Universities as Innovation Ecologies for Human & Planetary Flourishing
In an era of planetary crisis and a time when universities are increasingly under attack, an underlying question that has gradually moved to the center of attention is this: what is the role of universities in society, and what should their role be going forward?
Historically, universities have been central to fostering social mobility. More recently, and disturbingly, we have seen them become vehicles for reinforcing privilege and inequality. In the face of these ecological and economic challenges, what should future universities look like? What do societies need universities for?
This article explores that question from a historical point of view, looking both at the evolution of universities as institutions and at the evolution of the very idea and mission of universities and their role in society. I argue that universities must evolve into innovation ecologies for human and planetary flourishing — hubs that, in the face of systemic breakdown and collapse, foster the praxis of regenerating soil, self, and society.
Traditional educational structures fail to equip leaders and professionals with the transformation literacy they need to address the complex challenges of our time. In order to upgrade their models and methodologies from “education for employment” to “education for human flourishing,” educators and leaders will need to upgrade their own toolkits. Instead of learning by reflecting on the past, they will need to learn by sensing and actualizing the future as it emerges (the definition of “presencing”). Without that upgrade in learning and leadership capacity, all ideas and talk about structural reform will remain abstract and ineffective. The result will be more of the same.
Below I present seven propositions on the evolution of universities, the shortcomings of traditional education, and the shifts needed for higher education to fulfill its highest potential.
The paper contributes to the OECD High Performing Systems For Tomorrow group that focuses on how to reimagine educational institutions in the face of AI. As one of its members, Olli-Pekka Heinonen, Director General of the International Baccalaureate (IB) and former Finnish Minister of Education, puts it:
Universities are in a challenging situation. Societal changes are putting pressure on them to transform and reinvent themselves — but when under attack, they tend to freeze and defend. The proposal by Otto Scharmer, to identify universities as innovation ecologies for human and planetary flourishing, is both timely and valuable. University is the obvious answer to the question where one should go to learn about, and contribute to, the solutions to real-world existential threats to humankind and how to use human capabilities to their full potential.
1. The Idea of the University: From Knowledge Transfer to the Praxis of Transformation
The idea of the university has evolved in several stages. In the Western world, that evolution took roughly this form:
The 21st-century university model that is beginning to take shape must ground research and teaching in the praxis of regenerating soil, self, and societal systems. It must cultivate self-awareness and creativity through exposure to real-world challenges and hands-on practice fields.According to the 2024 UNDP Human Development Report, two-thirds of people worldwide are willing to sacrifice parts of their personal income to address climate change. Yet, the same proportion feels a complete loss of agency, believing any actions they take will have no real impact.
This gap — between willingness to act and perceived powerlessness — must be addressed by 21st-century universities. Without bridging this knowing-doing gap, we risk generating more knowledge that is disconnected from agency — in other words: more hot-air machines, more of the same.
2. A Leadership Void in the Face of Disruption
We live in a time of massive institutional and leadership failures, evidenced by global mistrust in mainstream institutions. No organization — government, business, multilateral institution — or even civil society, can solve its biggest challenges alone.
As an MIT-based action researcher, I have worked with leadership teams across sectors and observed the leadership void firsthand. Leaders today lack the toolkits and practices necessary for achieving complex cross-sector systems change. Universities, even if under attack, must do more than just defend the status quo. Universities must step up to fill this void by rethinking how they educate for leadership, collaboration, and systemic transformation going forward.
3. The Problem with Traditional Management Education
To illustrate the outdated learning models in higher ed, let’s look at a concrete example: management education in business schools. While this is just one example of many, similar points can be made about engineering and other STEM and non-STEM disciplines. In my experience, current university and management education overrates three things and underrates three others:
I. We overrate knowledge and underrate not-knowing.
Having spent half my professional life creating knowledge, it pains me to say that knowledge is overrated. I say this because many of the things that matter most in leadership and decision-making are things we don’t know. Specifically, we don’t know the future. No one does. Yet, as changemakers and leaders, we must use our best judgment to act in the present, in anticipation of what is about to happen.
Not-knowing is the ability to embrace uncertainty — to listen, sense, and co-sense from a deeper place. Accessing our not-knowing is at the root of all great entrepreneurship and deep creativity, enabling us to bring forth something truly new. In the age of AI, developing the ability to listen, sense, co-sense, and tune in to what is not yet known emerges as a primary capacity of learning and leadership.
II. We overrate comfort and underrate discomfort.
Anyone working in leadership development knows this: as long as leaders remain in their comfort zone, they are not learning anything that will lead to meaningful change. Behavioral change requires leaning into discomfort.
