Breathing life into a dying system
(Otto Scharmer)

Finance. Food. Fuel. Water shortage. Resource scarcity. Climate chaos. Mass poverty. Mass migration. Fundamentalism. Terrorism. Financial oligarchies. We have entered an Age of Disruption. Yet the possibility of profound personal, societal, and global renewal has never been more real. Now is our time.

Our moment of disruption deals with death and rebirth. What’s dying is an old civilization and a mindset of maximum “me”—maxi- mum material consumption, bigger is better, and special-interest- group-driven decision-making that has led us into a state of organized irresponsiblity, collectively creating results that nobody wants.What’s being born is less clear but in no way less significant. It’s something that we can feel in many places across Planet Earth. This future is not just about firefighting and tinkering with the surface of structural change. It’s not just about replacing one mindset that no longer serves us with another. It’s a future that requires us to tap into a deeper level of our humanity, of who we really are and who we want to be as a society. It is a future that we can sense, feel, and actualize by shifting the inner place from which we operate. It is a future that in those moments of disruption begins to presence itself through us.This inner shift, from fighting the old to sensing and presencing an emerging future possibility, is at the core of all deep leadership work today. It’s a shift that requires us to expand our thinking from the head to the heart. It is a shift from an ego-system awareness that cares about the well-being of oneself to an eco-system awareness that cares about the well-being of all, including oneself. When operating with ego-system awareness, we are driven by the concerns and intentions of our small ego self. When operating with eco-system awareness, we are driven by the concerns and intentions of our emerging or essential self—that is, by a concern that is informed by the well-being of the whole. The pre- fix eco- goes back to the Greek oikos and concerns the “whole house.” The word economy can be traced back to this same root. Transforming our current ego-system economy into an emerging eco-system economy means reconnecting economic thinking with its real root, which is the well-being of the whole house rather than money-making or the well- being of just a few of its inhabitants. But while the whole house was for the Greeks something very local, today it also concerns the well-being of our global communities and planetary eco-systems.This shift in awareness from ego-system to eco-system is something that we are approaching and living through not only as groups and organizations, but also as a global community. Pioneering the principles and personal practices that help us to perform this shift may well be one of the most important undertakings of our time