Betty Sue Flowers is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, a poet, editor, and longtime scenario planning practitioner. She served as director of the LBJ Presidential Library and is perhaps best known outside academia for editing Bill Moyers's "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth" (1988), the companion volume to the landmark PBS series — work that placed her at the intersection of humanistic scholarship and popular meaning-making. Her editorial and narrative skills, combined with her engagement with Shell's scenario planning practice, brought an unusual literary and philosophical sensibility to the organizational learning world.
Flowers is a co-author of presence-2004 with peter-senge, otto-scharmer, and joseph-jaworski. Her contribution to the book lies in its form as much as its content: "Presence" is structured as a reported dialogue interspersed with reflective essays, and Flowers's editorial intelligence shaped the book's voice and narrative coherence. Her background in mythology, poetry, and narrative theory gave the conversation about systemic change a humanistic register that distinguishes "Presence" from the more framework-oriented earlier Senge books. Where fifth-discipline-1990 and the fieldbooks are organized around concepts and practices, "Presence" is organized around a quality of attention and a phenomenology of transformation.
Within the Shell scenario planning tradition — which she engaged through the Global Business Network — Flowers helped develop the narrative and storytelling dimensions of scenario work, treating scenarios as a literary form with its own craft requirements as much as an analytical tool. This perspective informed the presence-2004 argument that the capacity to sense emerging futures requires a quality of listening and presence that is more akin to artistic perception than strategic analysis. Her work extends the learning-organization tradition in the direction of the humanities and contemplative inquiry, domains that became increasingly central to Senge's later thinking about system-leadership.