It is natural to value comfort and to be reluctant to embrace discomfort. However, to be ruthlessly honest about where the current system is broken and where new challenges and opportunities are emerging, we must engage in data-gathering and sensing activities that are not biased by our own comfort or discomfort. If our sense-making is limited to data sourced only from within our comfort zone, we will almost certainly remain stuck in old patterns of behavior, preventing anything truly new from entering our field of attention.
III. We overrate action and underrate non-action (stillness).
Those of us who were educated in business and engineering schools may find it hard to accept the idea that taking action isn’t always the best course. After all, isn’t action the whole point if one wants to make progress?
But consider this: when we jump from challenge to action without pausing, what are we doing? Reacting. Usually by doing more of the same. And that is precisely what we see playing out in institutions today — leaders are stuck in the patterns of the past. A pattern can take the form of analysis paralysis (overthinking without acting) or mindless action (using a ‘chainsaw’ without attending to and learning from the impact it creates).
In today’s hyper-expensive higher education environments, where everyone is in overdrive to maximize their return-on-investment (ROI), there is little space or time for reflection, contemplation, and inner stillness. Yet the capacity to value stillness (non-action) is and remains the primary gateway to all deep creativity.
Rebalancing What We Overrate and Underrate
Our current management paradigm overvalues knowledge, comfort, and action — while undervaluing not-knowing, discomfort, and non-action. Moving forward, we must learn to balance these polarities. A good changemaker and leader must be literate in all six capacities:
Knowledge and the ability to embrace not-knowing; comfort and the willingness to lean into discomfort; action and the capacity to access the deeper sources of creativity through stillness. The future of learning and leadership will depend on our ability to rebalance these capacities. That is as true for university leaders as it is for educators and students — in other words, for all types of learners in the system.
4. The Blind Spot of AI and the Future of Learning
In this age of artificial intelligence, AI is being used to reconfigure, recombine, and modify existing bodies of knowledge. As the hype around it goes through the usual cycle, we are beginning to see more clearly what the true power of AI (and the coming AGI) is, as well as some of its limitations.
What’s the one thing that we know is in AI’s blind spot? In a word: the future. Or to be more precise: that part of the future that cannot be reduced to modifying relational probabilities of the past. It’s the part of the future that, as Martin Buber once put it, “stays in need of us” to be sensed, embodied, and realized.
In other words: AI’s blind spot is the innate human capacity for deep creativity. It is unable to tap into the dormant potential that requires human agency from the heart. As Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) sums it up: “If we want to stay ahead of technological developments, we have to find and refine the qualities that are unique to our humanity, and that complement, not compete with, capacities we have created in our computers. Schools need to develop first-class humans, not second-class robots.”
Accordingly, as we see in many places already, the future of learning and leadership will require education to cultivate hands-on practices such as generative listening, deep sensing, and rapid-cycle prototyping, skills that allow us to tune in to and operate from the future as it emerges. I give examples below.
5. Universities as Innovation Ecologies: Breathing In, Breathing Out
A university that is not able to link with and innovate for the profound challenges facing our planet is not a university — at least not one that the 21st century calls for, one that revolves around the integration of teaching and research with the praxis of regenerating soil, society, and self.
In an age where the independence of universities is challenged, we should do more than just defend the status quo. We should reimagine the university as an innovation ecology that is, through a system of hubs, deeply embedded in the root systems of profound personal, ecological, and societal renewal.
What will it take to update the university for our current century and its challenges?
It will take three major shifts. These shifts are already underway and being prototyped around the world in many different forms — often at the margins of the current system. They are:
- A shift in the outer place of learning from the classroom to the real world: Universities must embed learning in immersion journeys and participatory action learning that take students to the frontlines of societal innovation.
- A shift in the inner place of learning from the head to the heart and from there to the hand: Education must move beyond intellectual exercises to engage in the praxis of regeneration and transformation
- A shift in the interpersonal space of learning by practicing deep listening and generative dialogue in ways that transforms how we converse, think, and act together.
The core process of such a living ecology can be conceptualized as a breathing process:
Breathing in: Learners take deep-dive journeys to the frontlines of disruption and the places of innovation and most potential, to listen and sense deeply and to support and sustain action learning-based innovation initiatives.
Breathing out: Returning to campus from the deep immersion, they and their fellow learners begin to make sense of what they experienced, along with other teams and pioneers in the field.
This breathing cycle turns university ecologies into living labs of emerging futures that are worthy of the learners’ highest commitment.
