To See and Sense Ourselves
Reframing this moment of racial reckoning in awareness-based systems change allows inspiration and energy.
Earthrise, December 24, 1968, taken by Apollo 8 crew
Earthrise. This is the photo that caused me, as an 8-year old in California to recognize both the miraculous beauty and the isolated fragility of the earth. And it wasn’t just me - this and a later image dubbed the “Blue Marble” made a global impact and energized the fledgling environmental movement. Humanity had a moment of consciousness that we live on a “spaceship earth,” a moment that extended over the course of a decade and beyond. More than 50 years later, Otto Scharmer uses video of the moment this was taken to illustrate the tenets of Awareness Based Systems Change in his U.lab 1x course:
You cannot understand a system unless you try to change it - Kurt Lewin
You cannot change a system unless you transform consciousness - Peter Senge
You cannot transform consciousness unless you make a system see and sense itself - Otto Scharmer
Framed in Awareness Based Systems Change, Earthrise, in a single, dramatic moment, caused humanity to see and sense the limits of the earth as a system, transforming our consciousness of how we individually and collectively impact it.
A Shift in Consciousness, Again.
This summer we in Minneapolis, and then across the globe, saw an entirely different kind of dramatic video, the bystander footage of the murder of George Floyd by a group of police officers. Like the Earthrise before it, it energized an existing movement - this time the Movement for Black Lives. In cities large and small, people of all races turned out to demonstrate our horror, anger, and frustration that this type of human rights abuse continues. And yet, Black leaders, journalists and organizers soon voiced a common question: “Why now, White people?” After all, in greater Minneapolis we have been averaging one or more such police killings every year. Typically there would then be smaller protests, for a few days or weeks. Why was this one the one that caused White people across the USA, as well as people from around the world, to feel common cause with our Black community when they had been telling us about this for years?
“Why now, white people?'“
There has been plenty of speculation about the reasons for this awakening, mostly stemming from conditions of the pandemic: unemployment, isolation leading to increased time online, information coming to light about the differential impact of COVID-19 on different racial groups, etc. Still, it was not until this year’s Co-Initiation session of U.Lab 1x, hearing Otto Scharmer review the conditions for transformational systems change, that it struck me. In the video of George Floyd’s death, we see into the face of the officer whose knee is in Mr. Floyd’s neck, for a full 8 minutes and 46 seconds. We see his composed, White features, and sense that he does not fear for his life, as the commonly invoked defense goes; nor does he need to make a “split-second decision.” What we see is accompanied by a sickening gut sense of the system in action.
But we also see and sense something more. During the Global Activation for Intention & Action (GAIA) initiative last spring, Scharmer added a fourth systems-change tenet, based on a conversation with Indigenous Brazilian activist, Ubiraci Pataxó:
You cannot make a system see and sense itself until you see and sense yourself as part of the system - Ubiraci Pataxó
For myself and White people I know, we could no longer avoid seeing and sensing ourselves as part of the system after seeing the officer’s face. We felt the earth shift under us, as surely as the Earthrise helped us feel the earth in motion. We suddenly saw the systemic relationship between our calls to public safety officers and their treatment of our Black fellow community members, just as we had suddenly seen the relationship between the earth and its surroundings. And those things cannot be un-seen.
In this month’s U-lab Co-initiation session, Otto continued from Pataxó’s tenet to surface the great divides that cause results nobody wants:
You cannot make a system see and sense itself unless you bridge the spiritual, social and ecological divides -Otto Scharmer
This statement captures the idea that as White viewers, seeing and sensing Mr. Floyd’s compliant behavior, his respectful requests, and his continuing agony made an internal bridge for me and others across a social divide between Black and White citizens. This then exposed an internal spiritual divide for many, between what we espouse and how we behave. This is what Cultural Somatics practitioner Rachel Martin calls a lack of "Cultural Coherence".
Living this Moment into a Movement
Along with the “Why now?” question, many Black leaders, organizers and journalists are voicing a concern that the passionate protests of the summer would recede into history as a moment of common cause, but only a moment. I, too, have been nagged by this concern. Reframing this moment as a step in awareness-based systems change gives me both inspiration and energy. I see how this is and will be a movement. And I have glimmers of how the tools of Theory U and its movement-awareness method, Social Presencing Theater (SPT) can be used specifically to keep this movement moving. Along with my fellow SPT Advanced Practitioner, Annie Blair, I am hosting a U.Lab hub to explore, prototype, and clarify the use of these tools for specific use in anti-racism work in a variety of countries and contexts. We would love to have you join us. Leave us a message at the hub link above, or sign up for a call below.
Don’t have bandwidth for the full U.Lab this year? Check out my free monthly Online SPT Social Justice Hub.