ABOUT US

The Presencing Institute (PI) was founded in 2005 by Otto Scharmer and a circle of co-founders, first as a non-profit in Boston and later in Berlin. Today we are a planetary network of practitioners, action researchers and awareness-based change makers, with a small core team spread across several regions.

Here is how the story unfolded.

1960s–1980s

Our Roots: The Farm and the Social Soil

Our work begins with the land.

Otto grew up on Hof Dannwisch, his family’s biodynamic farm in northern Germany. His parents, early pioneers of organic farming, taught him that the quality of the soil shapes the quality of everything that grows above it.

When Otto was 16, the 350-year-old farmhouse burned to the ground. Standing before the ruins, he felt everything familiar was gone, and yet something new began to open: a sense of a future possibility waiting to emerge. That moment foreshadowed what we now call presencing.

In the same years, Otto joined two youth movements of his generation: the movement for decentralized, renewable energy and against nuclear power, and the peace movement against the Cold War arms race. There he felt the same thing, this time collectively. What fuels social movements is a shared sense of a future possibility that will only come about if we step up together.

These experiences became the foundation of our work. Just as soil conditions shape everything that grows from it, social soil–the quality of our relationships and shared attention, shapes what communities and societies are able to bring forth. Otto and his siblings also transferred the ownership of the farm into a non-profit to secure the regenerative use of the land.

1995–2004

From Organizational Learning to Deep Systems Change

Fast-forward to the mid-1990s. Otto's experiences on the farm and in the movements had left him with a question: if individuals and communities can sense an emerging future, why do our institutions so rarely act from it?

After completing his PhD at Witten/Herdecke University, Otto took this question to MIT and the organizational learning community around Peter Senge. Its tools helped organizations learn from the past, but many of the challenges leaders faced could not be solved that way.

Otto interviewed more than 150 leading thinkers and practitioners about how profound innovation comes into the world (some of these interviews he conducted together with Joseph Jaworski). One of them, with former Hanover Insurance CEO Bill O'Brien, captured the core insight: “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.” We see what leaders do, but rarely the inner place from which they act.

ACROSS 150+ INTERVIEWS, A PATTERN EMERGED

When attention stays narrow and reactive, systems repeat the past.

When attention opens and deepens, new futures become possible.

These insights first appeared in Presence (2004), co-authored with Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers, and were fully developed in Theory U (2007). Its central idea: the quality of results depends on the quality of awareness from which we act.

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2005–2014

The Founding Years

By the early 2000s, Otto's work had begun to take on a life of its own. More and more people, from business leaders to activists and educators, wanted to explore and apply it. A growing circle of collaborators was ready to carry it forward together.

In the winter of 2005, during a snowstorm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Otto and a circle of co-founders founded the Presencing Institute. From the start, the circle envisioned a new place of learning: less a traditional institution than a multi-local university without borders.

THE FOUNDING CIRCLE

Over the next decade, the practice grew and spread. A turning point came in 2007, when Otto published Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. The book gave the work a shared language and framework, and it drew a growing community of practitioners around the world.

Over the years, tools and methods for applying the work built up: the group developed practices such as sensing journeys and case clinics, and the Presencing Institute decided to make every emerging tool open source (Creative Commons) so that it is accessible to everyone. Beth Jandernoa and Otto developed the Presencing Foundation Program, an intense four-day program in which participants learn these tools and apply them to their own context and work.

Social Arts: other ways of knowing

We found that groups could talk about their system for months without seeing their own part in it, or without sensing a potential future. Change required the ability to access other ways of knowing: through the body and through art. Two Social Art forms became central to our work.

Under the leadership of Arawana and Kelvy, the Social Arts became central to our work. Angela Baldini then enabled a set of programs that allowed individuals and teams to develop these social art skills.

2015-2024

Seeding & Cultivating a Global Ecosystem

If the founding years planted the seeds, this decade was about cultivating them at scale: in online learning, in global institutions, and in moments of crisis.

2005 ONWARDS

Local Ecosystems, AI & a New Science of Social Fields

Over the past few years, practitioners in different regions began connecting, learning and collaborating regionally. One innovation they launched is the Ecosystem Leadership Programs (ELPs), a support structure that blends learning with movement building for regeneration and flourishing.

ELPs became spaces where local initiatives and communities collaborate, deepened by walking and weaving with Indigenous leaders and knowledge holders as co-faculty and as fellow participants in these journeys.

These programs cultivate intentional and relational coherence and long-term transformation across whole landscapes and regions. Together, they mark a shift from global learning platforms toward deeply rooted, locally embodied ecosystems of practice.

These programs cultivate intentional and relational coherence and long-term transformation across whole landscapes and regions. Together, these initiatives mark a shift from global learning platforms toward deeply rooted, locally embodied ecosystems of practice.

OUR NEXT CHAPTER

Three questions we are living into