While the medieval university was defined by being disconnected and separate from society, the emerging 21st-century university model is the logical endpoint of a thousand-year-long opening process. That structural opening of institutions of education and higher education can be thought of as an inversion: what used to exist separate from society now emerges from a profound opening process to the societal and community context. The innovation ecosystem breathing process described above blends that opening to and immersion with societal challenges (breathing in) with high-quality supporting infrastructures for innovation and learning (breathing out).
6. From the University as Institution to the University as Process & Purpose
The origins of the university are often traced to medieval times. If the medieval university served a feudal society and the modern university was built for the industrial era of the 19th and 20th centuries, what form should the 21st-century university take in the midst of a rapidly accelerating planetary polycrisis — one that is largely driven by the very industrial paradigms of thought that today’s university systems continue to reinforce?
To address that question, we must consider a deeper and more diverse lineage of learning traditions worldwide that have long integrated ethical, social, and ecological learning.
To envision the next stage, we must move beyond the institutional perspective and reconnect with the university’s deeper essence — its living core process and core purpose. Seen through this lens, the university emerged from a diverse tapestry of cultures and traditions across centuries and continents. These include:
- Taxila University (India, 5th century BCE)
- The Academy of Athens (387 BCE)
- Confucian Academies (China, 2nd century BCE)
- House of Wisdom (Baghdad, 8th–13th centuries CE)
- Timbuktu University (Mali, 12th–16th centuries CE)
- Indigenous Knowledge (Americas, Africa, Australia, Polynesia, over millennia)
Despite their many differences, these knowledge ecosystems share some key characteristics:
- Learning begins in dialogue and immersion — whether under the trees of the Academy of Athens in Socratic exchange, through deep textual study and debate in Taxila, or in real-world governance and ethics in the Confucian tradition.
- Ethical wisdom and technical expertise are integrated rather than separate — as seen in the House of Wisdom, where scholars not only advanced mathematics and medicine but also reflected on their moral and philosophical implications.
- The academy is embedded in society and nature, rather than existing apart from them — mirrored in Timbuktu’s scholars, who advised local leaders, and Indigenous knowledge systems, where wisdom is inseparable from ecological stewardship.
- Education is not the passive transmission of knowledge but an active process of creating knowledge and evolutionary change — a principle embodied in the Indigenous practice of learning through storytelling, experience, and communal problem-solving.
In essence, these historical roots point to a more grounded and holistic connection between knowing, doing, and being — one that blends technical expertise with dialogue, self-development, and ethical competence.
What Should the 21st-Century University Look Like?
A university rooted in this extended epistemology should focus on:
- Learning as innovating: through a process of sensing, embodying, and enacting the emerging future by aligning attention, intention, and agency.
- Learning as planetary stewardship, relating scientific knowledge to both the challenges of our time and the foundations of wisdom traditions across cultures.
- Learning as both horizontal (technical) and vertical (inner) development, leveraging state- of-the-art social technologies and social arts-based practice fields.
Reconnecting the Roots: From Institution to Living Process
To meet the challenges of our time, universities must reconnect not only with their institutional roots (the medieval university) but also with their deeper universal roots in a process of cultivating soil, society, and self — planet, people, and personal agency.
Interestingly, the words humus, humanity, and humility all share the same etymological origin: the Indo-European ghom-, meaning “earth” or “ground.” This root gave rise to words related to soil, land, and humanity. This linguistic connection suggests something profound: just as humans originate from and remain rooted in the earth (humus), so too must universities. In this sense, humility is not about subservience but about being deeply connected to the ground of reality — both literally and metaphorically in the sense of deep systems thinking.
It is this spirit of humility and humanity that higher education must reclaim — shifting from an extractive model of knowledge to a regenerative one. To rise to the occasion in this century, universities must become catalysts for human and planetary flourishing.
7. The Missing “Middleware”: Infrastructures for Regenerating Soil, Society & Self
In the US and various other parts of the world institutions of higher education have experienced a significant drop in student enrollment over the past decade. There has been a related spike in school absentee rates among both students and teachers. For example, in the OECD countries, approximately 30% of registered students no longer attend school. They are still there on paper. But they don’t show up in the classroom. Outside of the OECD countries this number tends to be even higher. These trends constitute a massive crisis for educational systems that are stuck in old modes of operating that have outlived their usefulness.
What would it take to implement the seven propositions I have outlined here?
I believe that universities must invest in an enabling social middleware — the institutions and networks that serve as bridges between academia and society.
