Entering 2025: Meeting the Future In the Moment. What is Ours to Do?
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As we enter 2025, I want to share some reflections and intentions.
One realization of last year has been this: Our number one challenge isn’t biodiversity loss, climate change, polarization, countries falling apart, or AI. It is our widespread illusion of insignificance — the belief that there’s nothing we can do about it. Surveys show that more than two-thirds of people worldwide feel a loss of agency in our collective decision-making.
As we move into a world with increased levels of chaos, disruption and breakdowns, how can we rekindle our mostly dormant superpowers, how can we respond to these situations in ways that are more resilient, regenerative and transformative?
Rekindling Our Superpowers
What actually, in this moment, is our planet’s most important superpower? It’s not the United States. Not China. Nor is it Big Money, Big Tech or AI. It is our unique human capacity to align attention, intention, and agency. Energy follows attention…
This alignment is inner core of the U process that can be summarized by these two shifts:
• Attention, when truly deepened, gives rise to intention — a sense and presence of purpose, of why we’re here
• Intention, when really clarified, catalyzes agency — the capacity to bring our deepest purpose to life.
Aligning attention, intention and agency allows us to co-create and to bring our highest future potential into reality both individually and collectively. To do so requires practices that allow us to navigate the polarity between absencing (our continued march toward self-destruction) and presencing (a profound awakening of planetary awareness and agency). In the Presencing Institute core team we have developed, tested, and refined many of these practices that we now introduce in a new book that I co-authored with Katrin Kaufer, Presencing: Seven Practices for Transforming Self, Society, and Business (coming in April).
Small Islands of Coherence
Another core resonance of 2024 is that I have witnessed in so many places how creating the right holding spaces — where attention and intention begin to align — unleashes extraordinary energy and agency. From Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia, to North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia Pacific — presencing practices help inspired communities to co-activate creativity, connection, and hope (as exemplified by some 2024 pics below).
The leaders we support in these places of potential are tackling urgent challenges: adapting to climate change in coastal areas, transforming agrifood systems, reimagining education systems in the face of AI, and pioneering inclusive enterprises and economic models. These leaders need more than tools — they need generative spaces to step back, sense what’s emerging, and connect with others doing similar work.
As Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine reminds us: “Small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.”
Now, What Is Ours to Do?
As we’ve moved into 2025, we know that there will be more chaos, more breakdowns, and distraction that puts our capacity to create coherence to real tests. So, what is the smallest (and yet most significant) unit of an island of coherence that we can cultivate and shape? It starts with my, with your, and with our capacity to attend deeply, to attend with our mind and heart wide open. By fully attending in this way to the experience of the moment, and to the possibilities arising from it, we begin to create generative holding spaces. The pictures above are nothing but such holding spaces at a somewhat larger scale. It’s these kinds of ‘islands of coherence’ that make all the difference, because they help us to activate dormant potential by aligning attention, intention and agency at the scale of the whole.
At the Presencing Institute, we believe that now is the moment to support, expand, and connect these manifold islands of coherence. They may be small but nevertheless powerful as they offer a foundation for resilience and renewal. Together, they form a network of possibility, weaving a fabric of hope & transformation in a time where we are tested in many ways.
Presencing is essentially about meeting the future in the moment — individually and collectively. To inquire, inspire, and co-initiate the journey that now begins to unfold for us, we will offer a free, online, GAIA style mini-series of events from mid-April to mid-June that will feature practices and living examples of transformation (all details subject to change, but timing is likely 10.00–11.30 AM EDT):
April 17: Presencing: Seven Practices for Transforming Self, Society, and Business
May 1st: Presencing the Future of Education and Learning
May 15: Presencing the Future of Business and Finance
May 29: Presencing the Future of Governance and Democracy
June 12: Weaving and Activating Ecosystems Across Regions
Moreover, we’re happy to offer you five quick links as resources for our evolving work this year:
1. New Website: Explore our newly integrated platform at presencing.org (perhaps bookmark for ease of use)
2. UN SDG Leadership Labs: Watch this 3 min clip showcasing islands of coherence in action.
3. Tri Hita Karana Reflection: Enjoy this 3 min scribing clip from this Bali-inspired convening (by Jayce Pei Yu)
4. Our New Book: Presencing: Seven Practices for Transforming Self, Society & Business (in press)
5. Fourth Person Knowing: If you are interested in exploring the deeper dimensions of awareness-based systems change and have half an hour to spare, you might enjoy a summary and discussion of our recent article, Fourth Person: The Knowing of the Field, co-authored by Eva Pomeroy and me.
An Invitation to Co-create the Future
Lastly, I want to express my gratitude for the generous support we’ve received over the past weeks. To sustain and grow these spaces of hope, creativity, and transformation, we rely on contributions from our community. If you’ve already contributed — thank you! If you’re considering joining our circle of donors your generosity will help us to maintain our free programs, open-access journal, tools, and methods that support transformative change worldwide.
Wishing you love, light and courage for the new year!
Otto Scharmer
Chair, Presencing Institute
