Social Presencing Theatre to cope with complexity
The perfect storm! One of the statements frequently heard these days.
There is worry, there is fog and there are blockages looming over us. To put it in more painfully apt words: there is fear and disorientation reigns.
Even experience is of little help to us, in such new scenarios for content and intensity. We understand more and more that caring for our inner state, as individuals and as a community, is what can enable us to develop the ability to know how to be and how to transform the complex situations we experience.
The book Social Presencing Theatre
This book came out during the pandemic. It is coming out now, at a time when we are beginning to come to terms with the challenges raised by this scourge and how they have changed us. These challenges have by no means disappeared as the virus has abated. On the contrary, they left open questions and wounds to heal, personally, socially and professionally.
How to reintegrate the physical social dimension into our lives? How to make hybrid work integrated and sustainable? What new skills are required? What opportunities are opening up?
Social Presencing Theatre, a social art described in the book, offers concrete and accessible ways to tap into our full potential as individuals and as groups of people. It is no longer just about integrating our rational potential. It is also about fostering our the intuitive knowledge stored in our individual and social bodies.
Otto Scharmer asks in his Preface to Arawana’s work: how can we not just be ‘walking heads’ in our workplaces? The book tells, through concrete cases, how we can access an unexpressed potential that unleashes a great deal of energy in individuals and organisations. According to the book, this can be done by combining the tools of systemic thinking (System thinking) with those of systemic sensing (System sensing).
The integration of different types of intelligence
For some time now, we have been familiar with descriptions of the different types of intelligence that find a correspondence in everyday experience. From Gardner’s 9 intelligences to Goleman’s in-depth study of emotional intelligence, from Stephen and Rachel Kaplan’s talk of focused attention (directed attention) and free and diffuse attention defined as (fascination), to the integrative approaches that speak of a dance between rigour and intuition.
This book shows, chapter after chapter, the practical effectiveness – still so often underestimated – of integrating these different kinds of intelligence within ourselves and in our work teams.
Arawana demonstrates, how Social Presencing Theatre practices provide access to insights into the future that wants to emerge and the next steps to be taken. Insights that arise from the integration of body, mind and the social field in the open space of the present moment. What is the alternative?
If we do not intentionally take this time of integration to establish a sense of wholeness, we may find ourselves living in a mental world of projections.
At a time when such issues like diversity, uniqueness and inclusion are finally gaining the attention they deserve, this book offers a perspective on an integration that is effective. Not ideological, not polemical, but concret, and based on the evidence that our being is made up of head, heart and hands.
Social Presencing Theatre for Peoplerise
At Peoplerise, Social Presencing Theater is an integral part of our work with organisations, inspired over the years by Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute community.
We daily observe how teams are sitting on a treasure trove of skills, insights and potential, only partially expressed.
What if accessing this treasure trove was more a question of depth, than of investment?
A question of courage, rather than time?
More a matter of accepting our vulnerabilities, than the expression of power dynamics?
A matter of relationships, rather than hierarchy?
This book is an important contribution for all those who think that the time has come to rebalance the contrast and mend the rift between who we are in private life and who we are at work or in public life.
It can inspire colleagues and practitioners, just as it can support leaders of groups and organisations. It can inspire people from very different backgrounds to face the challenges of the present with a more systemic and less individualistic vision.
An essay that can be read like a novel or a biography that, page after page, becomes a mirror, a manual and an inspiration to face the daily challenges of the organisations we are called upon to inhabit with a new vision and in new ways.
