Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and a co-founder of the Presencing Institute, an action-research organization he established to develop and disseminate Theory U. His central contribution is Theory U, which describes how individuals and organizations can shift from reacting from the past to acting from an emerging future — a process he calls "presencing," a blend of "presence" and "sensing." The framework draws on phenomenology, cognitive science, and contemplative practice as well as organizational learning theory, and it extends the learning organization concept from behavioral and structural change toward transformation at the level of attention, awareness, and inner orientation.
Scharmer's intellectual relationship with peter-senge is one of the closest collaborations in the Senge network. They co-authored presence-2004 together with Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers, a book based on interviews with 150 scientists, social entrepreneurs, and business leaders about the nature of profound change. presence-2004 represents a significant deepening of Senge's earlier work: where fifth-discipline-1990 focused on the tools and disciplines of organizational learning, Presence explores the inner conditions — the quality of attention and awareness — that make deep learning possible. The book introduced "presencing" and the U-process to a broad audience.
Scharmer subsequently developed Theory U into a comprehensive framework in "Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges" (2007) and built a global learning community around it through the Presencing Institute and massive open online courses reaching hundreds of thousands of participants. His work represents one of the most significant extensions of Senge's learning-organization tradition — taking the five-disciplines framework and grounding it in a more explicit account of consciousness, emergence, and social transformation. He remains affiliated with both mit-sloan-school and society-for-organizational-learning.