Dr. C. Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and Founding Chair of the Presencing Institute, where for over two decades he has advanced cross-sector systems transformation. His groundbreaking work on “presencing”, learning from the emerging future, has redefined leadership thinking and practice worldwide. He... Read more
Dr. C. Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and Founding Chair of the Presencing Institute, where for over two decades he has advanced cross-sector systems transformation. His groundbreaking work on “presencing”, learning from the emerging future, has redefined leadership thinking and practice worldwide.
He is the author of the bestselling books Theory U and Leading from the Emerging Future, Essentials of Theory U, and co-author (with Katrin Kaufer) of Presencing: 7 Practices for Transforming Self, Society and Business.
Through initiatives such as the MITx u-lab, Otto has mobilized a community of over 260,000 participants from 197 countries and co-created Action Learning Labs for UN agencies and SDG Leadership Labs for UN Country Teams in 26 countries. A member of the Club of Rome, and the Word Future Council, Otto’s current work centers on shifting “from social systems to social soil”, the inner sources of attention, intention, and agency that enable profound societal regeneration. Raised on a farm in northern Germany, his metaphor of cultivating the social soil bridges agriculture, consciousness, and systems change.
He holds a PhD in economics from Witten/Herdecke University and has received the Jamieson Prize for Teaching Excellence at MIT, the Leonardo Corporate Learning Award, and the Elevating Humanity Award from the Organizational Development Network.
Stories of grass-roots innovation and leadership from global action labs.
Practical pathways for shifting systems from silos to shared awareness and collaboration.
How leaders can sense what wants to emerge and act from it with clarity and courage.
A new metaphor for systems change — what farmers do for soil, leaders must do for the social field.
A guided journey through the five movements of Theory U — from downloading to co-creating.
In an era of deep disruption, our greatest capacity is the ability to sense and actualize emerging future possibilities. Drawing from his latest book Presencing, Otto Scharmer explores how leaders and changemakers can shift their attention from the visible structures of systems to the invisible “social soil” beneath them — the...