Menu

Seeing and vision

September 28, 2004 By Uncategorized

It seems almost intuitive that there should be a connection between seeing and vision. Certainly in the physiological processes, seeing is what you do and vision is what you have. You can still see if you have bad vision, but you can’t see well.

I have been reading Presence by Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworsky and Betty Sue Flowers very slowly now for a few months and it’s time to start posting from it. The book is really about the evolution of Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, which is a map for looking at how people reach down into their deep sense of intention and purpose and bring that out to bear on the world around them, creating the futures for their communities and organizations that they want to see. It is beautifully in line with stuff I have been doing intuitively for years. This is one of those books that comes along to confirm one’s work and to give it language.

At any rate, not knowing where to start in posting from this great work, I am choosing this great quote on vision. It comes after the part of the book that talks about developing the capacity to see from within a system:

…many visions are doomed from the outset because those who articulate them, whether consciously or not, are coming from a place of powerlessness. If we believe that someone else has created our present reality, what is the basis for believing that we can create a different reality in the future?…When this happens, people formulate visions that are disconnected from a shared understanding of present reality and a shared responsibility for that reality. If people are still externalizing their problems, they create, in a sense, “externalized visions,” which amount to a kind of change strategy for fixing problems which they have not yet seen their part in creating. Only when people begin to see from within the forces that shape their reality and to see their part in how those forces might evolve does vision become powerful. Everything else is just vague hope.

— Presence, p 136

There is a nice review of the book here.