2015 he co founded the MIT X U Lab and in 2020 the Gaia Journey, Global Activation of Intention and Action which have activated a vibrant worldwide ecosystem of transformational change involving more than 200,000 users from 185 countries. Most recently, with his colleagues, he co created a global action learning lab for hundreds of change makers across UN agencies, as well as a suite of SDG leadership labs that help UN country teams to implement the Sustainable Development Goals. Otto earned his diploma and PhD in economics from Witten Hedricke. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that right. University in Germany. He is a member of the UN Learning Advisory Council for 2030 Agenda, the world Future Council on the Club of rome's High Level 21st Century Transformational economics Commission. He has won the Jamison Prize for teaching excellence at MIT and the European Leonardo Corporate Learning Award. In 2021, he received the Elevating Humanity Award from the Organizational Development Network.

So I think people can.

If you didn't already know about Arushwarma's work, you can understand why we're having this conversation on our day about resilience systems. We've been through another really tough year with multiple waves of the pandemic, which maybe now seems to be a B, we hope, but anyway, it's still been a very tough year. The increasingly obvious climate emergency, we were in a continual breakdown in our information ecology and increasing divisiveness and polarization and now we have this terrible war in Ukraine. And so I'm wondering what the year has been like for you and also what it's like for you to witness this as I believe you're still a German citizen. You at least were born and educated in Germany, so you're European. So I'm curious about, you know, what the year has been like for you and then how it is for you to be witnessing this, this invasion and land war in Europe.

Well, yes, you're right. I'm a dual citizen and so.

Yeah, I think.

You know, there's seeing what's happening, but more importantly seeing the course of action now that it's taken is so painful and.

To some degree also.

Paralyzing. Right. So, so I think there's, and it's like so almost what it does with you, you know, attending so you can't not, not attend. Right. But what it does, it, you know, it pulls you out a little bit, right. Out of yourself, out of your body kind of. It's like, you know.

And so you lose a little bit the inner balance, right? The balance between attending something that's going on and also your own agency. Right. And I think that's a little bit the challenge always. Right. For well, being and resilience. How do you access your own agency in anything really and without.

Really disconnecting but from a deep connection to what's going on. So that's a little bit what I'm trying to make sense of.

Is.

One, how to really attend to this situation in a way that is activating our own agency rather than.

Freezing it.

Secondly, also really, I think when I.

Sense it to my own body.

There is a little bit like deja vu almost, right? So because kind of that kind of feeling, that's not the first time we had it. We had it particularly in the beginning of the pandemic. We had it during the Trump years. And so then there were earlier occasions as well. But there is. So it feels like ever since, I mean, when I think about my own children, they're born around the year 2000.

So.

That'S all they know. Right.

So it's 9, 11, and then the Iraq war and then the financial collapse.

So the 2008 financial crisis, which we are still feeling the impact of, and then.

There was kind of many regional events, right? Kind of like the invasion in the Krim area peninsula, and then.

Now. And then the Trump years.

Pandemic, and now this. So what I'm noticing is that the frequency tends to almost go up. Right.

So it's kind of these events that.

Basically move us.

Into an inner state.

That is.

Out of balance. Right? Out of balance and kind of into this kind of paralysis in terms of our own agency. You could say on the one hand. Right. On the other hand, I would say there's a lot going on, right. An amazing response and awakening. And that is, you could say, the most important, least well told story of our age, Right. Including kind of what's happening now in the Ukraine, how people respond, how they collaborate, kind of how they. Even, for example, last week.

As you know, kind of, for example, the EU Leadership Council. Right. Kind of that. So in foreign policy matters, right. You need 27 countries out of 27 countries agree on everything. That means almost nothing gets ever decided, right. So that's kind of slightly controversial. And the EU Council came out like last week.

With a really radical package, right. On the day the invasion happened, right. So kind of on the same evening, kind of they had. And so that's. And the reason why that happened is because most people who went into that meeting didn't really expect to come out of what they came out with, right. In terms of the sanctions and the unity, including kind of measures that hit the European economy as well.

In significant ways. But what really happened is that.

They had with the Ukrainian president, kind of a direct.

Connection during part of the Meeting where he said, look.

This may be the last time you see me alive, right? And he really articulated what it's like on the ground and what would be the help needed. Right? And that really kind of. So the awareness of the real situation on the ground really helped all these like 27 country leaders, right, that usually are pretty narrow, often like just defending their own national interest, what they are sort of also elected for, that allowed them to really lift themselves up, right. And kind of make decisions kind of more.

From an awareness of the unfolding situation that they were just exposed to. And I think that's another great example. So it's a microcosm of what we see. And when you see how.

Yes, Putin maybe the chief.

The chief of one of the most powerful armies.