The Role of Social Middleware in Higher Education
The term middleware has recently been applied to fields other than technology. In the context discussed here, the term refers to the enabling conditions in two core dimensions of a university ecosystem:
1. The quality of the ecosystem — The depth and diversity of partners that offer meaningful action-learning opportunities and the nature of their relationships.
2. The quality of holding spaces and practices — State-of-the-art social technologies, such as reflective practices, generative listening practices, generative dialogues, and spaces that transform learning relationships from transactional to transformative.
In most universities, these elements remain unknown, underdeveloped, and/or underfunded.
Three Levels of Action Learning
To illustrate the importance of social middleware, consider how action-learning experiences cultivate different types and depths of engagement and agency.
On level 1, structured exposure (partial agency), students engage in university-organized experiences with pre-defined projects and accommodations. They experience new environments without actively shaping them, such as business students working with international companies in pre-arranged settings.
On level 2, immersive learning (expanded agency), students take greater ownership, working in small teams to solve real-world challenges with clients. This requires adaptability and problem-solving, as seen in MIT Sloan’s action-learning labs, where students collaborate with partners with minimal but targeted faculty support.
On level 3, transformative learning (regenerative agency), learning becomes systemic and regenerative, integrating deep listening, generative dialogue, and systems sensing. Programs like MIT u-lab and the UNDP Action Learning Lab use practices such as empathy walks, generative dialogue-based case clinics, and presencing practices to foster deep change and leadership.
Cultivating the Social Soil
The three types of action learning differ in the depth of agency that they give students: partial, expanded, or regenerative. The deeper the level of engagement and learner agency, the greater the shift from knowledge accumulation to embodied transformation.
Most universities are operating on level 1, and a few have reached level 2. Truly transformative learning — level 3 action learning — requires strong institutional commitment to cultivating the ‘social soil’ — the spaces and practices — that enable these learning processes. The cultivation of the social soil means:
- Investing in ecosystems of action-learning partners rather than one-off corporate projects.
- Strengthening long-term relationships between students, faculty, and external change-makers.
- Cultivating intentional holding spaces and leadership practices for deep change
To summarize, consider the two images below.
Figure 5 shows the social field as a combination of social systems (what we can see, count, and measure above the ground) and the social soil (the roots that are invisible to the eye: the quality of awareness and relationships).
Figure 6 applies the distinction between social systems and social soil to the discussion outlined above. Much of the activity takes place on the social soil side of the map. The deeper levels of action learning require a more refined mastery of the seven social leadership practices that we have found most impactful in terms of cultivating and shifting the qualities of thinking, conversing and acting together: becoming aware, listening, co-sensing dialogue, presencing, co-imagining, co-creating, and co-governing.
In essence, the different levels of action learning differ in how deeply they engage student agency with the cultivation of the social soil (the quality of relationships).
The Seeds of the 21st-Century University Are Already Here
If universities are to rise to the challenges of the polycrisis, they must move beyond mere knowledge transmission. Imagine a university that:
- Grounds learning and research in personal, relational, and planetary transformation.
- Bridges the gap between the planetary polycrisis and the outdated paradigms and toolkits.
- Rebalances what is overrated (knowledge, comfort, action) and what is underrated (not-knowing, discomfort, inaction/stillness) through new learning environments.
- Blends head, heart, and hand to cultivate first-class humans, not second-class robots.
- Functions as a breathing innovation ecology — with students immersed in frontline societal innovation and then making sense of those experiences when back on campus.
- Operates from an extended epistemology that integrates humility, humanity, and our embodied connection to the entire living world.
- Supports all of the above with hands-on leadership practices for cultivating the social soil — by shifting the quality of conversing, thinking, and acting together.
These characteristics summarize the seven aspects of upgrading the operating system of higher ed.
Figure 7 expands on Figure 2 by adding the knowledge type (column 3) that emerges from each type of institution.
Infrastructures for Cultivating the Social Soil
The second column of Figure 7 highlights the evolution of learning infrastructures — elements that either enable or, if missing, hinder transformation. The key to fostering generative learning environments lies in cultivating the social soil through social leadership practices and quality holding spaces that allow learning communities to connect, deepen, and co-create.
A truly transformative educational experience occurs when learners engage in generative social fields — whether in the classroom, small teams, or immersive action-learning journeys. The quality of such social fields determines whether learners can sense and actualize their best potential and agency.
While many recognize the power of a generative social field, few understand how to create one from scratch. The challenge lies in shaping both the visible (outer) and invisible (inner) conditions that foster it. That is why support structures for social leadership practices are essential for addressing the polycrisis at its roots.
