Quotes from C. Otto Scharmer

Myth 2: Leadership is about individuals. In fact, leadership is a distributed or collective capacity in a system, not just something that individuals do. Leadership is about the capacity of the whole system to sense and actualize the future that wants to emerge.

Energy follows attention. Wherever you place your attention, that is where the energy of the system will go. "Energy follows attention" means that we need to shift our attention from what we are trying to avoid to what we want to bring into reality.

This is the moment when what we need most is enough people with the skill, heart, and wisdom to help us pull ourselves back from the edge of breakdown and onto a different path.

The gap between financial capital of US$190 trillion looking for highly profitable investment opportunities and a real economy and social sector without access to the financial capital needed to operate and grow is at the heart of the worldwide economic crisis.

The crisis of our time isn't just a crisis of a single leader, organization, country, or conflict. The crisis of our time reveals the dying of an old social structure and way of thinking, an old way of institutionalizing and enacting collective social forms.

Leadership is about being better able to listen to the whole than anyone else can.

Most cross-institutional change processes fail because they miss the starting point: co-sensing across boundaries. We need infrastructures to facilitate this process on a sustained level across systems. And because they don't yet exist, organized interest groups go out and maximize their special interests against the whole, instead of engaging practitioners in the larger system in a process of sensing and innovating together. As

Isn't there a way to break the patterns of the past and tune into our highest future possibility—and to begin to operate from that place?

As individuals, we must begin to pay attention to our attention (self-awareness); as teams, we must begin to converse about our conversations (dialogue); as enterprises, we must begin to organize our organizing (networks of networks: eco-systems); and as eco-systems, we must begin to coordinate our coordinating (systems of awareness-based collective action, or ABC).

The crisis of our time isn't just a crisis of a single leader, organization, country, or conflict. The crisis of our time reveals the dying of an old social structure and way of thinking, an old way of institutionalizing and enacting collective social forms. Frontline

I once asked one of the most successful leaders of the telecom industry what she considered to be the essence of her leadership work. She responded, "I am facilitating the opening process so my team can sense and seize emerging opportunities as they arise from the fast paced business environment we are operating in.

It is this shared awareness that allows for fast, flexible, and fluid coordination and decision-making that are far more adaptive and co-creative than any other organizational model currently being used in major societal institutions.

You cannot understand a system unless you change it.

The ability to shift from reacting against the past to leaning into and presencing an emerging future is probably the single most important leadership capacity today.

There's only one issue in the world. It's the reintegration of mind and matter.

We collectively create results that nobody wants because decision-makers are increasingly disconnected from the people affected by their decisions. As a consequence, we are hitting the limits to leadership—that is, the limits to traditional top-down leadership that works through the mechanisms of institutional silos.

We need to articulate a different view of economic, political, and spiritual affairs—a view that is not primarily Left or Right, that is not wrapped around the primacy of this mechanism or that one, that doesn't believe that the solution to our problems lies with Big Government, Big Corporations, Big Money, or Big Ideology.

shift the global field of entrepreneurship

We respond to societal issues with quick technical fixes that address symptoms rather than with systemic solutions. As a consequence, we are hitting the limits to symptom-focused fixes—that is, limits to solutions that respond to problems with more technological gadgets rather than by addressing the problems' root causes.

The problem with our current societal eco-systems is the broken feedback loop between the parts and the whole. Theory U offers a method for relinking the parts and the whole by making it possible for the system to sense and see itself. When that happens, the collective consciousness begins to shift from ego-system awareness to eco-system awareness—from a silo view to a systems view.

But you can create conditions that allow a deeper alchemy to work—that is, conditions that help leaders in a system to broaden and deepen their view of the system from ego to eco, from "me" to

Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

The ability to shift from reacting against the past to leaning into and presencing an emerging future is probably the single most important leadership capacity today. It is a capacity that is critical in situations of disruptive change, not only for institutions and systems, but also for teams and individuals.