In the world, and he is probably going to win for another while all the battles on the military battlefield, but you can already see that in the blind spot of his own isolation, including isolation from the Russian people and even from its own advisors, that they are the seeds of his own.

Downfall and eventual self destruction.

They anticipated many things, but apparently what they didn't anticipate is the civil society response, the civil society response in the Ukraine, not only the military, but really from everyone there, all kind of a whole people response. And in his own country, in Russia, right, in more than thousand cities, people taking to the streets in spite of everything that he has put into place against it, right. Over the past couple of years, as we all know. And that's, I think, kind of when I look at that, I see in that really the presence of the human spirit, right. Kind of. So that's coming through. And even kind of in very unlikely places, like for example, the EU leadership, right. It does show up once in a while, right? So, and I think that's something I call awareness based collective action. So where kind of collective action arises from seeing the whole, from a shared awareness of the whole. And I think.

That is one of the greatest sources of hope. We see that in critical situations. And probably the EU, over the course of the past seven days grew more together than in two decades of conversations and negotiations before. And that continues in the face of danger, when we are looking together into the abyss and we begin to see ourselves. Because when they had the conversation on that night with Zelenskyy, that's what he told them. He told them, you are part of the problem. So they saw themselves.

They saw the abyss, and they saw how they are part of generating the abyss. And I think that's a kind of mindset that's kind of a systems view that's not based on othering, but that's based on really bending the beam of observation back onto ourselves and seeing how the problem that we face collectively also has to do with my own actions. That's giving me hope. And that's kind of what I see. We see in many places arising now in local radical region initiatives. We see kind of in city ecologies, how people come together. We even see it on the international stage every now and then. Think about 2015, the Paris Agreement before we lose it again. Right, but so it's not, but it is something I would say kind of there is kind of this other story in the world today which has not to do with the.

Social grammar of destruction. Right. Which is kind of the Putinism Trumpism kind of story.

But which has to do with the social grammar of creation. And that's kind of something that I call presencing. Presencing as sensing, emerging the highest future possibility and operating from that connection, embodying that connection in the present moment. And that gives me a lot of hope. So I'm sitting kind of depending on when you ask me. So I feel like the presence of both of these realities at the same time. And I think that's probably what most of us do.

Yeah, well, it's so helpful that you can articulate that the hopeful side of it because it's just so necessary. And it does seem that where we are as humanity is, we still seem to need these extreme wake up calls to sort of come together, get our act together. But you shared so much there. I mean, early in what you shared, you really described the impact of trauma, what trauma does to us. It takes us out of our bodies, it gets us out of our capacity to be in a responsive relational mode. It undermines our capacity for self regulation and self agency. And so it just undermines so many things and individually and then collectively. And of course it would not very big leap to see all the collective trauma antecedents of this war, not to justify anything that's going on, but obviously the whole history of two world wars and the Holocaust and everything else that's going on in Europe, really centuries of warfare in Europe and Russia and Germany being major players in that obviously as well as the rest of Europe.

And you start laying some of the seeds of looking at this through a theory you perspective. And, and it has been very encouraging to see. Prior to this it seemed like European leaders and countries were just busy with the business of the day, the status quo, their squabbles and self interest. And it seems to take this and earlier Post World War II, when the threat of the Soviet Union was very alive, Europe was much more unified. But as the illusion of peace and stability, people seemed to devolve into self interest. That seems to be a human problem we have. And it almost seems like we need this phenomena of a common enemy of some kind to come together. And one of the things that's been very disheartening here in the US is.

The pandemic could have served that purpose. But because we're in such a breakdown culturally and politically, it only exacerbated divides and things were weaponized and further conflict and politicization around things like mask wearing and vaccinations and so forth. So.

I wonder if we could start with maybe just your sense of what resilience is kind of individually and collectively. And then I would like to begin to explore how we kind of take that theory journey and look at this. Maybe the signs of all the, I mean, there's always breakdown before transformation, right? So maybe how can we find the threads and follow the threads that will lead us into the sensing that could take us into that emerging future and what wants to, what wants to be so? But to begin with, since we're really talking about individual and collective resilience on this summit, what does resilience mean to you?

I have actually two things. One is to comment on your comment and then I will answer that question you pose to begin. So I think that is true what you said. So you said we almost need kind of the common enemy to come together. And empirically, when you look at that, and I think what happened now in Europe is the perfect example for your point. On the other hand, it is also a mindset that.

Lets us run into trouble. So for example, when you really look at why was it what really triggered the current situation?

Because a big part of that is the U.S. state Department, the U.S. foreign policy, frankly, it's, that is still embodying this old mindset in many ways. And the way the Russian security interests have been ignored and.

Responded to a tone death or kind of just.

Somehow diminished is part of the story. What we now see, I mean, Putin's blind spot, but in short is kind of civil society and kind of this kind of collective awareness based action that he may be surprised by. But the blind spot of the west is that we don't see our own involvement in that story either. Right. And that's particularly true for the, for the Americans. Right. And it was Bush who went there and said Well, I am, you know, basically invited the Ukraine into.

