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The Spirit of Change
Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future
By Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, C. Otto Sharmer and Betty Sue Flowers
Society for Organizational Learning, 2004; 304 pp.; $40 (cloth)
Reviewed by Mark Gerzon
What are we to make of a conversational book that discusses Ford Motor Company and Mahayana Buddhism, careens from management theory to meditation practice, tells stories about the Bank of America and ancient Chinese sages, chronicles corporate board retreats and shamanic vision quests, and alludes to infrastructure and the infinite—and everything in between? What will give most readers the incentive to read this book is knowing that it is a series of conversations among four thoughtful, experienced intellectuals who are daring to do the impossible: introduce a theory of individual and organizational change that bridges the material and spiritual planes.
Do not read Presence because you think it succeeds at this awesome task—it doesn’t. But do read it. It will allow you to enter a cutting-edge conversation about change—both personal and organizational. It will introduce you to the full range of thinking about this crucial subject. And it will catalyze your own thinking as you respond—sometimes with admiration, other times with impatience—to the conversation swirling around you.
The challenge facing a breakthrough synthesis like this one is that readers who approach it from their own specialized angle will tend to find it superficial: Those who are deeply immersed in Buddhist thought will find the spiritual dimension rather skimpy. Those who are well-versed in organizational-change literature may find the business applications not worth the book’s hefty price. But neither of these lenses is useful for appreciating the real value of this remarkable book.
Calling their approach “more Buddhist than Western,” Peter Senge comes closest to summarizing the book’s vision when he addresses the fact that humans exist in two “interdependent orders”: first, the “manifest” domain, and second, the “infinite, the absolute, the transcendent, the universal beyond form, beyond thought, beyond any ‘thing’—typically referred to as ‘suchness.’ The human exists, literally, where these two orders intersect—what’s called the tathagatagarbha in the oldest texts.”
Senge explains the title of the book when he says: “I think a Buddhist would say that presencing can arise to the extent that we develop the capacity, individually and collectively, to extend our conscious awareness in both domains.”
Senge et al have conducted a panel discussion, not a lecture, which has all the strengths and weaknesses of that format. If we listen closely, it can change our worldview. But it is our responsibility to make sense of it and decide what its implications are for our work, and for our lives.
For me, reading Presence was both spiritual and intellectual nourishment. As someone who walks between these two worlds, I was grateful to find a book in which the authors had the courage to acknowledge the two planes as interdependent and equally important. I was touched deeply by their personal sharing, particularly by Joseph Jaworski’s soulful account of his wilderness experience of oneness. Jaworski’s story of his fourteen-day vision quest in Baja, California—almost an entire chapter in the book—captures the power of this book, as well as its limitation. The power resides in this man’s honest account of how he broke through the wall that separated him from his world, and experienced the timeless oneness with the universe that sages and mystics have written about for centuries. The limitation is that the implications of his journey are not explored.
His guide on the vision quest was spiritual teacher John Milton, who is convinced that “political, legal and economic approaches don’t go deep enough.” Like other teachers of this sort, Milton believes that the penetrating changes in human culture that we need for people to live in true harmony and balance with one another and the earth require an internal change. There is no question that Joseph Jaworski experienced that profound inner shift. What remains unclear is exactly how that can be translated in a way that the world can hear it.
That doing so is the authors’ goal becomes clear from their “U” theory of systemic change, in which the heart of the change process occurs when groups experience this transformative moment of “presence” collectively. This appears to be the brainchild of co-author Otto Sharmer, who intends to publish another book, entitled Theory U. How the authors intend to make this transformation happen on organizational retreats or during policy dialogues, however, is not adequately explained, as the following excerpt illustrates:
The state at the bottom of the U is presencing—seeing from the deepest source and becoming a vehicle for that source. When we suspend and redirect our attention, perception starts to arise from within the living process of the whole. When we are presencing, it moves further, to arise from the highest future possibility that connects self and whole. The real change in understanding presencing lies not in its abstractness but in the subtlety of the experience.
Mystics and seekers have been writing about this “subtle experience” for millennia, and circular, awkward passages such as this one do not add much to the literature.
Part of my confusion about the theory expounded in Presence may stem from the conversational style of the book, which ambles through thickets of ideas the way four good friends would traverse the English countryside. Clearly their conversations, which took place at Sharmer’s Cambridge apartment on several weekends spanning many months, were taped, transcribed and carefully edited. Betty Sue Flowers, a gifted writer who worked closely with Bill Moyers on the interviews with Joseph Campbell captured in The Power of Myth, does a valiant job trying to bring order and rhythm to the currents of conversation.
So do not read Presence for simplicity or clarity. Read it for complexity and richness. Since it is a dialogue involving four gifted thinkers and authors, it is a brainstorm, not a still pond.
If they hadn’t published it themselves, they would have had to label their book “spirituality,” or “business,” or one of the other ridiculous categories that bookstore chains love but that infuriate many readers. Thanks to their independence, the authors were able to cross back and forth between the different planes of existence within one volume.
As a result of the authors’ courage and wisdom, Presence comes into our hands just as it left theirs: as a gift of the spirit, bridging the worlds of spirit and matter—and inviting us to cross the divide too. ©
Mark Gerzon is director of the Global Leadership Network and the author of several books, including the forthcoming My Country Is the World: The Art of Leading Beyond Borders.End of the Earth is a valuable celebration of our 21st-century navigation between the known and, not just the unknown, but the unknowable. It’s a book of childlike wonder, deep humility and profound clarity; a book that will make the reader glad to remember the connection between the few wild places left on earth and the human spirit.
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