are you sure about that?

A few weeks ago a colleague gave me a copy of ‘Leading from the Emerging Future’ by Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer. Their work interests me because it is an attempt to find different solutions to global and in particular economic problems. Their approach is summed up in a quote from Albert Einstein who said, ‘We cannot solve problems with the same thinking we used to create them.’ So they are trying to find ways that we can be with each other that removes ‘same thinking’ recognising that ‘same thinking’ will produce ‘same results.’ It seems to me to be a useful way of thinking about change from global to personal situations. They also suggest that it is how we are in relationships that can effect change both for ourselves and others. They offer a useful way of thinking about communication and in particular listening. In my profession a lot of emphasis is placed on helping people to communicate, to find their voice, to tell it like it is and it is my job to listen. Scharmer and Kaufer ...

Quantum theory is the most far-ranging and successful attempt to understand the physical world ever devised by human beings. By the late Twenties quantum theorists had solved in elaborate detail the most pressing physics problem of that era--how light interacts with atoms. But along with its astonishing power to predict the most subtle light-matter effects, this fledgling theory created a host of philosophical problems, not the least of which was the bizarre notion that the world is in some sense "not real" except during an act of measurement. Many physicists, including Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, and French scientist-aristocrat Prince Louis De Broglie, felt that giving up reality was too high a price to pay for a mere theory no matter how successful; these physicists hoped in their hearts that quantum theory's triumphant reign would be short-lived, that this preposterous reality-denying theory would fail when applied outside the atom-sized realm where it had ac...