That was kind of infused by them. It was the US who was meddling in Ukrainian politics when it was still kind of the old government and.

All of these. And so why not? I mean the simple response request from first Yeltsin and then kind of Putin later over many years, which was always the same kind of not to join the NATO. I mean we have enough EU members, right? Like Finland, like Sweden, like Austria, like Ireland, who are not NATO members. Right. There's nothing wrong with that. Right. So why is that something that is never thought of as an action that's totally illogical and kind of the lack of even the consciousness for that has to do with that mindset, right. Kind of this enemy based mindset that does not really see the possibility also on the other side. And I think that's where that's the boundary we are hitting against. And the same is true for climate, right. Because we need to also collaborate with the Chinese civilization on that and with the Russians and with everyone else. So in a way the enemy is ourselves, right? It's not. So that's. But unless we are able to look into the mirror and recognize it's our old behaviors, including these mental models, right. Of othering. Right. Of kind of that total lack of empathy and totally lack of a Russian country that suffered 16 million kind of casualties in World War II. Right. Of course there's a collective trauma. Right. Of course there is something more sensitive that you can easily trigger if you then move with NATO one wave after another deep into the former Soviet Union states. So that's, I think it is like this lack of this tone, depth way of doing foreign policy that is lacking really a deeper sensing capacity of really what it means for the other sides. That's I think an interesting missing piece there that we now pay, particularly the Ukrainians pay a very high price for. So that's like just a comment, right? And kind of.

Well, just to follow up on that a minute, you know that I think you're pointing something very important that at the nation state level, certainly in the west, but maybe globally, we're still stuck in this kind of game theory, winner, loser, zero sum game approach, right. We can't seem to get beyond that. The UN is designed to help us get beyond that. I'm not sure how successful it is, but as long as we stay stuck in this win or loser zero sum thinking and even in your country with fall the Berlin Wall. I was talking to my colleague Thomas Hubel and he talked about how you Know, the reunification east and west in Germany was really the assimilation of the east and to the West. There's no sense of a real respectful dialogue, east and west here. It's more like the west is wanting to assimilate more and more into its Western world. And we get a lot of resentment from other parts of the world around us. And we can't seem to get off our sense of we're right and they're wrong.

You're absolutely right. So you have 12 years of Hitler, then you have, I don't know.

40 years of socialism on top of that, the next regime. And then people finally think, now freedom comes and what comes the worst people from West Germany coming over there in Western Europe and basically taking over the country. Right. So that's kind of from an Eastern German perspective, right? So you have been on the, you know, you know, through. Basically you just went through these two traumatic experience and now comes the third one. And that is exactly the psychological conditions out of which people.

Vote. AfD, right. Kind of basically the, the right wing party that is much more supported in eastern Germany than it was anywhere else in Germany. It's kind of the functional equivalent also for when you look at the map, kind of who is voting Trump or who is voting Brexit. It's always the same. It's kind of people who have been marginalized, not only economically taking away all the opportunities, but also they are not really part of the conversation. They don't see themselves. Right. When they, when they look into their cultural conversations. And so it's kind of this.

That kind of mechanism of exclusion which is creating an anger, which then is resulting in what we see kind of in, you know, in both countries in different ways playing out and in other countries in other ways. So I think that's the social grammar of how these new type of 21st century problems happening. And what I find so interesting is I think in this century, it's very different than in last century. Last century was capitalism, socialism, two social systems were working against each other, competing basically. And then you have the end of the Cold War. Now it's a much more complex story, right? Because now it's kind of.

Number one. We no longer share one reality, right? Kind of. So it's like just look inside the United States, right?

The Trump world is one universe and then there's kind of.

The. Whatever you call it, right? So the other universe. And it's like that what used to be a society is breaking into pieces, right? Of at least two, but probably more kind of pieces that More and more lose the connection of connecting with each other. And the same we see playing out on a geopolitical field, right. There's no mechanism, I mean, that Putin is living in his own world kind of. So there is not the connection, the conversation that would allow us to somehow move out of this now together. The plumbing is not there, Right. And I think a lot of that has to do really with the capacity to look into the mirror together, right? And to really. So the foundation building, what that's necessary today is, I believe a lot has to do. And that will also be one of the important sources of resilience is to feeling again the social body that we share, rather than getting stuck inside our own echo chambers, which of course is happening not only through the media world, but also through the social media world. And amplified that way, I would say.

On the. What, you know, so the resilience kind of.

I mean, when you look around, you almost find.

