Leading for Profound Innovation & Change

with C. Otto Scharmer and Arawana Hayashi

The most pressing challenges leaders and teams face today require innovative thinking and collaboration across traditional boundaries — across departments, organizations, sectors, and cultures. Too often, however, we as individuals and organizations become entrenched in rigid patterns of behavior that limit our ability to transcend these boundaries and work together to effect deep change. To bring about the level of transformation required in our current environment, we need a new way of learning and of leading — one not limited to reflecting the patterns of the past but that tunes into the possibilities of the future.

This module is an experiential introduction to the the ground-breaking U-Process as documented in Dr. Scharmer's Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges (Society for Organizational Learning, 2007).

C. Otto Scharmer, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer at MIT and the founding chair of ELIAS (Emerging Leaders Innovate Across Sectors), a program linking twenty leading global institutions from business, government, and civil society in order to prototype profound system innovations for a more sustainable world. He also is the founding chair of the Presencing Institute and a visiting professor at the Center for Innovation and Knowledge Research, Helsinki School of Economics. Dr. Scharmer has consulted with global companies, international institutions, and cross-sector change initiatives in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He has co-designed and delivered award-winning leadership programs for client organizations including DaimlerChrysler, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Fujitsu. He holds a Ph.D. in economics and management from Witten-Herdecke University, Germany. He introduced the theoretical framework and practice called "presencing" in Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges (2007), and in Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (2005), co-authored with Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. With his colleagues, Dr. Scharmer has used presencing to facilitate profound innovation and change processes both within companies and across societal systems. See also www.ottoscharmer.com and www.presencing.net.

Trained as a dancer, Arawana Hayashi's pioneering work as a choreographer, performer, and educator is rooted in improvisation, collaboration and traditional dance forms. After five years as director of an intercultural street dance company in Boston, Ms. Hayashi became Co-Director of the Dance Program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She was involved in experimental inter-disciplinary performance work that became the foundation for the University's current degree programs in performance and somatic psychology. Ms. Hayashi's study of Bugaku, Japanese Court dance, began under Suenobu Togi and led to founding the Jo Ha Kyu Performance Group in Boston. There she continued to explore the creative process. She is currently an acharya (senior teacher) in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition. She teaches workshops in The Art of Making a True Move for individuals and organizations throughout the U.S.

Ms. Hayashi has been on the core faculty of the Shambhala Institute's annual summer program since 2001. She began a collaboration with Otto Scharmer there in 2003 and is now actively engaged with the Presencing Institute, where she is leading the development of Social Presencing Theater.

"Arawana's exercises allowed me to contact a less contrived, more creative intelligence." — Deb Marsh, Assistant Director, Kenora Association for Community Living, Kenora, Ontario
2007 program participant

Regional Intensive Ontario Modules

Leading for Profound Innovation & Change with Otto Scharmer & Arawana Hayashi
Getting to Maybe: The Art and Practice of Leading Social Innovation with Brenda Zimmerman
Cultivating Authentic Leadership Presence with Toke Moeller, Barbara Bash & Bob Wing
Mapping & Leveraging Social Networks with Karen Stephenson
The Future of Leadership: Scenario Planning and the Changing Nature of Organizations and Communities with Art Kleiner