On Preparing the Social Soil – Learning & Practices From Theory U [#33]

If you have ever tried to grow vegetables, you will have learned that poor soil leads to a poor harvest.

Soil is amazing. It can store incredible amounts of CO2, it stores water, it grows forests, it hosts billions of microbes, bacteria and fungi, it filters water, cycles nutrients and much more.

Soil is the base for growing anything.

“Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.” – Paul Harvey

When taking a course last year at the Presencing Institute, I came across the concept of “Social Soil”. It describes the quality of our awareness and relationships.

The course described the social soil as the root of all the “observable” social systems we build: Agriculture, Education, Health, Business, Finance, Technology, Governance, etc.

And it makes sense. All social systems are built through relationships. So if we want to change the social systems that are misaligned with a liveable future, we need to change the quality of our awareness and relationships.

The Quality of our Work flows from the Quality of our Relationships.
The Quality of our Relationships flows from the Quality of our Communication.
The Quality of our Communication flows from the Integration of our Mind, Heart, Body, and Spirit.
- Marlow Hotchkiss

To build better relationships, we need to look at what needs to heal within us.

3 big divides cause us to feel separated and collectively create results that nobody wants.

• The Ecological Divide: telling us we are separated from nature
• The Social Divide: telling us that we are separated from others
• The Spiritual Divide: telling us we are separated from the divine (or higher self)

Additionally, there is the illusion of insignificance: 68% of humans feel a lack of self-agency, but 69% are willing to sacrifice income to combat climate change (UN Development Report 2024).

The process of Theory U is an offer to overcome these divides and to develop agency to influence the future.

The process starts with attention by seeing and sensing what's there, then it develops intention by presencing and crystallising, and then it steps into agency by embodying and co-creating the intention.

The process is fueled by developing an

• open mind (curiosity)
• open heart (compassion)
• open will (courage)

which leads to eco-system awareness.

But what we currently see a lot in the world right now is the opposite:

• Frozen will (fear)
• Frozen heart (hate)
• Frozen mind (ignorance)

which leads to ego-system awareness.

We know for sure that there will be more disruption in the future. We can either turn away (separation) or turn towards it (connection).

The future depends on you/us.

So what are the qualities to develop to improve the conditions for nutrient-rich social soil?

1. Accessing your discomfort –> sensing (equanimity)
2. Access your not-knowing –> listening (humility)
3. Access your Non-(Re)-Action –> letting go (stillness)

Instead of focusing only on the social systems, we are well advised to focus more on the social soil and quality of awareness from which they stem from.

Here are 7 Theory U practices that build the social soil from which the social systems emerge:

1. Becoming Aware
2. Listening
3. Dialogue
4. Presencing
5. Co-Imagination
6. Co-Creation
7. Eco-system Governance

These seven practices map onto the journey of Theory U — moving from individual awareness outward into collective action and systemic transformation.

1. Becoming Aware

This is the foundational practice of waking up to what is actually happening — in yourself, in others, and in the system around you.

It means noticing your habitual patterns of thought, your assumptions, your reactive emotions, and the blind spots that shape how you see the world. Scharmer, the inventor of Theory U, often calls this shifting from “absencing” (operating on autopilot, disconnected from self and source) to presence. Without this baseline awareness, the other practices can’t take root.

It often involves contemplative practices like journaling, or simply pausing to notice “what is” rather than rushing to judgment or action.

My favourite practice is the morning check-in: Before reaching for your phone, spend some time asking yourself three questions.

What am I feeling right now? What’s the quality of my attention? What matters most today?

Write the answers in your notebook.

2. Listening

Theory U distinguishes four levels of listening, and the practice is about moving down through them:

• downloading (hearing what confirms what you already know)
• factual listening (noticing new data and disconfirming information)
• empathic listening (sensing the world through another’s eyes and heart)
• generative listening (listening from the emerging future, where something new wants to come through).

Practising listening is how you move from being trapped in your own perspective to genuinely encountering others.

I've got to be honest here, I struggle with this one, because I love sharing all these things I learned. But I am realising more and more that I can always learn from others' perspectives. That’s why I use practices like the ​Zwiegespräch​.

