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.

The Peer Learning session went well, with questions from participants getting me to think more deeply about the material and how to present it. We added in a new section on Action Learning and looked at the cycle of doing, reflecting, theorising, and planning, and the opportunity each stage offers for deeper learning. We had a guest observer from ICA Associates, facilitators extraordinaire, and I look forward to hearing his feedback.

Tomorrow I head to the four day Authentic Leadership in Action intensive hosted by the Shambhala Institute. The plenary sessions include talks by Peter Senge (of Fifth Discipline fame, a professor at MIT, and a founder of the Society for Organizational Learning) and Otto Scharmer (also at MIT, author of Theory U, and founder of Emerging Leaders Innovate Across Sectors).

Each participant also signs up for a particular module to participate in over the course of the retreat, and I’m signed up for The Future of Leadership: Scenario Planning and the Changing Nature of Organizations and Communities. Since first reading about scenario planning, I’ve been interested in how to design a learning event using scenarios to plan for future possibilities. In this module, I think we’ll actually participate in a scenario session, envisioning future possibilities that leadership could take over the next decade based on different combinations of organizational changes and challenges.

Upon return I’ll post some of the learning and reflecting from the intensive.

Next week I’m attending the Authentic Leadership in Action regional intensive hosted by the Shambhala Institute. One of the speakers, Otto Scharmer, outlines four ways of listening. I read Scharmer’s take on listening in Adam Kahane’s book “Solving Tough Problems”.

Scharmer’s four ways of listening:

1. downloading, or “listening from within our own story”. In downloading, we start with our own perception and understanding, and only listen for what confirms what we already believe. We listen for evidence of our own belief system.

2. debating, or “listening from the outside”. In debating, we exchange information from an objective perspective, rather than being a part of the exchange.

3. reflective dialogue. In reflective dialogue, our listening is starting to include a personal engagement. We listen to ourselves, and we listen to others, listening “from the inside”.

4. generative dialogue. In generative dialogue, we listen from within the whole – ourselves, others, and the system we create together.

As Kahane describes Scharmer’s listening taxonomy, downloading and debating are “insufficient to create new social realities”. But when we can listen from within ourselves, open up to others, and perceive from within the system, then new realities can emerge.