Meet Rachel Hentsch
On the power of the collective and the importance of fostering curiosity
If you have ever browsed through the Presencing Institute’s (PI’s) Field of the Future blog, received a newsletter from PI in your inbox, or interacted with PI’s social media channels, you will have, perhaps unknowingly, already met Rachel Hentsch. Rachel has taken on several different roles in PI, including that of managing the numerous social media channels, overseeing media production and communications, leading PI’s editorial team, creating the Field of the Future blog, helping to launch new online events, and co-evolving animated scribing.
She reflects that she “loves working within the Presencing Institute, because there is space to move into areas where things want to be born.” In this way, she feels like she is “in a wonderful garden” where she can “move from certain areas of plants to others, all the while helping to build the dream.” And we catch her, now, in one of those moments of movement, for in the next six months, Rachel’s attention will be shifting more towards the marketing and promotion strategy of U.Academy, as well as supporting the u.school for transformation’s media and communications, and community engagement for advanced leadership programs.
The Power of Co-Creation
Rachel’s first encounter with PI occurred when in 2016, she participated in u.lab as an online learner. At the end of the course, and out of a sense of appreciation for the people who had hosted the u.lab hub in Rome, Rachel “wanted to give back and help others” the way she had been helped during her journey. So, in 2017, Rachel took part in co-hosting the u.lab hub in Rome. This experience “felt like having landed in a space of homecoming.” Rachel reflects on how, through participating in u.lab, the term ‘change-maker’ came alive for her. In this way, the idea of “changing the world took on another meaning and became something I wanted to do.”
For Rachel, the idea of changing the world, or shaping the future, had always “seemed like such a remote thing…and impossible.” Rachel reflects that this may have been because she “wasn’t seeing the potential of the collective.” She remembers how, before entering the u.lab process, she had been “very much a one-person team” in the sense that “I believed in my own capacity, but didn’t yet understand the profound power of true teamwork.”
Through the experience of connecting with others, Rachel realized how, in a group, the “overall intelligence is so much more than the sum of its parts.” This means that, when a group is facing a challenge, the group might be able to “reflect certain possibilities that we would never have imagined on our own.”
In other words, “it’s as though there is this wisdom coming through us that we don’t really comprehend at all…it comes from a place inside us that defies logic and defies the cognitive part of how we reason.” Rachel adds, “it’s almost like a kind of magic for me…to be able to hold a space together in a way that is going to help each of us within the group to find a space of creation that we didn’t know existed.”
Generative Scribing and Animation
Generative Scribing is a domain Rachel has been experimenting in. What Rachel loves about the process of scribing is the way in which it “is going to be a channeling of something that is not really coming from my rational structure.” Rather, it is a process in which one “absorbs what is happening around you… it’s almost as though you’re letting something come through you.”
Letting something come through you might be “scary at the beginning,” because it entails a certain loss of control. But this is also what Rachel loves about the process. In working with animations in her scribing, she notices how she often feels surprised by what comes: “Because I don’t really know what’s going to happen with the animation as I draw…it’s almost like opening an easter egg once it’s done.” Because, although Rachel starts off the process of animated scribing “with some notions” of what she wants to draw, in fact “the magic of it is that I’m not totally in control…sometimes I don’t know why I’m picking this color and why I’m using this brush.” When she looks at the finished piece, Rachel “recognizes parts of it as having come from my hand…but part of it came from elsewhere.”
This also happens when Rachel integrates music into the animation: she finds that “something really surprising always happens with the music, because I have some sort of idea of what music I want, but when I plug it in, there are synchronicities that I could not even have designed…they come together in a way that I really feel like it’s come from beyond me.”
Thriving in the Unknown
Rachel believes that “uncertainty and the unknown hold so much promise…it’s where anything can happen.” Both in her personal, as well as her professional, life, Rachel seems to retain an openness, and appetite for the unknown. It is Rachel’s love for learning that allows her to thrive in the unknown, which then pushes her into new territories. When she enters a space which is unfamiliar to her, she understands it as “an opportunity, as well as a good excuse, to learn more and to be open to receiving.”