No person who doesn't have like a quasi burnout, right? Or it's close to or knows people that are. And so this, I think kind of this particularly, you know, at the tail end of the pandemic or the current wave of the pandemic. Pandemic, that is a almost universal condition you find we find in ourselves and in each other. And so when, what, what resilience for me is really the capacity in these new environments that we all know kind of. So what. What's happening now is probably not going to.

The, the subject will change, right? So, but what's going to stay is kind of the phenomenon of disruption. And I just went through kind of the last 20 years, right, all the disruptions we had. So that's. When you look at the technology, when you look at climate change, when you look at inequality, there's one thing very clear, the disruption will keep coming our way and they will amplify each other kind of. That's the one thing we do know. And so the question then for resilience is how can we build the capacity that these.

Disruptions that come our way are not pulling us out of balance, are not pulling us out of ourselves in a way that we lose ourselves and.

We get into a totally reactive and exhaustive mode and in. So how do we nurture ourselves and how do we, you know, balance ourselves? And so I think this, you know, the, the guide for that is kind of, you know, when you, for example, look into the research of, of well being and happiness, I mean, most of these studies point at the same three or so things, right? It is basic. It's something very simple, right? It's connecting with nature, connecting with planet Earth, with Mother Nature. It's connecting with each other. Right. So, so having cultivating relationships, deep relationships kind of that are empathic, generative, kind of that, you know, work on all the different levels and channels that we have as humans and therefore nurture us as a social field. And then the third one is connecting with ourselves, with our own spirit, with our own emerging self, with kind of who we could be tomorrow, with our sense of purpose, with our sense of what we are here for. And I think it's those three dimensions. So resilience essentially means kind of that, this.

So what's going to increase is that the exterior forces and the contradictions that we face by them will be amplified. So we will be pulled more into different directions. And the only way of dealing with that is to strengthen your own self. Right. And how do you do that? By cultivating these three relationships with the planet, kind of with Mother nature, with each other, kind of. And you know, for some people that may be many, but you know, for most people that's not that many people. Kind of the core relationships, it's just, you know.

It'S not necessarily a big number of people, but they are very critical. And what is the quality time.

We put in place that allows us to cultivate these really critical relationships and then the relationship to our, ourselves, right? So that's, you know, where we. Moments of stillness, moments of meditation, moments of kind of connecting really with what we're here for, what we are in service of. And I think there's like many, there's like many different forms, so you can do that. But these are kind of the three anchor points, I would say, that allow us to strengthen ourselves in a way that gives us the capacity to deal with the increasing.

Dissonances we will be working with and the increasing tensions that decision makers and human beings will be confronted with going forward.

That's a beautiful framework. And what you gave is a classic description of spiritual well being. And resilience is that sense of connectedness interpersonally within ourselves, interpersonally with each other, and then with some greater dimension, whether it's nature, the divine or the natural world of the earth that gives our life meaning and purpose. And.

You know, you mentioned plumbing before that we don't have the plumbing that, you know, and I think that's a, you know, resilience is both individually is developing our own, a healthy, resilient neurobiology, right. That can make us stronger and more resilient and then how do we then, you know, create that plumbing collectively? But to begin with, I really like that you focused on, you know, contrasting burnout and how much burnout there is with the need for individual resilience. And you know, in May we're putting out another summit. It's all about self care because we just feel it's so necessary right now. And in some ways, you know, you could be tempted to say, you know, really we all need to focus on our individual resilience because it's going to get tougher, it's going to get harder and at least we can take good care of ourselves. Maybe that's the best we can do. And I do think that's really important because if we can find some way to co create collective resilience or systemic resilience, it's going to be relatively resilient people that do that.

Right.

We can't do that from a place of burnout and being out of ourselves and being reactive and so forth. So I do think it's essential that we all really focus on our individual resilience. And we have a lot of science supporting how to really do that effectively today.

And we don't want to give up on the, on the, we can't give up on the collective, right? So maybe from that theory you perspective and you're right, like here in our country in the US we have almost no shared cultural commons anymore. There's a complete breakdown with you know, the so called post truth era. And you know, people feel so marginalized. There's a fairly, fairly, what would have been considered fairly extreme kind of left view that's dominating the mainstream and kind of elite and tone deaf to anybody else. And then you have those feeling really marginalized, drifting further to the right and some people talk, you have these almost pseudo religious movements of what some people describe as Wokeism and that on the left and the QAnon other things on the right and they're collapsing the middle, there's very, there's very little middle left where there's any kind of shared commons. And, and so in that landscape how do we begin to. Because I think it's almost like we have to start over. And because many of the institutions that even with their corruptions and shadow side did kind of hold us together for centuries are dissolving or people aren't finding them relevant and everybody's just on the net, which doesn't really support resilience. I guess it can, but it's also really challenging. So how do we begin to find our way back to some kind of social cohesion and maybe recreate new frameworks for coming together and creating a shared commons of some kind of connection and trust and shared humanity and a sense of shared future that we all have to invest in. So I'm wondering if you could describe maybe any threads we could follow to begin that journey from the theory you perspective. I know that you've created these global networks and I'm sure that's what those are about. And. But it seems like it's ever more challenging and in particular here in our country. Essentially you pointed to the civil society in Ukraine that we're seeing, that resurgence of the people in civil society. I don't know what would happen here in the US Our civil society is all but dissolved here in the U.S.