3. Dialogue

Dialogue here is distinct from debate or discussion. It’s a collective practice of thinking together, suspending judgment, and inquiring into the assumptions that underlie what people say.

Building on the work of David Bohm and William Isaacs, dialogue moves a group through stages:

• polite talk
• breakdown or conflict
• reflective inquiry
• and finally, generative flow, where the group accesses a shared field of meaning.

It requires people to speak from what’s authentically arising rather than rehearsed positions, and to listen for what’s between and beneath the words.

Dialogue is how a collective begins to see itself.

This is not easy. We are trained to rehearse and share premade arguments. Trusting that the right things come out of our mouths in the moment, without thinking it fully through before, is a challenge. It goes against what we are taught in school.

But I have learned that it resonates more with others.

One can notice if someone is just repeating talking points or genuinely resonates with what they are saying.

4. Presencing

This is the pivot point — the deep stillness where individuals and groups connect with their highest future potential and let it inform what they do.

In a collective context, presencing is when a group lets go of its old identity, agendas, and assumptions, and opens to what is emerging. It often involves silence, solo time in nature, deep reflection, or a “crystallising” moment where shared intention becomes clear.

Presencing is where the U turns: from sensing what is, to envisioning what could be.

Looking back on my life, I can see various presencing moments. Travelling solo in South America, my time in Lisbon with my friend Fabian where I started to journal regularly, and last year, my time off after my former employer went bust.

It always involved some form of freedom, slowing down and reflecting. Here are 4 practices that you can make work with a busier schedule as well:

The solo retreat: block half a day, go somewhere with no agenda — a forest, a quiet church, a long train ride — and bring two questions: what is my work in the world, and what is being asked of me now. Don’t try to answer. Just hold them.

The “future self” letter: write a letter from yourself five years from now, living into your highest potential, back to yourself today. What does that self want you to know?

Stillness practice: ten minutes a day of doing nothing — not meditation with a technique, just sitting and letting whatever wants to surface, surface. Scharmer often points to this as the simplest doorway into presencing.

The threshold question: when facing a decision, ask “what would I do if I were operating from my deepest sense of purpose, not from fear or habit?” Sit with it before acting.

5. Co-Imagination

Once a group or you have touched into a sense of emerging possibility by presencing, co-imagination is the practice of giving it form. It’s the collective creative work of envisioning futures, articulating what the new could look like, and weaving individual insights into a shared image.

This often happens through storytelling, visualisation, sketching, embodied exercises, or generative scribing. Co-imagination is playful and exploratory — it’s not yet building, but imagining together with enough vividness that the future starts to feel real and shared.

Here is how to practice it:

Sketch your future: spend 20 minutes drawing (badly is fine) the future you sense wants to emerge in your work, family, or community. Visual thinking accesses something verbal thinking doesn’t.

The 7-day prototype: pick one tiny experiment that embodies the future you want and run it within a week. Any actual small action you can learn from. Then ask yourself: what did reality teach me?

Find your “stakeholder edge”: identify one person in your system whose perspective you’ve been avoiding and have a real conversation with them.

6. Co-Creation

This is where imagination becomes prototype. Co-creation is the hands-on, iterative practice of building living examples of the new — small experiments, pilots, or prototypes that let you “learn by doing.”

Scharmer emphasizes “prototyping the new by linking head, heart, and hand.”

The idea is to make the future tangible quickly, get feedback from the real world, and iterate. It’s a bias toward action grounded in the deeper intention discovered through presencing.

For me, this is moving to the countryside with the dream of building a regenerative village and learning that being here draws me to dive deep into bioregioning.

I guess it's a bigger prototype than most feel comfortable with, but I had experimented a lot around this way of living in the past.

Start with a prototype of something that you feel slightly stretched about, then learn and design the next version.

7. Eco-System Governance

This final practice scales the work to the level of whole systems. It’s about creating the structures, infrastructures, and shared platforms that allow many actors across a system — companies, governments, civil society, communities — to coordinate, learn, and act together for the well-being of the whole rather than narrow interests.

