Fluent Essays

Please write a 1-2 page free response to this essay, very simple: what did you find interesting or valuable? Perplexing? Not useful...or...challenging to implement? How does what he is talking about link to this concept “witness” we are piecing together? tu2_chapter11.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Ch ap ter 11 Presencing • Two Root Questions of Creativity • The Field Structure of Presencing • Two Types of Knowledge and Knowing • Moments of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness • Principles of Presencing • Field Notes Seeing from the Source Seeing from the Source resencing, the blending of sensing and presence, means to connect from the Source of the highest future possibility and to bring it into the now. When moving into the state of presencing, perception begins to happen from a future possibility that depends on us to come into reality. In that state we step into our real being, who we really are, our authentic self. Presencing is a movement that lets us approach our self from the emerging future.| In many ways, presencing resembles sensing. Both involve shifting the place of perception from the interior to the exterior of one’s (physical) organization. The key difference is that sensing shifts the place of perception to the current whole while presencing shifts the place of perception to the source of an emerging future whole—to a future possibility that is seeking to emerge. As I watched my family’s farmhouse burn, I began to feel that everything I thought I was, was gone—that was an example of sensing. When the boundary between the fire and me collapsed and I became aware that I wasn’t separate from the fire and that the house that went up in flames wasn’t separate from |ö| Th eory me—that was also sensing. In sensing, my perception originated in the current field: the burning fire right in front of me. But the next moment, when I felt elevated to another sphere of clarity and awareness and experienced a pull toward the source of silence and Self—that was a foreshadowing of presencing. Two Root Questions of Creativity The territory at the bottom of the U is where we connect with the source of inner knowing that Brian Arthur talked about. The threshold there needs to be crossed in order to connect to one’s real source of presence, creativity, and power. To find out more about that source, Joseph Jaworski and I interviewed Michael Ray, who had developed a Stanford Business School course on creativity in business. Over the years, people had told me that taking his course had changed their lives. So I was interested in finding out how this man, according to Fast Company the “most creative man in Silicon Valley,” helped practitioners connect to their sources of creativity.2 “How do you do this? What is the essential activity that actually helps people become more creative?” Ray responded, “I create learning environments in all my courses that allow people to address and work on the two root questions of creativity.” He paused and then continued: “Who is my Self? and What is my Work? The capital-S Self.” By this, Ray said, he means one’s highest self, the self that transcends pettiness and signifies our “best future possibility.” Similarly, “capital-W Work” is not one’s current job but one’s purpose, what you are here on earth to do. “Know thyself” echoes my conversation with Master Nan, who told me that in order to be a good leader, you must know yourself. “Know thyself” appears throughout all great wisdom traditions. I remember it being a principal teaching when I studied the teachings of Gandhi in India. “You must be the change you seek to create.” It also was attributed to Apollo and inscribed at the entrance of the ancient Greek temple in Delphi. And Goethe knew that the essence of nature cannot be found without turning your atten- ö ö2 PRESENCI N tion back upon yourself, that you can learn who you are only by immersing yourself in the world. Today the self is at the core of what we study, not only in philosophy but also in physics, sociology, and management. The Field Structure of Presencing Presencing happens when our perception begins to happen from the source of our emerging future. The boundaries between three types of presence collapse: the presence of the past (current field), the presence of the future (the emerging field of the future), and the presence of one’s authentic Self. When this co-presence, or merging of the three types of presence, begins to resonate, we experience a profound shift, a change of the place from which we operate. When I stood in front of the fire, I experienced the presence of my authentic Self and felt connected both to the journey that had brought me there (the presence of the past) and to what I felt emerging from the future (the presence of the future). One day I was hiking in the Alps, in Val Fex, a small valley near the border between Switzerland and Italy, right next to Sils Maria, where the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used to write. This area is a special place in Europe because it is the watershed for three major rivers: the Rhine, flowing to the northwest; the Inn, flowing to the northeast; and the Po, flowing to the south. I decided to follow the Inn to its source. As I hiked upstream, I realized that I had never in my life followed a stream all the way to its source. In fact, I had never seen what the source of a major river really looks like. The stream grew narrower and narrower until it was simply a trickle, and I found myself standing near a pond in the wide bowl of a valley, encircled by glacier-covered mountaintops. I just stood there and listened. With surprise, I realized that I was at the center of countless waterfalls streaming off the mountains. They were making the most beautiful symphony one can imagine. Stunned, I realized that there was no single point of origin. I watched the source all around and above me, streaming off the circle of glaciated mountaintops and then converging in the small pond. Was the pond the source? Th eory Was it the circle of waterfalls? Or was it the glaciers on the mountaintops? Or was it the whole planetary cycle of nature: rain, rivers flowing to the ocean, and evaporation? Metaphorically speaking, presencing is the capacity that allows us to operate from this extended notion of the source, to function as a watershed by sensing what wants to come forth and then allowing it to come into being. In other words, by bringing the water from the surrounding waterfalls to a single point, the pond fills and spills into the river, bringing it into being. Presencing enhances sensing, just as sensing enhances seeing. Sensing extends seeing by moving our locus of attention “inside” a phenomenon. Presencing enlarges the activity of sensing by using our Self as a vehicle for deepening our sensing. The root of the word presencing is *es, which means “to be.” The words essence, yes, presence, and present (gift) all share this same Indo-European root. An Old Indian derivative of this same root from India is sat, which means both “truth” and “goodness.” This term became a major force in the twentieth century, when Mahatma Gandhi used it to convey his key notion of satyagraha (his strategy of truth and nonviolence). The Old German sun, which is derived from the same root, means “those who are surrounding us” or “the beings who surround us.”