Yeah, I think Bob Putnam was talking about that quite a while ago. And since then that that trend has certainly been amplified. I mean certainly civil society and.

Social connection has, and social capital has. The way we looked at it, kind of like with the traditional institutions organizing that, it has dissipated there. But I still wonder kind of whether to some degrees I think it shows, it can show up in interesting ways. That's what you see in the Ukraine. But let's also date our. So we now have this conversation on day seven or day eight of the invasion. Right. So that's early stage and of course it's going to be a lot more difficult later on. So when this tape will be a scene or so. But what you clearly can see in the beginning, like the week one and week two is.

The magic of everyone coming together. Right. Kind of. And that this is possible. No one thought that was possible. Right. And kind of. So I saw also on, you know, through some friends and also on German tv, interviews with people from civil society in Ukraine and they themselves are totally surprised. Right. They never expected that it came out of. They said a week ago I was kind of this normal guy there and now. So.

In other words, it is even of surprise for the very people who are enacting this, who are operating in this new way. And that also gives me some hope for even for places like here, where it looks very difficult, it really looks, as you said, you have wokeism on the one side and kind of all the right wing craziness on the other side. But structurally there's unfortunately a lot of similarities in terms of creating how you deal with people who think differently. Everything about social learning and really our capacity to hold community is about that, holding, learning how to work together with people who think Differently, Right. Not the same. Right. Who are not singing the same song. Kind of the same song.

And so, for example, when you ask, where is that actually happening? I would say it is happening. It is even happening in the United States. And where? Locally. Locally first. Because let's say in my street here, or let's say in our city, in our little city or, or other cities where you see. So what's bringing us together? The commons, right. So kind of our shared concerns. And I don't care whether you know what party you vote for. Right. But we have this. As neighbors kind of are living in the same city, we have this shared concern. So what we really need to learn in society today is how we work together, how we learn how to collaborate with people who think differently than I am. Right. And so it's kind of those kind of holding spaces where we intentionally move beyond our own bubble in order to organize for some more complex collaboration that say is necessary. Right. To regenerate our ecological, our social, but also our cultural commons. Right. That's, that's where a lot of positive things are already happening right now, but where you have the old ideologies and the old kind of bubbles being at war with each other. And I'm not saying everything is equal, so I'm not saying.

Some of the QAnon craziness is the same, then let's say kind of just wokeism based. But there are some structural similarities. Right. And that's a problem. Right. And so if we want to. So where that is, you know, disconnected from each other is particularly kind of on the higher levels and also on abstract levels. The more abstract kind of, the more kind of you move into these configurations, particularly if it's amplified through social media, which is basically thriving on amplifying disinformation, anger, outrage and fear. Right. And so.

That'S what we are seeing. So we are not seeing the deeper mechanisms that is actually generating that. So why is it so much worse now than it was, say 10, 20, 30 years ago? Well, dark money is one factor. Right. But the other one is big tech. So it's like having a business model that is based on activating these five things I just mentioned.

At its core, it's not like an accident. That's a core feature.

Because it's maximizing user behavior.

Beneath that is a contract that we never made, which is that the likes of Mark Zuckerberg are owning our data, which is our own experience.

We never made such a contract so that one person could take our own experience, turn that with data analytics. Into information that allows him to effectively successfully manipulate the behavior of the whole. That's basically what the business model is based on, as Shoshana Zuboff has so brilliantly laid out in her book the Age of Surveillance Capitalism. So I think those things, they were in a blind spot so far. But as we move forward, we will have to reflect on the deeper mechanisms that keep structurally amplifying these problems you and I just talked about kind of over the past half an hour. And as we do that, I think we will.

Renegotiate that contract in a way that puts data and technology much more.

Into the service of the evolution of the whole and not only into the service of big data company based empire building.

So that's a choice, right? So the question is, what's the intention we have.

When we design and create and use technology? And the more we activate our agency around that, I think the more we will be able to transform our society. So when you look at the bigger picture and zoom out, so 21st century, what are our big problems? It's, you know, it's climate and biodiversity, it's kind of inequality and poverty, but then it's also mental health, right? Kind of our, and I refer to these three things in theory, us, the ecological divide, the social divide, the spiritual divide, right? Those are our three big problems. And I think.

