The adaptive challenge of our time
We face what Eric Martin would call a profound adaptive challenge: how to create meaningful change in a world that has been fractured by centuries of individualistic thinking. This isn’t a technical problem with a known solution—it’s an adaptive challenge that requires us to examine our deepest assumptions about leadership, success, and human potential.
The dominant narrative tells us that change happens through heroic individual action. But this story has become part of the problem, trapping us in old mental models that no longer serve our emerging reality.
Getting on the Balcony: Seeing the whole system
When we step back and observe the larger pattern, we notice something remarkable: every breakthrough that has truly served humanity emerged from community, not individual genius. Indigenous systems thinking captures this truth: “I am because we are.”- Ubuntu.
Ubuntu isn’t sentiment, it’s systems thinking. Individual and collective exist in dynamic relationship where one’s health depends entirely on the other’s health. Fragment this relationship, and we create structural conflicts that undermine our highest aspirations.
From the balcony, we can see three adaptive challenges embedded in our current moment:
- The challenge of value creation: How do we move from extractive to generative models of success?
- The challenge of collective Intelligence: How do we access wisdom that emerges from diversity rather than uniformity?
- The challenge of sustainable change: How do we build capacity for continuous adaptation rather than episodic intervention?
The U-Process of Community Formation
Otto Scharmer’s Theory U offers a powerful framework for understanding how communities can navigate these adaptive challenges. The journey moves through distinct phases:
Downloading → Suspending: From Individual to Collective Seeing
Most teams get stuck in “downloading”, recycling old patterns, competing for scarce resources, optimizing individual performance. The first movement requires suspending these habitual responses and opening to collective seeing.
In Ubuntu terms, this means recognizing that our individual success is inextricably linked to collective well-being. Indigenous farming cooperatives demonstrate this principle: when I worked with subsistence farmers in Mazabuka, Zambia, I observed that they consistently suspended competition and opted instead to collaborate. As a result, they consistently outperformed industrial agriculture. It’s no accident that small-scale farmers feed (the good stuff) for the whole world.
Redirecting → Letting Go: From Ego-System to Eco-System Awareness
As Scharmer notes, this requires a shift from ego-system awareness (What do I want to create?) to eco-system awareness (What wants to emerge through us?). This is the deep work of letting go—releasing attachment to individual credit, control, and predetermined outcomes.
During the pandemic, we witnessed communities that successfully made this shift. Instead of hoarding resources or waiting for institutional solutions, neighborhood networks began presencing collective wisdom. Solutions emerged that no individual could have designed: mutual aid networks, community gardens, and informal childcare cooperatives. Community health care workers got applause every day on their way to and from saving lives – a habit that we’ve unfortunately abandoned.
To paraphrase a famed American president, you can get anything done if you don’t care who gets the credit.
Presencing: Accessing the Field of Collective Potential
At the bottom of the “U” lies presencing…connecting with the deepest source of possibility. In community context, this means accessing what indigenous cultures have always known: collective wisdom transcends individual knowledge.
This isn’t mystical, it’s practical. Research consistently shows that cognitively diverse teams solve complex problems more effectively than homogeneous groups of experts. But accessing this collective intelligence requires what adaptive leadership calls “holding the space”—creating psychological safety where marginalized voices can surface system-changing insights.
Crystallizing → Prototyping: From Intention to Action
As collective intention crystallizes, communities begin prototyping new ways of being together. This is where Ubuntu philosophy becomes Ubuntu practice: small experiments in mutual care, shared decision-making, and collective value creation.
These prototypes often look unremarkable from the outside. A community land trust. A worker cooperative. A neighborhood food garden. But they represent what Scharmer calls “acupuncture points”—small interventions that can shift entire systems.
Institutionalizing: Embedding New Patterns
The final movement involves institutionalizing these new patterns, not through rigid structures, but through what we might call “behavioral infrastructure.” Rituals (and ceremony) that sustain relationship. Decision-making processes that honor collective wisdom. Economic models that distribute value equitably.
The Work of Adaptive Leadership in Community
This U-Process requires a fundamental shift in how we understand leadership. Instead of leaders who have answers, we need leaders who can regulate distress as communities navigate uncertainty. Instead of leaders who solve problems for people, we need leaders who can give the work back to the community and trust collective intelligence.
Most importantly, we need leaders who can protect voices from below, ensuring that the perspectives most likely to generate breakthrough insights aren’t marginalized or silenced.
This is the deep work of what some call “staying alive” – maintaining capacity to lead change while systems push back against transformation. It requires what indigenous cultures understand as leadership responsibility: creating conditions where community wisdom can emerge.
The Recursive Pattern: Community Building IS Leadership Development
Here we discover something profound: the process of building generative community IS the process of developing adaptive leadership capacity. As we learn to presence collective wisdom, we develop our ability to sense emerging possibilities. As we practice letting go of individual control, we strengthen our capacity for systems leadership.
This creates what systems theorists call a “virtuous cycle.” Communities that successfully navigate adaptive challenges develop members with greater leadership capacity. Those members, in turn, can help other communities navigate their adaptive challenges.
From Downloading to Presencing: The Choice Point
We stand at what Scharmer calls a “choice point.” We can continue downloading old patterns of individualistic competition, or we can commit to the deeper work of collective transformation.
The path forward requires what Theory U calls “radical openness”—openness of mind (suspending judgment), openness of heart (connecting with others), and openness of will (letting go of control). It requires trusting that when we create the right conditions, solutions will emerge that serve not just our immediate needs, but the needs of the larger whole.
Ubuntu – indigenous systems thinking and adaptive leadership converge on this truth: the future that wants to emerge through us is always more powerful than the future any of us can create alone. Our work is not to download predetermined solutions, but to presence the collective intelligence that can meet our deepest challenges.
The seed contains the tree, but the tree emerges through soil, water, sun, and time. We are both the seeds and the conditions that allow new possibilities to grow. The question is not whether we can solve our adaptive challenges alone—we cannot. The question is whether we can create the conditions for collective wisdom to emerge. That is the work of our time.
If you’re ready to transform these insights into lived practice, join our next Leadership and Community Building Workshop, where you’ll discover how your individual gifts find their fullest expression in community with others who share your commitment to meaningful change.