After the fantastic experience of attending a plenary session led by Otto Scharmer and getting to talk with him during a dinner break, I’m revisiting the post I made earlier in which I described Otto’s classification of four ways of listening. The understanding I got from Kahane’s book isn’t very complete (and probably my new understanding is far from complete), but here’s a better explanation.

Otto’s working assumption for his presentation is that we do not understand the essence of leadership. That there is a blindspot in leadership and the blindspot is around understanding the inner source from which leaders operate when they do their best work. His proposition is that the success of a leader depends on the inner source from which the leader operates (and that two people could do exactly the same thing with different results if they are acting from different inner sources). Our leadership challenge, therefore, is to shift the inner place from which we operate.

Otto illustrated this shift with the example of listening. He outlined the listening example at the level of the individual, the group, the institution, and the system – below just outlines the individual level.

If I am represented by a circle, then the first level of listening (downloading, or “I and me” listening), is when I am listening from the centre of my own circle, from within my own walls. Everything I hear is filtered through my own boundaries and limitations, and really I am only hearing that which reconfirms what I know to be true.

The second level of listening has me move to the outline of my circle – I am listening from my external wall, looking out the window. Listening from the inside but looking at what is outside, a more objective listening. Otto called this factual listening, or “I and it” listening.

The third level of listening he called empathic listening, or “I and you” listening. At this level, you are outside the walls of your circle, your circle boundaries become a dotted line, and you listen from outside yourself, from the perspective of another. “An everyday version of an out-of-body experience”, he described it. It happens when we listen from outside of our own boundaries and forget our own agenda. We listen from the perspective of another person. As a facilitator, this is the level of listening with which I most identified – listening from the perspective of another, or from the perspective of a group. This perspective is what coaches try to see, when they look out at the coachee’s perspective and try to understand the coachee’s reality from his/her point of view.

But here is the challenging level, the level that takes real effort to achieve. The fourth level, which Otto called listening from the emerging future, or “I and now” listening. Here you are listening not just from a particular spot outside your own circle, but from a field of possibility – a field of spots outside your own circle, a field of spots of future possibilities, a field of your potential future selves. Otto described it as “connecting with that which is just about to happen now”.

For groups (rather than individuals), these four levels are termed downloading (conversation coming from within, from an internal agenda); debate (we start to speak our mind and objectively debate; we look at possibilities but still are stuck within our own viewpoint); dialogue (where the group achieves the capacity to see itself from without, to see the larger system we collectively enact, seeing the system from outside and how we are part of the system); and collective creativity, where we can listen from a realm of future possibilities.

And all of those are just the listening examples! What Otto drew it back to was leadership and the inner source of leadership. How do we identify the inner place from which we are leading? Are we leading from inside the boundaries of our own preconceived notions? Are we leading from our own boundaries, but considering objective possibilities that are out there? Are we leading from outside of ourselves, or our group, and looking back at ourselves from another perspective? And is it possible that the best place to lead would be from the emerging future, from what is just about to happen now, leading from a field of possibilities that we create together?

As a management consultant told me, an employee will never achieve more than the possibilities that their manager has imagined for them, because in imagining those possibilities the manager is limiting the possibilities for the employee to realize his/her potential. In very real ways, the fields of possibilities we imagine can determine what we are able to do; or, we could always be limited by what we imagine as future potentials. The flipside is that if we’re able to shift to include a larger field of potential future possibilities, we expand the range of what actually is possible.