Awareness-based Systems Change 🧘

Theory U

1) Co-initiation | Uncovering shared intention

• Attend: Listen to What Life Calls You to Do

• Connect: Listen to and dialogue with the interesting players in the field on the Edges of the System (harvest & share!)

• Co-initiate a diverse group that inspires a common intention/question (lead by painting a picture that is intentionally incomplete; you make a few strokes and you leave lots of blank space so that others can make a contribution.)

• Build the Container (the holding space that shapes and cultivates the web of relationships)

2) Co-sensing | Seeing reality from the edges of the system

• Build a Highly Committed Core Team and clarify essential questions

• Take Immersive Learning Journeys to the Places of Most Potential

• Observe, Observe, Observe: Suspend Your Voice of Judgment and Connect with Your Sense of Wonder

• Practice Deep Listening and Dialogue: Connect with Your Mind and Heart Wide Open

• Create collective sensing organs that allow the system to see itself, e.g. Social Presencing Theater and Embodied Knowing

3) Presencing, the blending of sensing and presence, means to sense and actualize from the source of one’s highest future possibility in the now: connecting to the emerging future

• Letting go: Let go of your old self and the non-essentials that must die

• Letting come: connect & surrender to the future that wants to emerge through you

• Intentional Silence: Pick a Practice That Helps You Connect with Your Source

• Follow Your Journey: Do What You Love, Love What You Do. Who is my self? What is my work? I Can’t Not Do It

• Create Circles of presence to Charge the Space/Container.

  “Before I go up front, I open my heart and consciously send unconditional love to everyone in the room. It creates a field or surround of love.”

4) Co-creation

• Crystallize Your Vision and Intent

• Form Core Groups: Five People Can Change the World

• Prototype strategic microcosms as a landing strip for the emerging future. Fail often to succeed sooner. Create Worm holes to the future

• Iterate, Iterate, Iterate: Create and Adapt and Always Be in Dialogue with the Universe

• Integrate Head, Heart, and Hand

5) Co-evolving: Embodying and institutionalizing the new—scaling the new while growing and evolving innovation eco-systems for collective impact.

• Create Enabling Infrastructures That Allow the System to Sense and See Itself

• Create Massive Capacity-Building Mechanisms to scale the new

• Labs and Platforms for Cultivating the Social Soil

Deep listening and Awareness-based Systems Change

• An open mind is the capacity to suspend old habits of judgment—to see with fresh eyes (remove the Voice of Judgment)

• An open heart is the capacity to empathize and to look at a situation through the eyes of somebody else (remove the Voice of Cynisism)

• An open will is the capacity to “let go” of the old and “let come” the new (remove the Voice of Fear)

Theory U

Inner Development Goals (IDGs)