24 Principles of Large Scale Leadership and Change Management Interventions

The method of U(Theory U by MIT Prof.Dr. Otto Scharmer) is summarized in 24 Principles.

1. Listen to What Life Calls You to Do: The essence of the U Process is to strengthen our ability to be present and consciously co-create.
2. Listen and Dialogue with Interesting Players on the Edges: The second domain of listening takes you out of your familiar world and to the edges and corners of the system.
3. Clarify Intention and Core Questions: Do not rush the first step of clarifying the intention and core questions that guide the inquiry. The quality of the creative design process is a function of the quality of the problem statement that defines your starting point.
4. Convene a Diverse Core Group around a Shared Intention: Convene a constellation of players that need one another to take action and to move forward. This is not about getting people to ‘buy-in’ but looking for people with shared intention. The quality of impact of your initiative depends on the quality of the shared intention by the Core Team.
5. Build the Container (Holding Space for the future to Emerge): The quality of that shared intention largely depends on the quality of the container, the holding space that shapes and cultivates the web of relationships. The most important leverage point for building a high-impact container is right at the beginning, when you set the tone, when you evoke and activate the field. Container building includes outer and inner conditions, the most important of which is collective listening to the different voices and to the whole.
6. Build a Highly Committed Core Team: To create focus and commitment, clarify: What: What you want to create; Why: Why is matters; How – the process that will get you there; Who – The roles and responsibilities of all key players involved; When and Where – the road map ahead
7. Taking Learning Journeys to the Places of Most Potential: Learning journeys connect people to the contexts and ideas that are relevant to creating the possible future. The deep-dive journey moves one’s operating perspective from inside a familiar world – the institutional bubble – to an unfamiliar world outside that is surprising, fresh, disturbing, exciting and new.
8. Observe, Observe, Observe: Suspend Your Voice of Judgment and Connect with Your Sense of Wonder
9. Practice Deep Listening and Dialogue: Connect with Your Mind and Heart Wide Open
10. Collective Sense Making: Use Social Presencing Theater and Embodied Knowing
11. Circles: Charging the Container
12. Letting Go: The Presence of the Circle Being
13. Intentional Silence: Pick a Practice that helps you
14. Follow Your Journey: Do what You Love, Love What You Do
15. Letting Come: Presencing the Future Wanting to Emerge
16. The Power of Intention: Crystallize Your Vision and Intent
17. Form Core Groups: Five People Can Change the World
18. Create a Platform or Place: Innovation happens in places. In nature, before the caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, it needs the shelter of the cocoon.
19. Build a 0.8 Prototype
20. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate: Always Be in Dialogue with the Universe
21. Seek it with your Hands: Integrate Head, Heart and Hand
22. Create Enabling Infrastructures That Allow the System to Sense and See Itself
23. Create Massive Capacity-Building Mechanisms
24. Labs and Platforms for Cultivating the Social Soil: The objective is to create a platform that helps this emerging global movement to become aware of itself.

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