Presence and Presencing

How to create predictable miracles

A super-quick blog post today, heavily plagiarised from my doctoral dissertation, as I’m doing a full-time online course this week with the Presencing Institute. If you’re not familiar with Presencing, it’s a blended word formed from sensing (feeling the future possibility) and presence (the state of being in the present moment). It means sensing and actualizing one’s highest future possibility- acting from the presence of what is wanting to emerge.

If you think this all sounds a bit fluffy, you might be surprised to hear that it was founded by a German lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management called Otto Scharmer. He co-founded the Presencing Institute in 2006, and in 2009 he and Katrin Kaufer published Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. Described as an “action research platform at the intersection of science, consciousness, and profound social and organizational change”, the Presencing Institute has had a significant and widespread impact on addressing global challenges such as the ecological crisis, inequality, finance, healthcare and education.

Summarising their work as enabling the transition “from ego-system to eco-system”, the Institute identifies three fundamental disconnects that need to be healed in order to create an equitable and sustainable future: the ecological divide, the social…