Learning from the Future as it Emerges

How can we connect to this second stream of time as individuals, as organizations, and as eco-systems? That exploration has guided my research journey over the past two decades. It has led me to describe a deep learning cycle that uses a different kind of process—one that moves us to the edges of the system, connects us to our deepest sources of knowing, and prompts us to explore the future by doing. This deep learning cycle applies both to our professional and our personal lives. For example, as a sixteen-year-old, I had an experience that gave me a real taste of what it looks and feels like to be pulled by the field of emerging future potential.

Facing the Fire

When I left our farmhouse that morning for school, I had no idea it was the last time I would see my home, a large, 350-year-old farmhouse. It was just another ordinary day at school until about one o’clock, when the teacher called me out of class and said I should go home. I had no idea what might have happened, but felt it wasn’t good news. After the usual one-hour train ride I ran to the entrance of the station and jumped into a cab. Long before the cab arrived, I saw huge gray and black clouds of smoke billowing into the air. My heart was pounding as the cab approached our long driveway. I recognized neighbors, area firefighters, and policemen. I jumped from the cab and ran through the crowd that had gathered, down the last half-mile of our chestnut-lined driveway. When I reached the courtyard, I could not believe my eyes. The world I had lived in all my life was gone. Up in smoke. As the reality of the fire in front of me began to sink in, I felt as if somebody had ripped the ground from under my feet. The place of my birth, childhood, and youth was gone. As I stood there, taking in the heat of the fire and feeling time slow down, I realized how attached I had been to all the things destroyed by the fire. Everything I thought I was had dissolved. Everything? No, perhaps not everything, for I felt that a tiny element of myself still existed. Somebody was still there, watching all this. Who?

At that moment I realized there was another dimension of myself that I hadn’t previously been aware of, a dimension that related to my future possibilities. At that moment, I felt drawn upward, above my physical body, and began watching the scene from that elevated place. I felt my mind quieting and expanding in a moment of unparalleled clarity. I was not the person I had thought I was. My real self was not attached to all the material possessions smoldering inside the ruins. I suddenly knew that I, my true Self, was still alive! It was this “I” that was the Seer. And this Seer was more alive, more awake, more acutely present than the “I” that I had known before. No longer weighed down by the material possessions the fire had just consumed, with everything gone, I was lighter and free, released to encounter the other part of myself, the part that drew me into the future—into my future—into a world waiting for me to bring it into reality.

Scharmer, Otto. The Essentials of Theory U: Core Principles and Applications (pp. 30-31). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.