Theory U and CSR 2.0: Alignment of Two Conceptual Approaches to Create Profound Innovation and Transformative Change in Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility

Making It Personal: Developing Sustainability Leaders in Business

“…All of these allude to a process whereby learners somehow find themselves outside their comfort zone, in a position where their existing mental frameworks and beliefs cannot help in making sense of the situation, forcing a change at some level of understanding or value system. This process is the basis of learning models such as Otto Scharmer's Theory U (Scharmer & Senge, 2009), whose relevance to sustainability has been explored (van Lawick van Pabst & Visser, 2012), and is also sometimes conceptualized as 'sensemaking' (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014). This process of learning or conceptual change is not a purely cognitive process: the seminal work of Pintrich et al (1993) found an important role for motivation interacting with cognition in this form of learning in the classroom, which has come to be called the 'warming trend' within educational psychology.…”

“…The learning literature suggests that transformation is often catalyzed by some form of uncomfortable experience: for example, Laws and Rein (2003) refer to “uncertainty and doubt,” Sinclair and Diduck (2001) to a “disorienting dilemma,” and van der Knaap (1995) to “cognitive dissonance.” All of these allude to a process whereby learners somehow find themselves outside their comfort zone, in a position where their existing mental frameworks and beliefs cannot help in making sense of the situation, forcing a change at some level of understanding or value system. This process is the basis of learning models such as Otto Scharmer’s Theory U (Scharmer & Senge, 2009), whose relevance to sustainability has been explored (van Lawick van Pabst & Visser, 2012), and is also sometimes conceptualized as “sensemaking” (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014).…”