© In figure ||.|, the place from which we operate moves not only from the center (downloading) to the periphery (seeing) and from there to beyond the boundary of our own organization (sensing), but progressing on to the surrounding sphere—that is, to “the beings who surround us.” To learn more about this way of operating, I went to Berkeley, California, to meet with Eleanor Rosch, whom I introduced to you in chapter |0. She is one of the most eminent cognitive psychologists of our time and a professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology. I first encountered her work when reading The Embodied Mind, a book she co-authored with Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson. We met after the Berkeley Knowledge Forum, a conference on knowledge management hosted by Ikujiro Nonaka at the Haas School of Business. Rosch had just made a stunning presentation in which she introduced the notion of “primary knowing.” ö ö PRESENCI N F I G U R E 1 1 . 1 : T H E F I E LD S T R U C T U R E OF P RESENSI NG Two Types of Knowledge and Knowing In her presentation she drew a distinction between two types of knowledge: conventional analytical knowledge and “primary knowing,” or wisdom awareness. The analytical picture offered by the cognitive sciences, Rosch argues, is based on conventional analytical knowledge—that is, the field structure of attention described above as “seeing.” In this state the world is thought of as a set of separate objects and states of affairs, and the human mind as a machine that isolates, stores, and retrieves knowledge as an indirect representation of the world and oneself. By contrast, primary knowing characterizes a sensing and presencing type of cognition in which one “is said to know by means of interconnected wholes (rather than isolated contingent parts) and timeless, direct presentation (rather than through stored re-presentations). Such knowing is “open,” rather than determinate; and a sense of unconditional value, rather than conditional usefulness, is an inherent part of the act of knowing itself. … Action from awareness,” Rosch argues, “is claimed to be spontaneous, rather than Th eory the result of decision making; it is compassionate, since it is based on wholes larger than the self; and it can be shockingly effective.”ã Mind and World Are Not Separate The implications of this view for psychology and the cognitive sciences, says Rosch, are sweeping. She argues, “Mind and world are not separate. Since the subjective and objective aspects of experience arise together as different poles of the same act of cognition (are part of the same informational field) they are already joined at their inception.” Rosch claims that we need a “fundamental reorientation of what science is,” recalling Albert Einstein’s dictum that problems can never be solved with the same mind that created them. According to Rosch, “Our sciences need to be performed with the mind of wisdom.” It is clear to me that Rosch is developing a language around the subtle experiences that most of us have but barely notice. As we walked back to her office, she said, “Just saying that mind and world are not separate is only part of it. All the lists of attributes that I outlined … actually all go together as one thing. That one thing is what Tibetan Buddhism calls the natural state and what Taoism calls the Source. It’s what is at the heart of the heart of the heart. There is this awareness and this little spark that is positive—and completely independent of all of the things that we think are so important. This is the way things happen, and in the light of that, action becomes action from that. And lacking that, or being ignorant of it, we just make terrible messes—as individuals, as nations, and as cultures.” The Field Knows Itself and Leads to Action Back in her office, she continued, “Think of everything that is happening as moment-by-moment presentations from this deep heart source that has a knowing dimension to it. Tibetan Buddhism talks about emptiness, luminosity, and the knowing capacity as inseparable. That knowing capacity actually is the field knowing itself, in a sense, or this larger context knowing itself.” “So your own activity is to help this process, the field knowing itself?” I asked. ö öö PRESENCI N “If you follow your nature far enough as it moves,” she continued, “if you follow so far that you really let go, then you find that you’re actually the original being, the original way of being. The original way of being knows things and does things in its own way. When that happens, or when you get even a glimpse of it, you realize that we don’t actually act as fragmented selves the way we think we do. Nothing you do can produce this realization, this original way of being. It’s a matter of tuning in to it and its way of acting. It actually has a great intention to be itself, so to speak, and it will do so if you just let it.” Rosch talked about the same turning points I had frequently observed in workshops and that Varela also talked about: redirection (tuning in) and letting go. For example, in the Patient-Physician Dialogue Forum, when the participants looked at the wall with the white and dark dots, letting the picture sink into their minds, they weren’t taking in any additional data. What was shifting in that moment was the place from which they were looking at the picture in front of them. Before that, they had operated from their conventional interior selves, or what Rosch calls “the individual locked inside his skin looking out through his eyes.” After the shift, the forum participants began to operate from a different place, from a self that is outside their own skin and physical organization. When you operate from the self-transcending, enhanced sense of self— from a place that is both inside and outside the observer’s organization—you see your self as part of the system and you start to see how people enact that system. You feel as if you are not just