C.O. Scharmer: Joseph, what underlying question does your work address?

Joseph Jaworski: I have a deep belief that the human capacity includes the ability to sense and actualize what wants to happen before it manifests. For over two decades I’ve been grappling with the question: how can we sense and actualize emerging futures?

Most of the experiences that led me into this were experiences of collapsing boundaries between me and others, even me and animals. That has led me directly into this path…

[David Bohm] talked to me about collapsing boundaries, and I think this was the beginning of my real quest for knowledge... He said, what you need to do is to remove the blocks that separate these people. Then you can operate as a single intelligence for the good of the community or the region. How do you go about eliminating the blocks between people? That was the beginning of my lifelong quest, actually, to learn about this phenomenon...

Over the next ten years, my team and I were able to elicit these experiences on a regular basis among these people. We would select twenty or twenty-five leaders in these communities who were at or near the top of whatever they were doing. CEOs, mayors, and chiefs of police. We would go through a selection process, put them together, have a two- or three-day orientation session, and then the spend seven days in the wilderness with them…

Someone showed up in my office named Renata Karlin. She was with Shell and she reported directly to Arie de Geus… She called from New York and said she wanted to meet with me. I thought it was because she was with Shell and I had gotten some money from Shell to run this program, and that she wanted a report. So I said, fine. She showed up and put her purse down and sat across the table from me and said very matter-of-factly, "Well, Mr. Jaworski." She started telling me all about Shell… Then she just looked at me and said, "I want to ask you, would you be willing to be considered as the leader of the scenario team?"

I had agreed to stay at Shell for a fixed amount of time, and when I left I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do. I ended up, at the suggestion of Peter, moving to Boston to join him at what was then called the MIT Organizational Learning Center, in a completely undefined role. I moved here with my family not knowing at all what I was doing. I had a deep knowing that this was the right thing to do but couldn’t articulate it. Peter and I never discussed what I would be doing...

I believe that the most important realm of leadership is this capacity to collectively sense what it is that is wanting to be brought forth in the world, and to bring it forth as it desires.

There was a mini-crisis and we called a little halt to the meeting. We went out in the hallway and talked about it, and got things back on track. When we came back, Dave Chapman, who is the deputy head of the Trading Company asked a question that came right straight from his heart... Time slowed down, and there was sort of a transcendence of the whole group, the structure of the room changed...

COS: If you were to summarize the essence of what you found out during the last year of research, and of all your previous work, what would that be?

Joseph Jaworski: Well, there’s one penetrating insight that I’ve come out with, Otto, and that is that the key to all of this is love…

COS: What were the forces that let [Nazi Germany] happen?

Joseph Jaworski: The total absence of love. If we would read The Art of Loving by Erich From we would see more of the answer… I think it’s a lifelong effort to keep purifying that intent, to keep working on it. I look at what I have set out for myself, and it’s written down, and I concentrate on that every morning in order to be able to do that today…

There are radio waves, there are television waves, there are electrical fields, all sorts of things that you can’t touch or feel, but they are there and there’s that structure in the room. There are also, for lack of a better word, social fields, and Bohm said that these fields are deeply affected by our intention and our way of being. And that was profound for me. He also spoke to me about Bell’s theorem, the idea of non-localness. That was a model of change that just completely turned my world upside-down. It was critical for the work in Shell to develop a critical mass of people who could hold the right intention and know what that is.

Number one, I think that the first is you must see the world as non-substantial... The second is to see yourself in relationship to everything in the world, see yourself as part of the unfolding… The third is understanding a different kind of commitment: …you surrender to your grand will, as opposed to your puny unfree will…

The blind spot is that we don’t understand that the blocks that keep us from seeing how connected we truly are. If we only could remove these blocks that keep us separated, this could literally change the entire world...

Early in his life Jaworski had the profound experience of discovering a deeper bond of connection to other people and to other living beings. He described this deeply moving experience as a "collapse of boundaries." His work then became organized by two guiding questions. One, how should one understand this collapse of boundaries? And two, how could one help others and groups to experience similar deeper relationships both individually and collectively? Jaworski’s story is a wonderful example of what Master Nan (in his interview) talked about as "entering the meditative space of leadership" and what Eleanor Rosch calls "primary knowing." He expresses the belief that "the key to all of this is love," that is, the process of opening the heart. This insight suggests a radical new starting point for rethinking the foundations of social science and management practice and relates to the work of the 20^th century philosopher Kitaro Nishida (on Nishida, see the interview with Ohashi).