“The key is how will you become aware?” -Otto Scharmer via Theory U: Learning from the Future as it Emerges
Awareness is a multi-faceted word or term. It can be defined as “knowledge or perception of a situation or fact” or “concern about and well-informed interest in a particular situation or development.” However, there are a variety of awareness’ as well, from self-awareness to social awareness, all of which are incredibly important. There is also the issue of raising or creating awareness, of creating a state of knowing, which is especially imperative in our current context and for the speed of which our teams, organizations, systems, society and world continue to shift and change.
While we understand the importance of deepening our individual, organizational and collective awareness, especially as leaders, we still hear things like “you just don’t know what you don’t know?” Which in many respects is very true and difficult. But in other ways, it can often feel as if some leaders are choosing the safety of not knowing, of the “you just don’t know what you don’t know,” mantra as a way of avoiding awareness, of utilizing ambiguity and uncertainty as a shield to ward off the heavy lift of what knowing and awareness can ultimately require of our leadership and our organizations.
But how do we become aware? What does it require of us to become aware?
As Francisco Varela and Otto Scharmer add, “Can this core process be cultivated as an ability?” And by core process, this idea of making awareness an ability.
Of which Varela and Scharmer share are what Varela refers to as the “three gestures of becoming aware: suspension, redirection, and letting-go.” What Varela refers to as the “core process,” which “is the basic ability through which each individual can actually access his or her experience.” A space where awareness is accessed and cultivated.
Varela shares in The Three Gestures of Becoming Aware that this cycle of suspension, of redirection and of letting-go reside at the “at the very core of what life is all about, as life is constantly in this process of reaccomodation.” However, what Varela and Scharmer want or look to add to this cyclical life process is the aim of “taking the core of this life and making it more explicit so that you can cultivate it and explore it in a more disciplined way.” To turn it into a disciplined process and cycle of creating awareness.
Let’s take a deeper look at the parts of this core cycle, of the three gestures of awareness, as they can be seen as growing increasingly important to our current context and in moving forward through greater levels of uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity:
- Suspending – As Scharmer would say, is “seeing with new eyes.” As he adds in Theory U is being able to “suspend judgments in order to see the objective reality” of what is being faced. It becomes about suspending habitual thought and judgment, which Depraz and Varela share in The Three Gestures of Awareness as a “basic precondition for any possibility of change…” Which is and can be incredibly difficult for leaders in a world that has accelerated the pace of change, a world that demands continuous outcomes, while multi-tasking a multitude of new and growing initiatives. In many ways, we have to create spaces for leaders where the very idea of suspension can be facilitated and accepted. As introspection is often not a space that leaders have time to become familiar with, especially in today’s change world. And for that reason, that lack of familiarity can breed contempt towards or uncomfortableness with the process of suspension and the feeling of slowing down that it may invoke.
- Redirecting – As Varela and Scharmer add, “redirection is a gesture.” It is within that gesture that, “suspension creates a space, the new comes up, and then you can redirect.” As Scharmer adds in Theory U, redirection is where you can “let go of the old and start to connect with higher order intentions.” As Scharmer puts forth regarding redirection is that it “is about redirecting your attention from the exterior to the interior by turning the attention toward the source of the mental process…” As Varela and Scharmer share, we are paying attention in this gesture to what is emerging, to the new, and we are suspending judgment, and we redirecting that attention that is usually going outward toward the new, to that object, and turning it inward. It is here that Scharmer contributes from Theory U that “you help them redirect their attention from the object tot he process in order to help them view the system from a perspective that allows them to see how their own actions contribute to the problem at hand. It is at that point when people begin to see how they collectively create a pattern that at first seemed to be caused by purely exterior forces.” Without the suspension gesture, of becoming comfortable in that space of introspection, redirection does not occur. Which is why all 3 gestures of this core cycle are important and interconnected and ongoing.
- Letting-Go – It is at the point of letting go that Scharmer adds that by “changing the quality of our attention by letting-go of old identities and intentions and allowing something new to come in, some emerging future identity and purpose.” As Varela and Scharmer put forth, “but the letting-go here is crucial, because it’s only when you don’t hold on to the redirection that you can again go back to suspension.” It is in letting go that Depraz and Varela invoke that idea of “receptivity to the experience.” It is in this cycle that we become more open to awareness and what is emerging.
All three of these gestures are part of an ongoing core cycle of becoming aware, and as Depraz and Varela share in The Gesture of Awareness, it becomes about the two inseparable aspects of abandoning the habitual and being able to become receptive. It is in these gestures; suspension, redirection, and letting go that Depraz and Varela describe that we are working with “two reversals of the most habitual cognitive functioning: a turning of the direction of attention from exterior to interior, and; a change in the quality of attention, which passes from the looking-for to the letting-come.”
Or as Scharmer shares, “each one of these gestures needs to cultivated.” It is in these gestures we begin to better cultivate awareness.
DCulberhouse 