Leading from the Emerging Future Quotes

“Myth 2: Leadership is about individuals. In fact, leadership is a distributed or collective capacity in a system, not just something that individuals do. Leadership is about the capacity of the whole system to sense and actualize the future that wants to emerge.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“Energy follows attention. Wherever you place your attention, that is where the energy of the system will go. “Energy follows attention” means that we need to shift our attention from what we are trying to avoid to what we want to bring into reality.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“This is the moment when what we need most is enough people with the skill, heart, and wisdom to help us pull ourselves back from the edge of breakdown and onto a different path.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“The gap between financial capital of US$190 trillion looking for highly profitable investment opportunities and a real economy and social sector without access to the financial capital needed to operate and grow is at the heart of the worldwide economic crisis.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“We need to articulate a different view of economic, political, and spiritual affairs—a view that is not primarily Left or Right, that is not wrapped around the primacy of this mechanism or that one, that doesn’t believe that the solution to our problems lies with Big Government, Big Corporations, Big Money, or Big Ideology.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“As individuals, we must begin to pay attention to our attention (self-awareness); as teams, we must begin to converse about our conversations (dialogue); as enterprises, we must begin to organize our organizing (networks of networks: eco-systems); and as eco-systems, we must begin to coordinate our coordinating (systems of awareness-based collective action, or ABC).”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“It is this shared awareness that allows for fast, flexible, and fluid coordination and decision-making that are far more adaptive and co-creative than any other organizational model currently being used in major societal institutions.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“The ability to shift from reacting against the past to leaning into and presencing an emerging future is probably the single most important leadership capacity today.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“At the beginning of the twenty-first century, probably for the first time in human history, the living presence of the abyss—that is, the simultaneous existence of one world that is dying and another one that is being born—is a widely shared experience for millions of people across cultures, sectors, and generations. It is experienced in communities as well as in ministries, global companies, NGOs, and UN organizations—wherever people are looking at the real picture. It’s a felt sense that applies to relationships, institutions, and systems, but even more to the personal level of our journey from self to Self.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“There’s only one issue in the world. It’s the reintegration of mind and matter.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“We respond to societal issues with quick technical fixes that address symptoms rather than with systemic solutions. As a consequence, we are hitting the limits to symptom-focused fixes—that is, limits to solutions that respond to problems with more technological gadgets rather than by addressing the problems’ root causes.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“We collectively create results that nobody wants because decision-makers are increasingly disconnected from the people affected by their decisions. As a consequence, we are hitting the limits to leadership—that is, the limits to traditional top-down leadership that works through the mechanisms of institutional silos.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“The ability to shift from reacting against the past to leaning into and presencing an emerging future is probably the single most important leadership capacity today. It is a capacity that is critical in situations of disruptive change, not only for institutions and systems, but also for teams and individuals.”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“shift the global field of entrepreneurship”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

“But you can create conditions that allow a deeper alchemy to work—that is, conditions that help leaders in a system to broaden and deepen their view of the system from ego to eco, from “me” to”
― C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies