Different Worlds, Different Operating Systems: Theory U Work in China
by Lili Xu & Rachel Hentsch
During the last weekend of April 2019, the largest annual tech unconference in China, called “2050: Tech Brings Youth Together”, concluded its 2019 run in Hangzhou — also known as the Silicon Valley of China. The unconference hosted 10 different “containers” to allow young people to meet and “see each others’ smiles” — including 100 self-organised forums, 100 reunions, 100 exhibitions, a mini marathon, a camping, and several concerts.
Within this framework, the u.lab China team jointly organised a reunion with the Open-Source (coding) Society, and a forum on the “Digital Transformation of Chinese Rural Villages”. By combining the social technology of Theory U with the resources of tech communities, they created a space to help transform the countryside into educational classrooms, where children and their parents from urban areas could convene to learn about farming, with the support of a digital infrastructure incentivising community contribution and the “sharing of happiness”.
This was a great example of “Tech for Good” in action. The tech community needs to factor in what Otto Scharmer has called “vertical literacy”, that is, “the capacity to lead transformative change, by shifting the level of operating from 1.0 and 2.0 to 3.0 and 4.0”: by developing (both individual and collective) self-awareness, accessing curiosity, compassion and courage, deepening our listening capacities, shifting governance models from centralised towards ecosystemic , operating from the whole, and learning to hold space. The open-source tech communities’ governance model and tools for minimal consensus-building and fast iteration are examples we could all learn from.
It might be surprising to think that this actually happened in China. Despite the largest online population in the world (over 1.4 billion internet users), China has at the same time been noticeably absent from the digitised reality with which we are familiar in the West — structured by Facebook, Twitter, Google, Youtube, Amazon, Uber and the like. The truth is, a complete set of Chinese digital platforms has successfully kept any foreign competitors or counterparts well out of the country.
As an important global power player, China can appear to be a world of its own in many ways. Its digital reality is largely a mirror of how differently the country as a whole operates. People literally live and work inside of the WeChat “super App”, that (in the words of Li Yuan, a New York Times technology columnist based in Hong Kong) is “the equivalent of WhatsApp plus Facebook plus PayPal plus Uber plus GrubHub plus many other things.” Such an all-in-one architecture is a drastic departure from the multi-centered digital offerings of the West, where the collaboration of different functionalities is external, and the boundaries are visible.
The same lens can be used to look at the country’s governing structure: while it’s easy for us to criticise lack of transparency and very concerning hyper-surveillance issues, one can’t help but be impressed at the government’s efficiency and swiftness in, for instance, implementing the high-speed network of passenger-dedicated railways, and the dramatic progress in reducing poverty over the past three decades.
China, with its deep Confucian roots and collective rice-farming culture spanning millennia, simply has a different operating system. The country and its people speak and act following a different set of social grammar rules.
Where ideology, commerce and technical intervention have all struggled to hold space for generative dialogue in China, the social field orientation inherent in Theory U has fruitfully tapped into the historically strong role of relationships in China.
As early as in 2012, with the steady support of the UID (United In Diversity) foundation, Tsinghua University and MIT launched a tri-sector leadership and innovation program called IDEAS. IDEAS is a leadership program to support action for sustainable solutions such as poverty sustainability and education with a system approach. Facilitated by Dr. Otto Scharmer, Dr. Peter Senge and the Chinese team, Theory U served as an underlying framework for action learning for Zhejiang province leaders, for the Shanghai 2030 Vision initiative, and the ICBC Big Data initiative.
A more distributed and accessible social innovation activation happened in 2015. The u.lab “massive open online course” (MOOC) was launched on Tsinghua University’s Xuetang platform in China (in parallel with its launch on the edX platform), and has witnessed the enrolment of tens of thousands of participants across hundreds of hubs. With many of the Chinese community’s activities occurring in “parallel spaces”, either offline or via alternative channels (such as WeChat on mobile phones), they remain invisible to the outsider’s eye, and therefore do not show up proportionally in the data sources available to people in the West.
Ever since the inception of the u.lab MOOC, there has been a great group of “eco-colleagues” working to weave the social field together.
The deep cultivation of the social field has been picking up momentum over the past few years. In a series of articles published on WeChat in January 2019, Presencing Institute China Partner Lili Xu has meticulously mapped the impact that Theory U is having on her country. A living ecology, she explains to her readers, is built through the application of the following six practices:
- 1. Paying attention to the quality of relationships
- 2. Crystallising perceptions into architecture
- 3. Leveraging technology
- 4. Building place & container
- 5. Integrating social arts & technologies
- 6. Starting with clarity of intention
In this first article on China, we want to address the first point:
1. PAYING ATTENTION TO THE QUALITY OF RELATIONSHIPS
The quality of the soil will determine the quality of products that grow out of it, using Otto Scharmer’s analogy with agriculture. The invisible social field must be cultivated. But how?
Open mind and open heart are key. The quality of relationships within an organisation, business or community will directly determine the “temperature” of the field. We need high quality connections in today’s complex, multiple-stakeholder systems.
Alibaba
Alibaba is the largest e-commerce company in China, and has evolved into a vibrant eco-system covering cloud, logistic and financial services. In February 2018 China u.lab team and Alibaba’s organisational department carried out a sensing journey into the company’s senior management structure.
Their management team of 400 formed more than 100 groups of 3–5 people, who engaged in sensing journeys in a “capillary” fashion, delving deep into the Alibaba eco system, bringing back the voices and desires of customers and partners, both upstream and downstream of the organisation. This was an important step in the direction of an “ecological” re-shaping of the Alibaba management team.
Presencing Foundation Program (PFP)
Since 2016, the u.lab China team has been using the Presencing Foundation Program (PFP) as a container for bottom-up innovation in environment, education, and health, bringing Theory U-based innovation models to connect individuals, organisations and institutions to explore new future avenues for transformation and collaboration.
More than 40 volunteers, staff and teaching assistants formed an organic ecological team that will convene periodically around the mission of furthering Theory U-based innovation.
Here is a video that was made during the Presencing Foundation Program in Hangzhou, in May 2018:
Jayce Pei Yu Lee, graphic facilitator and visual catalyst, held the container beautifully as a core partner of the China field. Jayce also co-proofread the traditional Chinese translation with Jorie Wu and contributed to the publication (on 5th March 2019) of Otto Scharmer’s new book “The Essentials of Theory U”.
In our next article on China, we will be looking at more examples and illustrations of what is building up in China around Otto Scharmer’s Theory U practices and methodologies, in terms of how:
- perceptions are being crystallised into architecture,
- technology is being leveraged,
- places and containers are being built,
- social arts and technologies are being integrated, and
- initiatives begin with clarity of intention.
The power of a vibrant social field shows up in different shapes and forms, through different co-creative vessels including with companies like Ant Financial, business schools such as Lakeside University, tech centers such as iCenter at Tsinghua University and many grass-root institutions and individuals. All are being held by an eco-system of forces that bond together based on shared intentions and the new business and financial principles of “pay-it-forward” and “pay-what-feels-right”. A good eco-system is full of good relationships: more in our next article.
Our heartfelt thanks go to Bradley Chenoweth, Jayce Lee and Sai Yang for their wonderful proofreading and editing support on this piece.
