Theory U: Sensing

… or something like that.

Step three in the U process is Sensing, and this is where is gets a little mystical. Scharmer outlines the basic princples, and then gives three examples, which I summarized in my notes thus:

	Charging the Container	Diving in	Redirecting Attention	Activate Deeper Exprience
Principle	Creating, consecrating space	Immersion in the particular	Listeing, paying attention to the connections	Connecting with the source
Circle of Seven	Shared experience	Deep check-in	Active process	Wisdom, understanding
Henri Bortoft	Slow down	Observation	Staying with it	Perceiving authentic wholeness
Plato's Cave	Emerge from the cave	Take in the outside world	Grasp reality from inside the formative field	Knowing from the heart emerges
		concrete particulars →		sensing with the heart

Well, that’s not the most elegant table I’ve ever seen. I may have to learn CSS after all…

I’m having a little trouble imagining the "deeper experience” that Scharmer is talking about (although I may actually have experienced it), but it does remind me of some comments from my Jesuit friends. Fr. Mark Thibodeaux SJ, for example, speaks to the first and third steps of the process in Armchair Mystic. In the first step, Scharmer talks about creating a space for sensing, that involves physical, temporal, relational, and intentional dimensions, he later cites the example from the “Circle Seven” group, who begin their sessions with a meditative “shared experience.” Thibodeaux correspondingly discusses the importance of ritual in creating a space for prayer:

God told Moses at the burning bush, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:4ff.). Saint Ignatious of Loyola suggests that the pray-er “reverence his spot” before praying, so, I bow, genuflect, or kneel before my own holy ground. I end the prayer time with the Sign of the Cross, the Our Father or some other prayer I like… (12-3)

Similarly, as regards the third step, Scharmer quotes Henri Bortoft as saying “There is a huge resistance against [slowing down]. Most of us are too busy downloading most of the time.” Thibodeaux correspondingly describes his experience of distraction in contemplative prayer:

Whatever I choose to do, I will do it very slowly and quietly. I will pause from time to time, close my eyes and be still again. I am once again feeling for an opening into solitude. Maybe I will slip into it this time, but only for a brief moments, and then I will find myself out of it again. No problem. I’ll move back to something else… (48-9)

It’s certainly not an accident that, like Thibodeaux, both Bortoft and Beth Jandernoa of the Circle of Seven speak extensively of the experience of “slowing down.” The way to the mystical-sounding “deeper experience” of “authentic wholeness,” is clearly a mindfulness exercise.

The process of diving in, particularly the sort of non-judgmental “deep check in” that the Circle of Seven does, also reminded me of a Jesuit practice of “faith sharing” described in The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by my spiritual hero, Fr. James Martin SJ:

Every Sunday night in the novitiate our community gathered for “faith sharing,” which meant speaking to one another about our spiritual lives: where we had experienced God in our daily lives and what our prayer was like.

There were two rules. First, everything was confidential. Second, no comments were allowed after someone spoke, unless it was a question asked to clarify something.

The first rule made sense. The second seemed ridiculous. … I couldn’t understand why the novice director wanted us to be silent.

Gradually I realized: it was so we could listen (255).

He goes on to say that we want to listen, but sooner or later find ourselves trying to solve the problems, adding to the ideas with our own experience, offering counterexamples… (and , ahem! making judgments!) Scharmer seems to be calling for a similar space in which we eliminate the possibility of judgment, in order better to observe each others’ experiences.

I can imagine how this might play out in a faculty meeting, but it would certainly be different from any meeting I’ve ever attended. I think the Gaming Goggles of the Carolina/CMS 2.0 Summit definitely lean in this direction: if we were to focus on Green Goggles (“Gather”), for example, and suspend Blue and Red (to shut down judgment) as well as Purple (to avoid counter proposals), we might be able to dive in and redirect attention effectively. I am especially eager to get to the part where we all see ourselves as a part of the same system, however. How many of our problems are we perpetuating ourselves? How often are we creating the “problem” students that we have? (100% of the time?)

As much trouble as I had picturing this deeper experience Scharmer kept alluding to, as I thought back, I believe I may have stumbled into this Sensing space, one afternoon as I was trying to avoid grading some cognitively low-level assignments I had given to a group of students with whom I had never quite hit it off. As I looked over their uninspired answers, I realized that my questions were at least as uninspired. “If even I hate these assignments,” I mused, “what must their experience be like? Can I blame them for such lackluster performance?” I finished the grading, but after I returned the assignments, I sat down with them essentially started over with my approach. “I have some new ideas for making this course ‘suck less,’ tell me what you think…”

In effect, my perception had shifted from the periphery to the field; instead of the victim of a punk bunch of students, I suddenly saw myself as a member of the community, equally responsible for the desultory, resentful atmosphere. In effect, I moved from a model of leadership as “Command and Control” to “Co-Creation” … to at least some extent.

I think that’s what Scharmer is getting at.