Most of them, so most people, also people who come in from a mindfulness perspective and so on, most people think, well, if just everyone is behaving differently, then the system changes. And from a systems view, you know, that's actually not true at all. Because for example, in terms of the climate problem, the problem is not just the individual consumer behavior, right? The problem is the collective choices we make, right? So that we are subsidizing the wrong kind of agriculture, right? That we are subsidizing the wrong kind of energy, right, that is killing us rather than the regenerative energy and so on and so forth. So in other words, it is the collective decision making, right, that really where we need different vehicles of sense making. Where kind of this sense making and systems thinking and how we attend to a situation together.

Where we do that, right, on the local level, on a regional level, but also kind of on a whole systems level. And today we don't have these infrastructures that facilitate these kinds of processes. In other words, the right people are not brought together into a communication situation. And if they do, if you bring them into the same room, what do you often see? The same old behavior, the same people giving the same speeches. So the second thing that you need is not only bringing them together, but the second thing is you need to give them a process that allows them to move from a silo view to a systems view, or as I would say, from an ego system awareness to an ecosystem awareness. And that actually is very well possible.

We and many others already doing this kind of work. Often it's locally, but it's also on higher levels, including a number of UN organizations. And that gives me a lot of hope that this actually can be scaled up to the degree necessary, but it requires an intentional effort. Today we live in a world where the G20 countries, this is 60% of the global population and 80% of the global GDP. So the population in the G20 countries.

Three out of four people, are in full support of transforming our current economic system towards.

Better addressing the ecological and social challenges of our time. Three out of four, it's 75%. But what's going on in reality, none of that. That's kind of the gap. And I think that's a gap that needs collective attention. That needs attention to how we actually make collective decisions. That's the challenge of democracy and how we need to evolve democracy.

Forward rather than backward, what we see today. And it also has to do really, with new civic infrastructures, often locally, where we really need to invest into and enhance our collaborative intelligence.

In ways that. That reach way beyond our existing bubbles, that more and more just separate from each other.

Wow.

So you began, and I love that you began by emphasizing the importance of local. Right. So when you really get down to the neighborhood level, we have such clear common interest. Right. You know, I live out in a little New England town, and we're starting, you know, we've been here a couple years, but we're getting to know our neighbors and people and. And we clearly have shared interest here beyond whatever politics we may hold. And it's much clearer the more local you go. And there are a lot of amazing things going on locally here in the US and around the world. But I know here in the US there are local networks forming. There's people who imagine intense disruptions coming our way from climate change and are starting to create the local networks that would be more resilient. So this whole idea of thinking globally and acting locally, local. Right. So there is a lot of that happening, and that's very hopeful. And I think a very necessary reweaving, resilience will be.

Network, locality. And I want to ask you about your work around that in a moment. And then you did talk about the more macro level where we do need collective action to change these systems. And I have a friend who's introducing some models to G20 that involve bringing blockchain technology into reflection, informing how data ownership data. And there is some promise that I don't understand enough about blockchain technology and smart contracts to understand how that works. But it's something about the agency over our data would be returned to us in some ways that would really work through these smart contracts. But there are these ideas going around. There needs to be this collective action.

And I think we can't ignore that. Economic drivers have to be part of the solution because they're so powerful in terms of how the interconnected world, you know, a lot of us kind of would just want to step out and go back to the, go back to the land and ignore, you know, it's all bad, it's all capitalism, it's all money. But if we don't get the economic drivers supporting transformation, it's going to be really hard to make much progress. I wonder if you could talk about though, I know that you have this global network of these U labs and other structures. So what does that look like on the ground? Let's say somebody, I know you have some U labs in Ukraine, but let's say somebody anywhere in the world, here in Vermont or in another country or somewhere, wants to start a U lab. And what does that work look like at the local level? And then how does that get networked up into the kind of movement you're trying to create? What does that actually look like on.

The ground and feel like? Well, I mean, ULAB is actually an interesting example, right. Because it almost like happened a little bit accidentally. So it's started really with my class here at mit, right. And so I teach this class, so it's called New Lab. And it's basically.

About transforming business society itself, right. And.

Methods and tools. And so it really puts your own journey and activate your own agency around that into the center. So I then, out of mit, as maybe some of the listeners will remember.

Started really the whole movement around democratizing access to education in the sense of putting all the knowledge online for free for all educators worldwide. Right. That was heavily resisted by many other universities. But, you know, then most others joined in. And.

Then MIT, in collaboration with Harvard and 30 other universities, created a platform, edX, that was then beginning to replicate courses that could be joined from anywhere, right. Kind of MIT or Harvard courses. And so I was invited to put my class there and that's what we did with ulab. But of course.

MIT have it being also somewhat traditional. It was just a one to many structure, basically lectures broadcasted out. But if you want to organize education around transformation, you need.

The crucible, you need a container, you need a kind of a space where really.

