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TE: Presence has four authors who carry on a dialogue. What led you to this particular format?
PS: It became clear early on in the process of doing this book that it needed a first person voice, and not just a third person voice. We couldn't just talk about these issues in the abstract. We laid out a theory by merging it with our own personal journeys of discovery and confusion. There are in fact many things that you don't necessarily figure out in life. And you need to learn how to talk about these things coherently, though not with a sense of certainty. This means making sense of your experience without necessarily reducing it to some absolute statements about the nature of the universe and organizations.
The leaders who I admire have a deep sense of confidence; but they also have a willingness to embrace uncertainty and their own ignorance. And in fact embracing their ignorance creates a lot of space for many other people to join them as co-leaders. Every change effort reflects this kind of paradoxical balance between deep confidence and immense uncertainty that gives people the opportunity to participate at a deeper level. It starts with leaders who reveal that they are as fearful and concerned as everybody.
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”Continually rediscovering what you are here to do
is at the heart of what we are talking about.”
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TE: While your fieldbooks supplied a wealth of tools to complement The Fifth Discipline, Presence goes in another direction. Can you explain?
PS: You go into a bookstore today and find a remarkable number of books on meditation, Buddhism, and other spiritual practices. I think the challenge is to connect this opening to the deeper personal journeys of development we are all on, with our work and our organizations and our role in society.
Presence is focused on the largest questions: the context for all businesses. We aren't discussing any one business, but the subject of leadership in the broadest sense. Running around trying to make your company more profitable is not what we are talking about. Trying to make the business better so its more profitable is.
And so we made a choice not to focus on applications. At the same time, this book absolutely helps people in their business in a powerful way, which is awareness. We explore the extent to which people can learn to see beyond their preconceptions. One powerful application of this relates to seeing into shifts in the marketplace. This type of work has gained quite a bit of recognition with Brian Arthur, who has mainly consulted with business about how to sense these radical changes.
This book explores the process of continually suspending your habitual ways of seeing the world. We ask: how do you suspend everything you think you know and embrace the uncertainty? This means living in the question of what are we here to do, versus living in the question of how do we exploit these questions. Continually rediscovering what you are here to do is at the heart of what we are talking about.
TE: Most influential business thinkers build on their success by introducing new tools for businesses to be more productive. Yet while you continue to work on the fundamental issue of change, you are addressing an increasingly broad arena. Why is this?
PS: The further you go the deeper you get into the dysfunctions in our society. That is one of the reasons why the developmental method has become so marginalized in our society. We placate ourselves with lots of material goodies, choosing television not reflection. It's much easier to choose to be more comfortable than to pursue what you truly care about. A primary motivation for our writing Presence has to do with the condition of the world, which is of great concern.
It's always been clear to me that the work we are involved in deals with the very long term. I had hoped that The Fifth Discipline would be the springboard for many changes. But let's face it, it takes many hundreds of years to create techno-consumer changes. And that's where real change is needed. Ultimately, this work is about consumption, and our values as a materialistic society.
And we don't have an infinite amount of time. An awful lot of what is going on in the world is getting worse not better. People are scared and holding onto what is fundamentalism. All indications reveal that climate change is getting worse, with potentially catastrophic consequences. And what we need are truly radical changes. We need to get beyond talking about how many parts per million we will allow in the atmosphere. We need to start exploring whether we should, say, move to 200 mile per gallon cars? The point is that we have an enormous opportunity for innovation around this issue, and this will come down to how we frame the conversation. That is where the change is going to come.
TE: You published Presence independently, and only after a year released a trade version through Doubleday/Currency. What was the strategy for this?
PS: Two reasons. First, this was a very unusual book and we wanted a lot of feedback early on, to be able to refine it. Second, I wanted to get SoL, The Society for Organizational Learning into the publishing business. We have been too reliant on membership fees. Our model for Presence was designed to build knowledge for systemic needs. We formed a deal with Doubleday for wider distribution with a co-branded version of the book. We continue to publish the original edition, which is available with a workbook through SoL. We are also trying to build a brand with SoL. We are trying to get a message out into the world. We have a lot of knowledge in our network and we are trying to let people know about it.