An example of this might be the birth of the Field of the Future blog, which was “very impromptu.” Rachel describes the process as one where she was “seeing a need, a possibility, and even though I wasn’t really sure about what I was doing, it all ended up falling into place.”
Rachel then adds, with a laugh, that when she was applying to work at PI, in reading the job description she “was really attracted by the word adhocracy,” for this indicated the openness and flexibility with which the team approaches its tasks and challenges. “I like working with improvisation,” Rachel explains. Improvisation, to her, means “crafting something from all the elements that look like they might be clashing… which I see as opportunity.”
Dirt Biking into the Unknown
One way in which Rachel leaned into the unknown was through taking up motorcycling. It was in the “most unlikely moment” of Rachel’s life, having just given birth to her third daughter, when Rachel started being coached by her husband on how to drive a motorcycle. She remembers how she “was just kind of leaning into the unknown and seeing what might happen.” Rachel had been “born with a wish to become a motorcyclist.” So, when the opportunity arose, she took it.
In taking part in a season of competition — despite the inner voice saying what are you doing, Rachel!? — Rachel describes feeling “a sense of achievement in having overcome my own limitations.” In the end, she muses: “I wasn’t competing against others…I was competing against my own self.” It also gave her the confidence to try things she wasn’t immediately comfortable with and pushing her own limits.
Rachel reflects how “motorcycling has been a pocket of joy alongside everything else I’ve been doing.” She thinks that “when the gut tells you that something might be possible, then you had better take a deep breath…and just take a first step.” Of course, if something feels wrong, “you course correct, and change your direction.”
Rachel spends most of her weekends motorcycling and dirt-biking with her husband in Rome. “It reboots my psyche: my brain goes empty when I dirt bike because I’m so concentrated on the driving that I forget about everything else.”
Curiosity and Courage as the Root of Creation
As the mother of five children, Rachel noticed how important it is to let children explore the world through their innate curiosity. For “curiosity is at the root of discovery and creation.” As we all were once children ourselves, “curiosity is something we are all born with.” Yet sometimes we are not encouraged to trust our sense of wonder. In this sense, there is much to learn from watching children explore and discover the world, for “if we were not curious, we could never move into spaces of innovation.”
Rachel’s broad range of experiences and work reflects her curiosity. From animated scribing to event managing TEDxCountdown and the Dialogues on Transforming Society and Self (DoTS); from motorcycling to speaking five languages and supporting the GAIA language tracks; Rachel’s horizon of interests and talents seems never-ending.
Rachel hopes that we can “encourage each other to step into new exploration and new discovery” by learning, from our children as well as from one another, to foster this sense of curiosity.
Courage, too, plays an important role in creation. Rachel believes that “courage is also about not holding back when giving: to be able to let go about the ‘what’s in it for me’ perspective, and give wholeheartedly, unreservedly, without always worrying about measurable returns. Of course, that also does potentially expose one to the possibility of loss. However, from my personal experience, this type of courage ultimately unlocks energy and potential in ways that we may not have previously imagined.”
Turning Towards the Future
In looking towards the future, Rachel notices a “ripening of the fields” in the sense that “there are more and more change makers and people who are trying to build a sustainable and meaningful future.” In this way, the work being done at PI is “a very important stream, but there are also many other streams, and I hope that they will come together and create good.” All the while remembering that the work that lies ahead of us is huge. Rachel remembers being humbled and inspired by something that was said during the ecosystem leadership program, namely how “that which we’re working towards is something that we may not see in our lifetimes.” This, while being something humbling, is also “uplifting, because we can be putting our brick in the wall to make this new structure come to life.”
Rachel hopes that “we will be able to make sense of things that are happening and take the lessons into the future” in order to “build spaces to listen to each other and to connect with empathy.”
Rachel also looks forward to hopefully meeting again, this coming year, in person with the PI core team. Because there is something “irreplaceable” about sharing a physical space and “looking into each other’s eyes, but not through a screen.”
Video of the interview:
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