Pushing harder and harder on familiar solutions, while fundamental problems persist or worsen, is a reliable indicator of nonsystemic thinking—what we often call the “what we need here is a bigger hammer” syndrome.

The fundamental characteristic of the relatively unaligned team is wasted energy. Individuals may work extraordinarily hard, but their efforts do not efficiently translate to team effort. By contrast, when a team becomes more aligned, a commonality of direction emerges, and individuals’ energies harmonize. There is less wasted energy. In fact, a re

Participative openness is inadequate because it fails to generate the commitment and shared understanding needed for real change. As one disgruntled executive put it, “The implicit assumption around here is that the solution to all problems is sharing our views.” The core problem is that learning together starts when we actually listen to one anoth

Real vision cannot be understood in isolation from the idea of purpose. By purpose, I mean an individual’s sense of why he or she is alive. No one could prove or disprove the statement that human beings have purpose. It would be fruitless even to engage in the debate. But as a working premise, the idea has great power. One implication is that happi

Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human.

My colleague and co-author of Presence, Otto Scharmer, explains a shift in orientation and intention that arises from three “thresholds,” or openings through which we must pass in leading profound change: opening the head, opening the heart, and opening the will.10 The first involves opening ourselves to see and hear what is in front of us but we h

Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.

O’Brien’s conviction that “the best way to grow financial capital is through growing human capital.”

Balancing (or stabilizing) feedback operates whenever there is a goal-oriented behavior.