Presencing

Logistics

Facilitators

Resources

Participant Feedback

Register

Contact Us

Download the Presencing Workshop Flyer

December 3-7, 2007
The Royal Sonesta Hotel, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Facilitated by C. Otto Scharmer, Beth Jandernoa, and Arawana Hayashi
Register Today!

Leaders around the world face unprecedented economic, social, environmental, and political challenges. Whether your organization acts locally, globally, or both, leadership challenges are multiplying and current approaches to leadership development often don’t address the deeper, underlying systemic or social issues. But then, what are the leadership capacities needed to collectively engage with these complex challenges and develop adaptive, generative solutions across boundaries?

In working with leadership teams across sectors and industries, Otto Scharmer realized that leaders could not meet their existing challenges by operating on the basis of past experience alone. From interviews with more than 150 global leaders, creators, and master practitioners on such areas as high-performance, innovation, and leadership, Dr. Scharmer with his colleagues developed the U-process; a learning cycle based on one’s ability to sense and realize emerging futures.

Presencing, the workshop, introduces the U-process step by step and engages participants in interactive learning experiences. Participants will practice the U-Process and its underlying social technology for profound innovation and change by applying their learning directly to their work.

Anticipated Learning
This workshop engages participants in the principles and practices of presencing. “Presencing,” a blend of “presence” and “sensing” refers to the ability to sense and bring into the present one’s highest future potential – as an individual and as a collective. Through interactive presentations, reflective exercises, case clinics, and embodiment practices, participants will learn and apply the seven capacities underlying their ability as leaders to transcend boundaries and rigid behavior patterns, realize new possibilities, and work together to enable transformation.

Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance, said that his greatest insight after years of facilitating corporate change was that “the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.” Participants will explore their own blind spots as leaders and expand their awareness beyond what they do and how they do it to understand the source or inner place from which they operate and perceive the world. They will learn to pay attention to what’s going on within and around them in ways that lead to the opening of their minds, hearts, and wills. This holistic opening constitutes a shift in awareness that allows participants to learn from the future as it emerges, and to realize that future in the world.

What is required in order to connect and learn from the future as it emerges? What kind of attention does it take in the now that allows our actions to be guided (and informed) by the future that wants to emerge? To answer these fundamental questions, participants will learn and apply interdependent elements of the U-process and Presencing which include:

• Four Levels of Responding to Change
• Four Types of Listening
• Three (inner) instruments: Open Heart, Open Mind, Open Will
• Practices to access and bring forth one’s authentic Self
• Three barriers to master in one’s inner work
• Five Movements of Presencing as a social technology for change:
  • Co-Initiating: Listen to others and to what life call you to do
  • Co-Sensing: Go to places of most potential and listen with your heart and mind wide open
  • Co-Presencing: Retreat and reflect, allow the inner knowing to emerge
  • Co-creating: Prototype a microcosm of the new to explore the future by doing
  • Co-Evolving: Grow innovation ecosystems by seeing and acting from the emerging whole.
• Twenty-Four Principles and Practices of Presencing

Moving through the U-proces, participants will access new ways of leading and learning that serve not only themselves and their organizations, but also the communities of which they are a part.

Who Should Attend?
This three and a half day experiential workshop for leaders and teams at all levels introduces a collective leadership methodology for sensing and facilitating profound innovation and change both within organizations and across societal systems. A large portion of the Presencing workshop is dedicated to case clinics, where participants will apply their learning to current challenges and projects in their work. Participants will benefit the most from this workshop by attending with two or three of their colleagues or stakeholders.

This workshop will be of particular value to teams in early stages of projects as a hybrid between developing their individual and collective leadership capacities, creating a shared vision for their projects and engagement with internal and external stakeholders, and prototyping new ideas. Please feel free to speak to Frank Schneider, SoL Partnership Development, to explore how to create the highest leverage for you, your team and/or your organization by participating in this workshop (Phone: 1-617-300-9535, E-mail: frank@solonline.org.)

This workshop is a great next step for graduates from other SoL programs such as the Core Competencies Course and the Foundations for Leadership Program. However, no prior experience with organizational learning is required to attend the Presencing workshop.

Space is Limited, Register Today!

Click the diagram for a one-page handout on the U model.