With the recent news of Volkswagen’s cheating, I wonder how we can do better and I remembered my conversation with Otto Scharmer.
Otto is the author of Leading from the Emerging Future, Theory U, and Presence. He is a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is the founding chair of the MIT IDEAS Program, that takes leaders from civil society, government and business from Indonesia and China on a nine month action learning journey in order to co-create profound social innovation in their communities. With the German government (GIZ Global Leadership Academy) and the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan, he co-founded the Global Well-being and Gross National Happiness Lab, which brings together innovative thinkers from developing and industrialized countries to prototype new ways of measuring well-being and social progress. He has worked with governments in Africa, Asia and Europe and led leadership and innovation programs at corporations such as Daimler, Alibaba, ICBC, Eileen Fisher, Google and PwC.
Here is one of his comments during our interview:
“So we all live in bubbles. In each organization, the more successful you are as a leader of the organization the more you are in a bubble. And, the CEO is the bubble king, so to speak, because anyone around you is, you know, faking some stuff, right. It’s, kind of, sorting out the information that they think you don’t want to hear, so you live in a fake environment that is projected onto you because people think that’s what you want to hear.” Otto Scharmer
What kind of bubbles do you think possibly existed at Volkswagen?
What bubbles exist in your organization?
How can we be more truthful with one another?
We would love your thoughts.