Fourth-Person Knowing: The Missing Dimension
The third column of Figure 7 outlines the evolving nature of knowledge itself. Traditional education relies on three primary ways of knowing:
• First-person knowing (subjective)
• Second-person knowing (intersubjective)
• Third-person knowing (objective)
However, transformative change demands a fourth mode:
• Fourth-person knowing — a self-transcending awareness, experienced as creativity coming “through me” rather than being “of me.” This form of knowing allows individuals and communities to tap into the sources of deep creativity and change. It is, if activated, a force that can shift the grammar and quality of a social field (Scharmer & Pomeroy, 2024).
New Alliances and Partnerships
How can this fourth-person knowing, which enables us to engage with the deep structure dimension of societal change, become a regular part of the university experience?
The answer lies in bringing together the people, vision, and spaces that can forge new alliances — linking the most innovative pockets within academia to forward-thinking pioneers in social enterprises, businesses, and civil society organizations. Already, many such external partners have created spaces for deep action learning experiences that complement the on-campus learning environment in critical ways.
The seven propositions outlined above are not abstract theories awaiting realization. They are distilled from decades of educational and social innovation across geographies. Businesses, community-based groups, and civil society organizations, if engaged strategically, can serve as critical middleware partners in this transformation. These organizations hold vast reservoirs of knowledge and practice — knowledge that could reshape universities into the hubs of an innovation ecology, akin to what happened with Silicon Valley (emerging from Stanford’s innovation ecosystem) and Route 128 in the Boston area (growing from MIT’s innovation ecosystem).
While these examples fueled AI and biotech revolutions, in the face of widespread systemic collapse the next frontier in higher education could center on a much-needed wave of societal regeneration — enabled in collaboration with mission-driven enterprises and civil society organizations like Impact Hubs (offering generative spaces), IMAGO Global Grassroots (helping grassroots organizations to scale up for collective impact), SELCO (offering technical and community expertise around regenerative energy), Teach for All (innovation in learning), the Sustainable Food Lab (regenerative ag), or the Presencing Institute (leadership practices for deep systems change). For example, through u-school, the capacity-building arm of the Presencing Institute, all methods, practices, and tools for are made available as creative commons for learners and educators worldwide (including through a suite of free online programming).
Another foundational resource is the Education for Human Flourishing framework that emerged from the OECD High Performing Systems For Tomorrow group, which has reimagined the future of education in the face of AI. As part of that initiative, the Presencing Institute facilitated a leadership track to build collective capacity for the transformation of educational systems in several countries (including Finland, Estonia, and Canada [British Columbia] and for the International Baccalaureate leadership team).
By supporting such national and international collaboratives for profound renewal of our educational systems, and by supporting our universities and schools to open up and link with their surrounding ecosystem of innovation and regeneration, we can bridge the gap between outdated academic structures and the planetary challenges coming our way. Addressing these challenges at the core requires a deepened learning process that relies on existing knowledge but also helps learners to sense and actualize the emerging future using all four forms of knowing.
A Living, Evolving Process
The transformation of the university is not a singular event but an ongoing process — one that requires inspired vision and grounded action by students, faculty, administrators, and partners across sectors. For it to succeed, we must not only update outdated structures (e.g., departmental silos, lecture-based learning) but also update the purpose and core idea of the university in order to realign much necessary trans-disciplinary initiatives that focus on the fundamental challenges and opportunities of our time. It must be solidly grounded not only in the reality of our challenges but also the essence of our humanity, i.e., the intertwined regeneration of soil, society, and self.
Only by embracing this deep shift can we evolve the current form of the university — with all its blessings and limitations — toward a breathing innovation ecology that enables students to move beyond traditional knowledge transfer to co-sense and co-create the future that is in need of us to emerge.
This paper is a contribution to the Education for Human Flourishing initiative of the OECD High Performing Systems for Tomorrow country group. In this context, I thank Andreas Schleicher, Michael Stevenson, Yuri Belfali, and Olli-Pekka Heinonen for their inspiring ideas. I thank Eva Pomeroy, Becky Buell, Dayna Cunningham, Emma Paine, Laura Pastorini, Kenneth Hogg, and Sanjay Sarma for commenting on the draft.
For additional resources:
join: upcoming Presencing Series (April-June)
watch: 3 min Alchemist clip (u-lab)
enjoy: A farmer who puts his hand to the plow must look forward (tribute)
forthcoming book: Presencing: Seven Practices