You know, a transformational holding space. And that's what we created with small groups, we call them coaching circle and for them to self organize kind of. We created an extra support structure so that from the presencing Institute that allowed them to do that now interestingly, so we put that online. It was a big experiment because the old wisdom was okay, you can only if you do like transformational leadership development and stuff like that. Transformational learning, yeah, you can do that. But it's small groups where it works, right? You cannot really scale that. And I think we were among the first example really that showed that. No, you can scale that. Right. And so until now. So that was the first time we did that was 2015. And now since then more than 200,000 people have participated in that. And more than you know.

You know, a third are reporting about life changing experiences, right. And the other ones kind of eye opening and so forth. So there's. So we know that you can. These transformational learning experiences, you can bring them to scale, but the condition is that you radically decentralize the classroom and that you really put people's intention, what they want to change into the core. That's really what we did with Hubs and gave them basically a lot of tools to self organize. It led to this ecosystem. I would say it's kind of much more. It started as a class, more traditional, but it really led to an ecosystem where you have a lot of people then going up and taking their own initiatives and they kind of continued. So for example, one example is an initiative that ended up transforming how education at the Stockholm School of Economics, right. The number school in northern Europe is being done, right, by bringing in kind of more outward facing and more inward facing experiential learning module and.

Many, many other initiatives in other fields. So what we do then in order to help these initiatives to progress, we have like a second part for Ulab that just brings these initiatives together. So there's always a big group around educational initiatives and then there's an almost equal as big one around business, but also regenerative agriculture of course is huge. And I would say if I had to point for one.

So our bigger topic here, resilience and what does it mean collectively? Agriculture, Regenerative agriculture. That's where everything Starts, you want to regenerate the economy. That's where you start. Because where does the economy start? With nature. And where is that most evident? In agriculture. So when you want to grow. And essentially, I think we are in a moment where we see one civilization dying, an old civilization that's based on a disconnect to nature, to each other, to oneself, and another civilization wanting to be born, which is a different way of running an economy, more on an ecosystem awareness, a different way of really democratic decision making and creating whole person, whole systems, learning spaces. And that's what we really talk about. And if you want to help these initiatives, I think what we see now in, for example, this ULAB2X that has all these initiatives, I would say these are like seed initiatives for this other, you could say civilizational impulse. Right? So where. Or this other imagination of what our society could be if we are bridging the three divides to nature, to each other, to ourselves, rather than deepening that disconnect.

So that's where I think in the past we had processes that particularly helped these small groups, and these are usually groups of five, six, seven people who then have a stakeholder group of maybe another 10 or so around them. We help them in this kind of process.

This accelerator process, to reach out to the stakeholders, but also to be more cohesive in their own core team. Because at the end of the day, as I don't know your experience, but my experience is when you see real change happening someplace and you double click on why actually did that happen? Then very often it boils down to a relatively small group of people in the core who are holding the same intention, who are aligned around the same shared intention, and clarifying what that intention is and really building a team around that. That's a core piece of really operating from the future, kind of trying to make something really new happening. And that's a lot of the work. So in the past it was more like individual teams doing that. And what we are now more and more moving into is really interweaving these teams and making them aware that, yeah, we do this here, but in that other region, in this other region of the world, there is another group who in a very different context, tries to do exactly the same. Right? And we have actually the issues we run into, even though they live in a different world, are very similar. That's why we can help each other in significant ways. So we try then. So what the UNet looks like is to connect these people across projects with each other and make them coach each other make them help each other. Because we kind of the organizers of the whole thing. We almost have a very little budget to operate on because all of these structures are free and.

We never have the capacity to do that one on one ourselves. But what we can do is to hold the space for everyone and make people help each other. And that way it is less expensive and it's also more scalable because you really begin to grow this kind of different kind of social field that's really based on.

Creativity and not based on social destruction, as we were discussing in the first part of our conversation. Wow.

Well, this has been incredibly rich, Otto. And I think tying together scalability and decentralization I think is so important. I mean, one of the movements I always point to is the 12 step movement. The genius of the founders of AA. They created this thing that just grew all over the world and it's completely decentralized and it works. Right.

And you mentioned the importance of agricultural regenerative agriculture. I want people to please, if you haven't watched the presentations from yesterday, please watch some of those. And specifically Robert Cervelli, that's a really important piece. And I watch a very hopeful movie about agricultural regenerative agriculture that if we can recover the topsoil, stop the loss of topsoil, recover topsoil, that would be one of the most leveraged ways to take carbon out of the atmosphere. It could be a huge part of the solution and it's often not talked about that much. So. But organizing locally around this. So if people wanted to get involved and start a U lab or one of these groups, they could just go to the Presencing Institute and find their way and tell them how to organize themselves local to do that.

That's right. So presencing.org right, so.

