Presencing Institute (PI)

https://www.presencing.com/

The Presencing Institute (PI) is an awareness-based action-research community that creates social technologies, builds capacities, and generates holding spaces for profound societal renewal. This community tries to contribute to shifting the economy from ego to eco, and toward serving the well-being of all.

Professor Otto Scharmer calls out three major divides using the “iceberg model” of the current socioeconomic system acknowledging that what lays below - the structures and outmoded perspectives - are keeping us “locked into reenacting the same old patterns time and again.”  

Similar to the three elements of sustainability of which the spiritual/ consciousness is part of the social divide sustainability calls out the third element as the economic divide which Scharmer incorporates into the social divide while noting the primary economic block to prosperity: “In addition we see an increasing polarization in society in which the top 1 percent has a greater collective worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.”   

The two ways of calling our attention to planet, people and prosperity are complimentary, the important thing being that both address the complexity and patterns of thought associated with environmental, social, cultural and economic aspects of climate justice. And what he calls outmoded perspectives and structures are common across all the silos, icebergs, and bubbles we inhabit. 

Regardless of whether you see three or four icebergs, what Scharmer does do that the sustainability movement should do more of, is call out these divides as disconnects and in the context of relationships, our interconnectedness, as opposed to problems, opportunities, issues or elements. He defines the spiritual divide as deeply personal, between “self” and the merging future “Self” that represent a person’s greatest potential.  

“While the ecological divide is based on a disconnect between self and nature, and the social divide on a disconnect between self and other, the spiritual divide reflects a disconnect between self and Self—that is, between my current “self” and the emerging future “Self” that represents my greatest potential. This divide is manifest in rapidly growing figures on burnout and depression, which represent the growing gap between our actions and who we really are. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2000 more than twice as many people died from suicide as died in wars. 

Scharmer moves on to introduce the concept of Presencing, a blend of the words "presence" and "sensing," which refers to the ability to sense and bring into the present one's highest future potential—as an individual and as a group, giving leadership some direction on how best to proceed towards change given  dysfunctional structures and patterns. His Theory U, a social technology, offers a set of principles and practices for collectively co-creating the future that wants to emerge (following the movements of suspending, redirecting, letting go, presencing, letting come, enacting, and embodying).