C. Otto Scharmer

In front of the blank canvas: sensing emerging futures

Purpose – The paper asks how leaders in organizations address complex situations or challenges where past experiences are no longer helpful or might pose an obstacle for success. The authors use the metaphor of the blank canvas to describe the work of entrepreneurs or innovators who connect to an emerging future possibility. Based on their research, the authors argue that social technologies allow actors in organizations to connect to an emerging future, and break through habitual patterns of the past.Design/methodology/approach – Underlying this paper, are action research projects in change management and organizational learning. While social science methods tend to be based on observational data, the founder of action research, Kurt Lewin, and his successors, including Ed Schein, Chris Argyris, Peter Senge, and Bill Torbert, claim that we have to use more than just observation (third‐person views) to get meaningful data about social reality. According to Bill Torbert organizational researchers need to a...

Humility and Ignorance: What It Takes to Be an Effective Process Consultant

R eflections is about the creation, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge. In our first issue, we provided several articles that explored what we mean by knowledge, especially the distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge, between theory and practice, between knowing what and knowing how, between intellectual knowledge and skill in application of that knowledge. It is time to deal more explicitly than we have with the tacit skill dimension, to explore in somewhat greater detail what practitioners do that makes them more or less effective, to explore the theory of practice. We cannot, of course, give a definitive analysis of practice because practice is an art and because practice involves large amounts of improvisation. But we can provide some insights and some examples of how consultants and practitioners think about what they do and what they believe is more or less effective in getting things done. As in our previous issues, we open up the area and invite our readers to comment and to add their own insights.

Exploring transcendental leadership: a conversation

This paper documents the Management, Spirituality, and Religion’s Plenary Session at the Academy of Management, Philadelphia, 2014, with Jay B. Barney, Judy Wicks, and C. Otto Scharmer. The speakers were asked to discuss their views on Transcendental Leadership in terms of their own spiritual practices and how these practices contribute to a shift from I to We.