observing the system from a single point (the “balcony perspective”) but from multiple points simultaneously, from the surrounding field or sphere. This is what Bortoft called “striving from the whole to the part” and what Rosch refers to as “the field knowing itself,” a field that, if you succeed in tuning in to it, actually “has a great intention to be itself.” Moments of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness How does this all work? Well, let’s now look at a couple of examples. The first example comes from Erik Lemcke, a sculptor and management consultant from Denmark. Th eory My Hands Know “After having worked with a particular sculpture for some time,” he told me about his work, “there comes a certain moment when things are changing. When this moment of change comes, it is no longer me, alone, who is creating. I feel connected to something far deeper and my hands are co-creating with this power. At the same time, I feel that I am being filled with love and care as my perception is widening. I sense things in another way. It is a love for the world and for what is coming. I then intuitively know what I must do. My hands know if I must add or remove something. My hands know how the form should manifest. In one way, it is easy to create with this guidance. In those moments I have a strong feeling of gratitude and humility.” Erik’s example beautifully demonstrates that the essence of presencing and the essence of the deepest creative processes are one at the same. The following example comes from a very different world. I use it to demonstrate that these deep transformational experiences are not confined to serene settings of art and culture. On the contrary, they happen in the midst of turmoil and everyday life. Breaking Through a Membrane In Houston, Texas, during the first days of June |999, Joseph Jaworski and I sat in a final team meeting between a group of line managers and external consultants. We were meeting to design an action learning intervention that would help the people at the top of that organization—after a big downstream oil company merger—to lead their huge and complex organization more entrepreneurially and more effectively. The room brimmed with tension, anxiety, anger, and frustration. The level of conversation seemed to be driven by Gresham’s law. Sir Thomas Gresham, a sixteenth-century English businessman and public servant, observed that “bad money drives out good.”é Likewise, I have often seen a pattern in group conversations where bad conversation drives out the good. Bad conversation is annoying and noisy; the same people display their egos and monopolize the airtime, with no sensitivity to process or contributions from others that might move the group in a different direction. Good conver- ö öø PRESENCI N sation requires a certain quality of attention, or listening—a “container,” as Bill Isaacs would say—that includes some toning down or the elimination of “bad talk.” Thus good talk is contingent upon suspending bad talk, but bad talk is not contingent upon good—it just keeps on going and going and further reproducing itself. Our group, it struck me, was a living example of this painful principle. Almost every kind of birth process involves as much pain as it does joy and magic. Whenever a group achieves a significant breakthrough, first there is plenty of down-and-dirty pain and frustration. So why do we hear so many heroic stories about people accomplishing amazing things without this messy dimension? Because they’re fantasies. Soon after our second child was born, my wife said, “That’s it. We’re not doing this again.” But three months later she wondered, “Do we really want to have only two children? Maybe we should consider a third one.” If women accurately remembered the pain of childbirth, humanity’s future would be in serious jeopardy. And if we all accurately remembered the pain of group work, we would probably change occupations. But our minds clean up and polish our stories. There’s an instant background shift, and we start to downplay the “bad parts” and tune in to our joy about what we have accomplished. On that morning in Houston, the Dream Team, as they called themselves, seemed more like the Nightmare Team. Time was running out, and the task of designing a leadership laboratory to help leaders take their organization into the future clearly wasn’t being accomplished; the tension and bad feeling in the room escalated, so we decided to take a brief break. The leader of the group stepped out with Joseph and me to talk about how to best use the remaining time. We’d been meeting periodically for four months and had done a lot of intensive observation, immersion, and learning together. Furthermore, we had created a significant body of shared perception, understanding, and, to a certain degree, aspiration. It seemed we should be doing better. After we reconvened, the project leader pressed on through an endless list of checkoff items. I glanced up at David, one of the principal deal makers in the trading division and someone who had initially struck me as probably the most hard-nosed guy in the group. An iron man, he knew about athletics and performing in the zone, but Th eory he also was the most focused and serious guy on the team. Now he seemed to be working hard to articulate a question, trying to give voice to something inchoate but clearly present. The conversation moved on, but I saw him still holding on and allowing that question to build up, to take shape in his mind. By nodding to him, I drew the group’s attention to him. He started to crystallize his thought (or the thought started to crystallize through him). The energy field around him seemed to intensify. His question came from his source, and that was the turning point. He pointed to three or four charts hanging around the room. “These charts seem to be different, but something connects them.” One chart was the U model. Another showed the four fields of listening.ö Others displayed four different levels of organizational change. And then there was one that showed the structure of our lab process. “We’re trying to get our arms around this deep process of creation—of actively participating in creating new worlds—and these four pictures represent images, imprints of this deeper force at work. But what is it that connects these four footprints—what is its common underlying source?” His question shifted the attention in the room. The project leader was furious. He wanted to continue with his checklist. But that conversation had been abruptly halted by David’s question. Having articulated his question, David and the others looked a ... Purchase answer to see full attachment