The ability to move through the U as a team, an organization, or a system requires a new set of leadership capacities. The following seven Theory U leadership capacities are practiced today in multi-stakeholder innovation and corporate applications, as well as by the Presencing Institute, which is dedicated to integrating science, consciousness, and profound social change into a new social technology.
1. Holding the Space: Listen to What Life Calls You to Do
Building the U leadership capacity starts with the principle of incompleteness. Listen to what life calls you to do, and to that which emerges from the group of people you convene. To do this effectively you must intentionally leave a lot of open space for others to contribute.
2. Observing: Attend with Your Mind Wide Open
Unless you suspend your Voice of Judgment (VOJ), attempts to reach the places of most potential will be futile
3. Sensing: Connect with Your Heart
This is what moving down the left side of the U is all about—facilitating an opening process. The process involves the tuning of three instruments: the open mind, the open heart, and the open will. While the open mind is familiar to most of us, the other two capacities draw us into less familiar territory.
4. Presencing: Connect to the Deepest Source of Your Self and Will
While an open heart allows us to see a situation from the whole, the open will enables us to begin to act from the emerging whole.
5. Crystallizing: Access the Power of Intention
Even a very small group of key persons may commit itself to the purpose and outcomes of a project. That committed core group with its common intention then goes out into the world and creates an energy field that begins to attract people, opportunities, and resources. Momentum builds, and things begin to happen. The core group functions as a vehicle for the whole to manifest.
6. Prototyping: Integrate Head, Heart, and Hand
Moving down the left side of the U is about opening up and dealing with the resistance of thought, emotion, and will; moving up the right side is about intentionally reintegrating the intelligence of the head, the heart, and the hand in the context of practical applications. Integrate your thoughts, your emotions, and your will.
7. Performing: Playing the “Macro Violin”
An accomplished violinist once realized that he couldn’t simply play his violin in Chartres Cathedral—he had to play the entire space—what he called the “macro violin.” For systems and organizations to accomplish similarly large tasks, they need to convene the right sets of players (frontline people who are connected with one another through the same value chain), and use a social technology that gives them the skills to shift from pointless debating to co-creating the new.
