Before I explain what I mean by that, let’s start with why it’s important. The current global geo-political situation presents serious challenges for humankind. Our friend, Otto Scharmer, puts it much better than I could:

• We have created a thriving global economy that yet leaves 850 million people suffering from hunger and 3 billion people living in poverty (on less than two dollars per day). The poor of the world -- about 80 percent of mankind -- live on 15 percent of the world's total GNP.
• We invest significant resources on our agriculture and food systems only to create nonsustainable mass production of low-quality junk food that pollutes both our bodies and our environment, resulting in topsoil degradation of a territory as large as India (the equivalent of 21 percent of the present arable land in the world.)
• We spend enormous resources on health care systems that merely tinker with symptoms and are unable to address the root causes of health and sickness in our society. Our health outcomes aren't any better than in many societies that spend far less.
• We also pour considerable amounts of money into our educational systems, but we haven't been able to create schools and institutions of higher education that develop people's innate capacity to sense and shape their future, which I view as the single most important core capability for this century's knowledge and co-creation economy.
• In spite of alarming scientific and experimental evidence for an accelerating climate change, we, as a global system, continue to operate the old way -- as if nothing much has happened. More than half of the world's children today suffer conditions of depravation such as poverty, war, and HIV/AIDS. As a result, 40,000 children die of preventable diseases every day. (Theory U, pp 2-3)

This situation represents a serious threat to most organisations. It certainly makes it difficult to plan with any semblance of certainty. These issues are central to many organisations (eg governments, NGOs, aid organisations and environmental groups) but none are exempt. Business is increasingly required to respond to environmental and social concerns. Many would argue that regardless of government regulation, it is good business to do so. At a deeper level, most of us are concerned about the kind of world we will leave to our children. We can’t divorce what we do from 9 - 5 (if anyone still works from 9 to 5) from the kind of world we are creating. So the challenge is to do good work and do good business in an environment in which we feel very little sense of individual control.

This is where the blind spot comes in.

Since it’s his idea, I will let Scharmer provide a definition:

"...the place within or around us where our attention originates. It's the place from where we operate when we do something. The reason it's blind, is that it is an invisible dimension of our social field, of our everday experience in social interactions."

You might want to go back and read that again.

It is the place where our attention originates. You and I may give a great deal of thought to what we give attention to but do we think much about where that attention originates? That is, what is it within us or around us that leads us to pay attention to one thing and not another?

I find it a very difficult question to answer but at the same time I have a sense that it is a very important question. There are times when my awareness of this spot is acute. I can’t describe it but I am aware of it and when I am aware of it my decision making process is different. I become aware of possibilities that I had never thought of. I am sure you have had similar experiences. There are times when time, at one and the same time, both speeds up and slows down. Things are happening quickly but I seem to have the ability to act in slow motion. (cf the work of Csikszentmihalyi)

I think this is what Otto Scharmer is talking about with his concept of the blind spot. This awareness.

So what has this to do with responding to the global issues I quoted before? I believe that as groups of us become aware of our blind spot - the place where our attention originates – we will become far more creative within our sphere of influence and generate possibilities that weren’t there before.

Our sphere of influence may be, by our own account, quite limited but as we become aware of our blind spot we influence others, both within our organisation and outside it. The first impact we will see is that our own organisation, or our part of our organisation, becomes more creative and what I like to call generative. Scharmer suggests that we begin to create the future, or more accurately “we bring into being the future that is seeking to emerge.” This is a challenging concept but at the same time I find it quite exciting.

Regardless, this creativity and generativity both makes our organisation (or our part of it) more effective and that very effectiveness addresses in some way the global challenges that face us. For example we may find a more cost effective way to produce our product that at the same time reduces greenhouse emissions. Or we may develop a pricing structure that makes our product more widely accessible and at the same time yields a higher margin.

This is a simplistic representation of complex interactions that become possible when we intentionally operate from our blind spot but I hope it serves to illustrate potential scenarios.

At the heart of all this is the very foundation of leadership. Whether you are in a formal leadership position or not you have the potential to influence

As Scharmer puts it:

“The essence of leadership is to shift the inner place from which we operate both individually and collectively.”

His challenge then, to each of us is to make this shift, to find our blind spot and operate intentionally from it. From this we will become more creative and generative in our work and our organisations and we may just be surprised how much capacity we have to influence others.

How we do this is an article all by itself.

I leave you with this closing thought from a completely different source:

The outward work
will never be puny
if the inner work
is great.
And the outward work
can never be great or even good
if the inward one is puny and of little worth.(M. Fox, Original Blessing: a primer in creation spirituality 1983)

If you would like to follow any of the thoughts in this article further you might like to check out these links and further reading.

* I will refer to many authors and commentators in these articles. I do so with the usual disclaimer that their views are their own and don't necessarily represent mine. I include these references because I think the author's work is interesting and thought provoking. In this particular case, while I find Scharmer's work fascinating, stimulating and challenging, it concerns me that his work results in the establishment of another "institute." There are many schools of thought that relate or overlap Scharmer's. These schools don't revolve around the ideas of a single person rather the development of a whole way of thinking resulting from the contribution of hundreds or thousands of people over time.