Just read Presence, a book by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. 

The book is about how we think and how we think affects how we can change the world.  It combines modern physics, spirituality, sociology,  meditation practice, politics and more. 

Some of the best parts of the book are its stories.  It includes a fascinating narrative of a grass-roots health care initiative in Germany, where doctors, patients and other community members met and designed ways to make their health care system better. Here in the USA, where we are stuck on getting insurance for all, it is helpful to read this (pp 154 ff) to think about what we really want health care to be, even if everyone were insured.  The problem (and the solution) around health care is not only access, but what kind of care we should have.  This example describes methods and importance of community input   This narrative helps us understand that health care should not only be a service that doctors provide — but rather a system that all of us must create.

I have a question for the authors about their  values.  They challenge making money as the most important value. However, their examples are mostly about innovation in for-profit companies.  They tout a new development at The Gap.  They describe how VISA created a new business model, but they don’t challenge  the need for a new line of clothes (made where and by whom?) or the overall effect of VISA and its effect on peoples’ credit card debt and buying habits  — and our general overly-consumerist society, which the authors condemn.

Senge remarks how sad he felt when he saw an individually wrapped bar of soap at the hotel of an environmental conference.  He said little had changed in the hotel’s environmental consciousness in 20 years, since he started going to that same conference.  Funny, he notices the bar of soap, and feels  sad about that, but fails to notice the working conditions of the maid who put the soap in his bathroom, whose life has also probably not improved much in 20 years. 

However, there is much food for thought in the book.  The authors point out how the “soft stuff” of management is what really makes change.  They point out how we have to change our whole way of thinking and looking at the world for real social change to come about.  It made me think of the probability of dealing with global warming and other extreme environmental challenges.  I thought of Al Gore’s movie, and how he wants to change policies by appealing to our reason.  Presence argues that no amount of “reasoning,” no amount of data,  will create the changes we need.  We need a spiritual change in our hearts and how we see the world.  We need to see “the world” and “the environment” as ourselves, not as “out there” — something separate from ourselves.

Betty Sue Flowers questions  whether “short term self interest will solve our problems” (p. 217)  This goes to the heart of community organizing theory and methodology — which relies on self interest as the well-spring for social change— mobilizing groups of people around their collective self interest.  This is a good question for reflection — for community organizers and others.  Can motivation from self interest, especially short term self interest, solve our problems?

This book made me think, about organizing, about how I see the world, and about how we can change it.  It makes the point that time is running out.  Our technological abilities have far out-stripped our spiritual insight.

I also wonder about their focus on business   No doubt, business is a potent force on the planet and only getting more so.   However, the workshops they run cost thousands of dollars and are therefore only accessible to people with very high incomes — generally business executives.  They are missing out on the intelligence of thousands of people at the grass roots who can’t afford to attend their workshops.  This makes me sad.  I wonder how much money they assume they have to make to live, especially when they challenge the standard “bottom line.”   There are no doubt some great people working with businesses, but the world of community organizers and this world seldom meet, at least as far as I can tell.  And that makes me sad.  And to solve the problems the planet and its people face, we are going to need a more diverse group of people in the room.  And for that to happen, we need to re-think workshop pricing.