B9- Overspill, theoretical background & reflection

In the last part of the session on 21 of Jun, “Theory U” by Otto Scharmer has been presented and all the KCTs reflected upon their project according to the “Theory U” steps. As in my group, only I and one other group member were available and we made our reflections together.

Here I would like to write about my personal learning from the “Theory U”.

• Co-initiating:
Seeing with fresh eyes,
Suspending,
Listening to others.

• Co-sensing
Sensing from the field,
Redirecting and seeing from the whole.

• Presencing
Letting go, connecting to the source with open mind and heart.
Questions like: What is my work?

• Co-creating
Letting come, crystallizing visions and intentions,
Envisioning what seeks to emerge,
Prototyping.

• Co-evolving
Linking the head and the heart by embodying.

As my own interpretations during the whole process of the project, I have been able to learn to go through the process of listening and observing. It is important to consider the fact that people have different backgrounds and we as group members should learn how to give space to each other to exchange our ideas and how to listen to each other mutually.

According to Scharmer the “presencing” phase (at the bottom of the U), requires “the open mind, the open heart, and the open will”. During this course, we practiced this phase in our outing session, which was not very productive for me personally. Now when I review everything one more time and when deeply thinking about the aim of the theory u, I noticed that my problem was that, I have been a bit blind minded and was just thinking in a some kind of the closed-loop and did not really used all of my senses openly.

As in the phase of crystallizing, the group was much more successful than the other phases of the theory U, in a sense that we finally became capable of getting crystal clear in our intentions and prototyping.

In general the coherence between our project steps and the theory U increased by time. In other words, as we moved from the “presencing” phase to “co-creating”, the results were more in alignment with the theory U.

M.M