It involves shifting from ego-system awareness (what’s good for me) to eco-system awareness (what’s good for the whole). Practically, this might mean building cross-sector learning platforms, multi-stakeholder collaborations, or new governance arrangements that let a system sense and steer itself collectively.

This is where I feel I am at now. ​Building networks for systems change​. But I often remind myself to stay present and to listen better so I can do this work more effectively.

It’s not that you more through the U once. You do it multiple times.

These 7 practices form a progression:

the first three cultivate the inner and relational ground,

presencing is the turning point,

and the last three move the work outward into shared imagination, tangible prototypes, and systemic transformation.

They’re often described as practices that build “social soil” because they create the underlying conditions of awareness, trust, and connection from which healthy social systems can grow — without that soil, structural change tends not to stick.

What does that mean for the future?

We need to create Islands of Coherence that give us the support and space to realign Attention, Intention & Agency. We need to train the practices that improve the quality of our awareness & relationships so that we can build better social systems.

I have come to the conclusion that system change is mostly an inner change in a lot of individuals, and the context and systems we are part of can either support or hinder that inner change.

We need to make space to sense our highest collective potential, find agency and step into that. Together.

We try, and we fail. I do it all the time. The key is to stay compassionate with yourself and others.

​Here is a compassion meditation that I used this morning that I found beautiful​ - try it :)

Happy regenerating,

Jonas

P.S.:

If you got curious and want to give it a try. Here is a week's program you can use that takes you 20 min a day max:

Week One: A Starter Practice in Presencing

The whole thing hinges on one thing: slowing down enough to notice what's actually here. Seven days. That's all this is.

Don't try to master anything this week. Just feel what shifts in your own attention when you pay closer attention to it.

Pick a time you can actually protect. Morning works best. Then show up for seven days.

Day 1 — Notice your starting point (10 min)

Before you touch your phone in the morning, sit somewhere quiet with a notebook. Write for 10 minutes on three questions: What am I feeling right now? Where is my attention? What matters most to me today?

Don't edit. It's your baseline. You'll return to this on Day 7.

Day 2 — Listen one level deeper (in the flow of your day)

In every conversation today, notice which level you're listening from. Are you waiting to confirm what you already think? Taking in new information? Sensing the other person's actual experience? Open to being genuinely changed by them?

You don't need to do anything differently. Just notice. That evening, write down one conversation that surprised you.

Day 3 — Leave the gap (in the flow of your day)

In at least 3 conversations today, pause for 3 seconds before you respond.

Notice what arrives in that silence, for you and for them. Most of us never experience this gap. It's where real listening lives.

Day 4 — Walk without an agenda (20 min)

20 minutes, no phone, no podcast, no destination. Pay attention to what you usually filter out: the texture of the air, strangers' faces, what's happening in your own body.

When your mind goes for problem-solving, come back to your senses. This is "open mind" in practice: sensing without sorting.

Day 5 — Sit in stillness (10 min)

Set a timer for 10 minutes and sit. No technique, no app, no breath-counting.

Let whatever wants to surface, surface. Boredom, restlessness, a forgotten worry, a quiet knowing. All of it is information. Stop managing your inner world for a moment and let it speak.

Day 6 — Write from your future self (15 min)

Imagine yourself 5 years from now, living into your fullest potential. The real version, the one that's done the inner work. Write a short letter to your future self.

What do they want you to know? What are they asking you to let go of? What are they asking you to begin?

Day 7 — Return and reflect (15 min)

Open your notebook to Day 1. Read what you wrote. Answer the same 3 questions again: What am I feeling right now? Where is my attention? What matters most?

Notice what's shifted, even subtly. Then ask one more: What is one small action this week is asking of me?

Whatever surfaces, however small: do it within 48 hours. That's where the U moves from inner work into outer manifestation.

Theory U rests on a quiet bet: change the inner place you're operating from, and the outer results change too.

If you are curious about Theory U, here is the link to their website, where they offer free courses: ​https://www.u-school.org