schmoozy space Mark Szpakowski's szpace blog

I've just been looking at Otto Scharmer's Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges (The Social Technology of Presencing) (excerpt). The U Process is a powerful practice and theory for self-transformation of communities and organizations. In talking of enabling conditions to inspire shift on a global scale, Scharmer includes:

A new social art form I call Social Presencing Theater that stages media events and productions to connect different communities and their transformational stories by blending action research, theater, contemplative practices, intentional silence, generative dialogue, and open space.

This resonates with Buckminster Fuller's proposed World Game, where thousands of citizens would gather to watch large-scale simulations and scenarios of planetary actions and their results, something clearly necessary in our time. Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth tour is a great indication in that direction.

Social Presencing Theater takes this a step further. As he describes in a short section on The Theater Stage and the Collective Field, presenting and performing with a live audience is a different experience. The audience, caring and attentive, with minds and hearts wide open, creates a collective holding space, within which intention and presence co-emerge.

The practice of such a collective holding space would be a great direction for the technical/social-technology community to go in, both for conferences and for social collaboration tools. Bar Camps and Unconferences already bring together Open Space Technology and community-building web tools such as Wikis. Theory U and Social Presencing Theater could help give rise to the further necessary quantum moments pregnant with the reflection, dialogue, and self-organization that are being called for.