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Version 4.1, May 14, 2005.
The U-Process:
A Social Technology for Addressing Highly Complex Challenges
I. Introduction and Overview
The U-Process is a methodology foraddressing highly complex challenges—for solving complex problems orrealizing complex opportunities. It is a“social technology” for effecting thetransformation of reality, within andacross the worlds of business,government, and civil society.In using the U-Process, an individual orteam undertakesthree activitiesor movements:Sensingthecurrent reality of the system of which they arepart, carefully and in depth;Presencingandreflecting toallow their“inner knowing”to emerge, about what is going on and what they have todo; and thenRealizing, acting swiftly to bring forth a new reality.The U-Process has been developedthrough twenty years of intensivelearning-by-doing by Joseph Jaworskiand Adam Kahane of GeneronConsultingin partnership with OttoScharmer and Peter Senge of theMassachusetts Institute of Technology and theSociety for OrganizationalLearning. They have done thisdevelopment in a range of settingsaround the world, with corporateexecutives and line managers,politicians and public servants, activistsand revolutionaries, scientists andintellectuals.The U-Process is simultaneously acutting-edge technology and adistillation of ancient wisdom. It is aprocess that many creative people— business and social entrepreneurs,inventors, artists—use when they generate breakthroughs. The U-Processtakes what has previously been anindividual, tacit,intuitive, andlargely un-replicablepractice, andembodies it in amethodology thatcan be usedcollectively andconsciously toopen up and make visible concretefields of opportunity.The U-Process creates shared learningspaces within which teams of highly diverse individuals become capable of operating as a single intelligence. Thismode of operation allows them to share what each of them knows, so thattogether they can see the whole systemand their roles in enacting it. This“systems sight” enables extraordinarily effective individual and collectiveleadership. From this place of greaterclarity and connection, the teams areable to co-create breakthroughinnovations that address their mostcomplex challenges.
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II. Projects and Results
A large and growing body of basicresearchon the U-Process has beendeveloped over the last twenty years.The core of this research consists of over150 interviews with some of the world’sleading entrepreneurs, scientists, andartists, from businessman DavidMarsing to economist Brian Arthur tocognitive scientist Francisco Varela to violinist Miha Pogacnik.
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The U-Processis the synthesis of these diverseinnovation experiences, and thereforeresonates across a range of contexts andcultures.In parallel to this body of basic research,Generon and its partners have beeninvolved in a wide variety of appliedproblem-solving and systemictransformation projects. They have donethis work both inorganizational systems, within single business,government, or civil society organizations, and in broadersocietal
systems involving stakeholders from allthree sectors.The work in organizational systems hasprimarily been in multinationalcompanies associated with the Society for Organizational Learning, in a rangeof industries, includingenergy, mining,transportation, fast moving consumergoods, high technology, professionalservices, and banking.The work insocietal systems has been at thelocal,regional, national and internationallevels, in and across Africa, Asia,Europe, and North, Central and South America.The use of the U-Process in these
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See
Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future
by Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer,Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers(Cambridge: Society for Organizational Learning,2004).
various contexts has produced results atthree scales:
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In thecapacities—the thinking andacting—of the leaders of thesesystems,
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In therelationshipsamongst them,and
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In theperformanceof the systems.Examples from three societal U-Processprojects follow.
Local Example:the Lahn-DillHealth Care Initiative in Germany
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Faced with a healthcare system headingfor collapse, a new approach is beingconstructed in Lahn-Dill, a region of 280,000 inhabitants north of Frankfurt.Led by a grassroots community of innovators, including patients,physicians, and government and otherofficials, the project has used the U-Process to effect fundamental change inthe local healthcare system, buckingtrends evident in the rest of the country.CapacitiesThe project was initiated in 1999 after asurvey of doctors in the region foundthat 60% felt “inwardly resigned” to thestress of their jobs and 49% had at leastonce contemplated suicide. Patients were also deeply dissatisfied by theirexperiences with the health system. Thissituation changed fundamentally as aresult of the project. One doctor said:
“My relationship to patients has becomemore like a partnership, more a thinking-together. I am more able to elicit andreformulate the thinking of patients—to helpthem see what they think and to becomeaware of what they really want.”
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See “Breathing Life into a Dying System” by Katrin Kaeufer, Otto Scharmer, and Ursula Versteegen,
Reflections: the Journal of theSociety for Organizational Learning
, 2003.
3RelationshipsThe core of the project was a series of sensing and presencing dialoguesinvolving patients and physicians. Theseled to deep changes in the relationshipsamong them and to structural changesin the health care system:
“Physicians and patients now have theformal structures and shared experience to work differently together. The coordinationof care and, more broadly, thecommunication among physicians acrossLahn-Dill have improved. But probably themost subtle change is in how the self connects to the whole system, and whatimpact the individual can have on thatsystem. Though still overloaded, physiciansfeel less isolated, more engaged, and moreeffective.”
Performance
“In addition to the joint emergency carecenter, the physicians created several otherinitiatives, including agreements for medicalgroups to share specialized diagnosticequipment; a new format for transferringinformation between hospitals and outsidephysicians, and a jointly run office tocoordinate care for patients moving betweenthe two systems; quality-improvementgroups of physicians and other healthcareproviders; and citizen forums to educatepatients and support further reforms.”“‘The most striking development that I haveseen is that the patient complaints from thisregion dropped virtually to zero,’ says Dr.Peter Eckert, the head of the regionalsupervisory board. ‘That is in stark contrastto other regions, where we have many, many complaints and lawsuits.’ While quality indicators like complaint rates haveimproved, many costs have fallen. Forinstance, ambulance usage has declinedslightly (while increasing in comparableregions) and local hospitals now require justhalf the number of night time emergency physicians deployed under the old system.”
National Example: VisiónGuatemala
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This project was launched in 1998 toenvision and contribute to therebuilding of Guatemala after the end of that country’s brutal 36-year civil war, in which 200,000 people were killed and 1million displaced, out of a totalpopulation of only 7 million.CapacitiesThe Vision Guatemala team was madeup of 34 top leaders from all sectors of Guatemalan society, including businessmen, cabinet ministers, mayors, youth, journalists, university presidents,Mayan leaders, army generals andformer guerillas. They started their firstmeetings with very high levels of fearand mistrust and with extremely divergent and strongly held views abouttheir country’s past, present and future.Over the course of their two years of U-Process work together, they opened up,learned, and transformed both theirthinking and their acting. Two of themlater said:
“We are unaware of the great richness inothers. We do not see it. There is a lot, quitea lot, to learn from people who, frankly speaking, one would never have consideredas possible sources of learning.”“Very few people have the privilege of collective dreaming, which is intoxicating.The fact that you can sit and begin toconverge on a series of issues in which youare not just making it up, but you areactually trying to root it in reality…and alsoto grasp it up with all of your strength, sothat you can in fact envision what you sense.That sensation is very powerful.”
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Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities
by Adam Kahane (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004).
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U-Process Social Technology
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