Our story starts with a ten year research project conducted by Otto Scharmer and his colleagues, including Joseph Jaworski and Peter Senge, at MIT (1996-2006). A consciousness-based framework of leadership and change resulted from that research. The quality of results that a system creates are a function of the awareness that the people in that system operate from. It is referred to as Presencing or Theory U and has been published in the books Theory U (by Otto Scharmer) and Presence (co-authored by Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers).
The second phase started when 20 leaders from around the world met in December of 2006 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They created a holding space for cultivating presencing as an emerging movement of deep innovation and renewal in organizations, society and self. The participants agreed to start with advancing their own ongoing change projects, creating living examples, before launching into the public realm. After five years, these activities form a global ecology of projects and programs that link partners in business, government, and civil society and span the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The delivery of these projects and programs occurred directly through the Presencing Institute or through its partnering institutions such as MIT, Synergos, the Sustainable Food Lab or SoL (Society for Organizational Learning). During this second three year phase, the online community of the Presencing Institute (PI) grew from zero to 5,500 members.
The third and current phase begins in the Fall of 2011. The first public Presencing event will take place in Boston where 550 people will participate in person or in live-streamed parallel events around the world. The 2nd Presencing Global Forum will follow in Berlin, Germany, in June 2012, again with a web of live-streaming enabled parallel events across continents. The focus of this third phase is to continue to leverage the grassroot work of the past few years by co-creating a globally distributed, consciousness-based action research university that links people across institutions, sectors, and generations to co-create deep innovations in communities, systems and self.
Read Otto's opening remarks from the October Forum here.
