Developing leaders requires not just the buildup of their toolkit or competencies, but also shifting their Level of Consciousness (O'Brian, 2016; Scharmer 20__). The next challenge is explaining these concepts to an audience that did not have college education. I attempted to translate the concepts by likening them to channels on cable TV, pointing out the different units of analyses provided by the different channels. Channel 1: The Selfie Channel - The percieving the world thru one's own self-centered worldview. Channel 2: The Discovery/Science Channel - Interpreting the world primarily through science. Channel 3: The Oprah/Empathy Channel - Interpreting the world through the Other person's worldview Channel 4: The Balcony/Reality TV Director's Channel - Interpreting the world by observing emergence. http://www.ottoscharmer.com/sites/default/files/2000_Presencing.pdf https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/27112706/OBRIEN-DISSERTATION-2016.pdf?sequence=1
"Tadhana" is an old Filipino word that means fate or nature. Recently, the 2014 romatic comedy movie That Thing Called Tadhana made the term fresh and popular again. These days, tadhana connotes recognition of an emerging future and the need to move past old feelings, memories, and prisons (as Scharmer would call them) and operate from an openness to one's highest positive tadhana.
Which makes "tadhana" resemble "presencing". According to Scharmer, presencing means:
"liberating one’s perception from the “prison” of the past and then letting it operate from the field of the future. This means that you literally shift the place from which your perception operates to another vantage point. In practical terms, presencing means that you link yourself in a very real way with your “highest future possibility” and that you let it come into the present. Presencing is always relevant when past-driven reality no longer brings you forward, and when you have the feeling that you have to begin again on a completely new footing in order to progress...I use the presencing approach to facilitate profound innovation and change processes both within companies and across societal systems."
Now it might seem a stretch to liken a theory of social evolution with a romantic comedy theme, but then again, the intention is to popularize the understanding of leadership theories by looking for similar terms in the vernacular. In the movie, the girl struggles to liberate herself from her attachment to her past boyfriend. The boy journeys with her and challenges her to open herself up to the emerging future, instead of clinging to the past.
In societies burdened by class structures, marginalization of the poor, leaders need to similarly invite others to open themselves to get past their history and perhaps even identities anchored on poverty.
The video below shows how a social worker Jo Mateo uses stories to invite poor farmers to work toward a more liberating tadhana narrative. Through her story, she articulates how structural barriers and social exclusion are realities which will perpetuate poverty (choosing karit scenario), and how responding/pursuing a positive tadhana (choosing panulat) allows poor farmers to liberate themselves from poverty, first through their dreams, and then through their daily actions choosing (presencing) to respond to the call of their preferred tadhana.
A young female physician friend shared recently how she had not yet started the program for drug-users in her town, despite the fact that rehabilitating 800,000 drug users is an urgent and large scale problem in the Philippines these days. She said she had not yet been trained to address this problem. A hidden perspective is that a young female physician faces personal security risks when she interacts with drug users in a small rural town.
The Bridging Leadership framework (by AIM and Zuellig Family Foundation) propose "ownership" as a core principle in Bridging Leadership. Heifetz and Scharmer both describe the "ownership" mindsets of leaders but from slightly different perspectives.
Heifetz could describe the doctor's mindset as a form of "work avoidance" because the thought of doing the adaptive work on local drug-users could feel too "distressing", or "too hot" for this female physician. She may be conscious or only subconsciously aware of this distress or disequilibrium that she faces. She therefore conveniently declares that she has not yet been trained as a polite way of dis-owning the problem. (See Figure 1).
Scharmer would describe the situation as the doctor operating from "me-world" and "it-world", resorting to polite talk or talking tough as opposed to owning the issue at Level 3 and Level 4. (See Table 1 and Figure 2).