Or, you know, just look onto my homepage, it's my name. And then there's also links to the Presencing Institute. And so we are actually in a process where I don't know when this will be broadcasted, but you know, so we are moving towards something that we call useful for transformation. So because in collaboration of all these kind of renewal initiatives, we are realizing that there is a deeper capacity building really necessary. And so what we see in many places is really a movement towards planetary healing and civilizational renewal. And what's often missing is the methods and tools. Right. And the spaces for cultivating these capacities. So with the U School for Transformation, we want to allow, we want to offer such an infrastructure. Ulap, what I just described is part of that. But there are kind of other. It's kind of part of a longer pathway for transformation from a variety of different angles. And we learned that, for example, social arts play a very critical role for providing these practice fields and kind of really for developing these new collaborative capacities that we need kind of even locally, right. But even more, kind of on the. More.

On the other levels of systems change. So people will. So if they, in the second half of the year go to our website, they will find a bunch of things there. And I think it's just kind of what we see happening is just the weaving of a new movement where we all need to work together into the service really of this larger renewal movement. And as anyone knows, when you deal with what we will see is the old systems more and more moving towards collapse or going into collapse to some degrees. And when that happens, we know kind of what we are left with, right? When the old systems collapse, what's left is.

People, right? It's kind of your connections that you have to your friends, to your network, to your place, right? Kind of the place that's kind of why kind of Mother Earth is mattering and also regenerative agriculture is mattering that much and to ourselves, to the spaces of aspiration that we bring. So maybe in closing, because you just said that, I'm just thinking and also beginning to write about. If we really forget about all the details that we talked about and really make it simple, what is the one measure that would really tell us that in terms of the ecological divide, the ecological dimension, which is our problem? Number one, we make progress. And the answer is soil, right? So if we can increase the quality of the top soil, right. We are on the right path because it does everything for the whole biodiversity as well and so on. So that's kind of so in our daily behavior, right? Kind of. So the food that we eat and so on. So am I part of a cycle that is regenerating the topsoil or diminishing, depleting the topsoil? That's dimension number one. The second one is relationships, right? And what is relationships? It's the social soil, right? Kind of. So it is the quality of our communications, right. Of how we connect with each other. And I think that the core question that everyone, anyone can really ask themselves is, okay.

During the course of the day, let's say we are most of the 16, maybe awake hours we are in communication one way or another, how many hours do I spend on deep listening and dialogic conversation? And how many is kind of Just kind of downloading or kind of debate style. So kind of the more superficial ways of paying attention and connecting to the world. So that's a very simple metric. Right. But it does tell us to what degree we are cultivating the social soil. Right. And not only the soil of the planet Earth. And I would say the third dimension then is kind of. And that's kind of. So with that, I'm coming from the social divide that I just talked about to the spiritual divide. And the spiritual dividend I think is really the seeds for that soil. Right. So what are the seeds that I'm planting in that soil? Yes, kind of I need to cultivate the soil kind of with the way we listen, the way we hold the space for each other and so on. But the seeds kind of. That's kind of really the spiritual dimension, kind of. What is it kind of that's growing there? Right. What is it kind of that I'm planting? What is it that I am holding the space for? That is kind of maybe beginning to work through me. And so that's what. So during the course of a day, what are the practices that I'm using to cultivating that dimension? Is that just accidental? Right. I just think it happens somehow. Or where do I have dedicated places? Let's say my morning meditation or my evening meditation, whatever it is, what you do, where do you cultivate that dimension of how we contribute as human beings on this planet in the 21st century and particularly in this decade, which is the most decisive decade this planet has ever seen. And so this is, I believe from a collective level, this is the moment we all have been born for. Right. How are we waking up to that moment? Are we waking up like the European leaders that for a little moment last week, do we have this kind of collective awakening? And what is my own agency in that? Right. So how do I show up in this moment? And we all know kind of when it hits with transformation, I am awake. I get that one moment and then the next moment I lost it again. Right. And what do I do? It's the same like in a meditation process, right. I am focused, then I lose it, I'm distracted, then I notice that I get myself back on track. It's the same in the transformation process. And I think that's the work that we are all called for right now.

Wow, that is such a clear and helpful framework. And I just love this conversation. I mean, we took a really clear eyed look at the realities and the challenges we're facing, which are daunting. And you know, I think you gave us there some real clear signals we can look toward. Right. That idea of regenerating, literally the topsoil of the earth, regenerating our social soil and then what are we planting there and bringing consciousness to that. And yeah, an incredibly hopeful view. And I encourage people to check out your work@autochalmer.com or presencing.org and think about engaging locally and developing a U lab and maybe it focuses on, you know, how are we supporting topsoil regeneration in our neighborhood, our area, our region and by our behaviors, by our practices, by our consumption and so forth. And so wow, a lot to work with there. Thank you so much, Otto.

Thank you, Fleet. It was a really pleasure talking to you. And obviously all of this needs to be continued by all of us.

Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you. A lot of these conversations seem to have. Thank you.

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