Theory U

C. Otto Scharmer, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan and founding chair of the Presencing Institute, developed Theory U from interviews with 150 innovators and decades of action research on profound change. His u.lab MOOCs have carried awareness-based systems change to hundreds of thousands of practitioners worldwide.

Scharmer's Theory U describes a journey down and up the U — suspending habitual judgment, sensing the system, 'presencing' the emerging future, then prototyping. Awareness-based systems change for leaders and collectives.

The era: Distributed & Complex — Distributed, dispersed, interdependent, embedded in interaction; leadership as learning; global competencies; combine all theories.

Leading from the emerging future: observe, retreat, act — presencing.

This theory sits in the Distributed & Complex era of the map: Distributed, dispersed, interdependent, embedded in interaction; leadership as learning; global competencies; combine all theories.

• Scharmer, C. O. (2007). Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. Berrett-Koehler. Google Scholar ↗
• Senge, P., Scharmer, C. O., Jaworski, J., & Flowers, B. S. (2004). Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. SoL Press. Google Scholar ↗