U.Lab: Transforming Business, Society, and Self | MITx on edX | About Video

[MUSIC PLAYING] We live in an age of
profound disruption, where something is
ending and dying, and something else is
wanting to be born. What’s ending and
dying is a civilization that’s built on the
mindset of maximum me, of bigger is better,
and of special interest group-driven decision
making that has led us into a state of organized
irresponsibility. What’s being born is less clear. It’s a future that requires
us to connect with a deeper level of our humanity– to
discover who we really are and who we want to
be as a society. How can we build the
capacity to sense and actualize a future
that we feel is possible, we know is possible, but
that isn’t quite there yet? That question is at the
very heart of this course. I’m Otto Scharmer, a
senior lecturer at MIT, and I will be
facilitating your journey through U.Lab– Transforming
Business, Society, and Self. Guiding our approach
will be a method that is based on sensing,
connecting to our deeper sources of knowing,
and action learning. While the method itself is
new, many of its principles have been known by change
makers for generations. In fact, in the
Western world, you can trace some of
its foundations to this place– Walden Pond,
just outside of Boston. Here is where Henry David
Thoreau came in order to connect to the deeper essence
of what his life and work was about. Think about the influence
that his writing had on social movements
around the world. What all these movements
share is an understanding that to really profoundly
change the world requires us to connect
to our emerging self. And in order to discover
who you really are, you need to go out
into the world. Many people say for all
the talk about change, it rarely ever happens. But in my lifetime, I have seen
tectonic shifts several times. I saw it when the Berlin
Wall came down in 1989. I saw it when the apartheid
system in South Africa collapsed and we witnessed
the peaceful transition into the post-apartheid era. And I’m seeing it now
with the rise of China, as the center of gravity
of the world economy has been shifting from
the West to east Asia. And yet I believe that the most
significant disruptive change of our generation
is yet to come. It has to do with the
transformation of capitalism and self. The transformation of capitalism
depends on our ability to reshape how we connect to
each other, to the system, and to ourselves. So join us in U.Lab–
Transforming Business, Society, and Self.

Written by Raul Dinwiddie

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