Theory U: Learning from the Future as It Emerges

The journey of Theory U is basically an inquiry into this question: How can we access these deeper sources of time, being, and self in a way that is reliable, practical, and collective—and that works without your family farmhouse going up in flames every morning? These questions eventually prompted me to leave Germany for the United States in 1994

To lead profound change is to shift the inner place from which a system operates. This can be done only collaboratively, using what I have called a “social technology” throughout this book.

I suggest we call these ways of acting our field structures of attention.

My colleague and co-author of Presence, Otto Scharmer, explains a shift in orientation and intention that arises from three “thresholds,” or openings through which we must pass in leading profound change: opening the head, opening the heart, and opening the will.10 The first involves opening ourselves to see and hear what is in front of us but we h