Otto – yesterday, I found myself reflecting on the same thing. I captured it and posted what came to me as a conversation in the community space.
I want to thank you for facilitating the birth of this community, and for Kelvy’s wonderful creation. I personally feel that I finally found a place for connectedness and expression in a language that others can also relate to.
Thank you.

Hi Otto,

This is my first, and most definitely not last, contribution to this blog. I consider your entries and all comments critical clues to gaining a better understanding of how Theory U is being understood by others. I learn a lot from this process. Thanks for this medium.

One of the most interesting and thought provoking areas described in Theory U was your consistent explanation of how the phenomena of emergence and anti-emergence manifest in society. It struck a deep cord with me because this is such a fundamental reality that we experience in our daily lives. Instead, our society (often times I do this as well) seems to always default back to positional approaches based on limited parochial perspectives (contemporary market capitalism, religious fanaticism, fundamentalism etc.). In other words, we revert back to the process of “downloading” from past experiences.

Personally, I realized how deeply this was hidden from my field of view (or more importantly from my field of attention). My questions to you pertains to locating Theory U in the field of system thinking.

In your book, you mention that systems thinking looked at the holistic interaction of parts, but continued to learn from past experiences, where as Theory U heuristically presents the possibility (and reality) of learning from the future.

Would this then be the development of Senge’s “Mental Models?” How would you locate this?

Thanks again,
Simon

I joined this community very recently.

It’s already one of the liveliest and most inspiring places on the internet.

Hala, Simon, Max–great to read your comments. Simon, on your systems thinking and mental model question: yes, mental models and also system dynamics (which is the name of the systems thinking school that Senge’s mentor Jay Forrester developed at MIT) are both examples of learning from the experiences of the past. they do not tap into the field of the emerging future. so they are very useful. but also limited in that regard.
–otto