Otto Scharmer's work on presencing invites a radical departure in how we talk about organizational thrivancy. He argues that we can no longer create a viable future as an extension of even a successful past.
Several currently significant leadership challenges cannot be successfully approached this way because the experience base of a team often is not relevant for the issue at hand. In order to do well in the emerging new business environments, organizations and their leaders have to develop a new cognitive capability, the capability for sensing and seizing emerging business opportunities (Arthur 1996, 2000). Organizations and their leaders can develop this capability by engaging in a different kind of learning cycle, one that allows them to learn from the future as it emerges, rather than from reflecting on past experiences. I suggest calling this evolving new learning capacity “presencing.”
The term is the synergy of presence and sensing. Learning from the future as it emerges is the kind of listening made possible when we suspend belief in even our most confident assumptions. It's asking new and larger questions, and being intentional about doing this as the heart of any planning effort. It is based on the notion that the most compelling sense of the future happens in the dialogue between what we dream and how we listen.