In an essay published on the Presencing Institute’s Field of the Future Blog, Otto Scharmer, who teaches the u-lab course at MIT Sloan, argues that higher education needs a fourth founding in the age of AI: a Bauhaus for generative social fields. Its raw material is the social soil: the quality of relationships from which people think, talk and act together. He writes about universities, and his thesis holds for any organization that wants to see itself and change: it is a lesson in leadership. His thesis first, then what it shares with our work on regeneration and regenerative leadership.

AI is wearing down three human capacities: attention, attachment and agency

Scharmer opens in his own classroom. This fall, in his u-lab course, a student described running from class to class, using AI for homework just to get by, and finding deep relationships in that one class alone.

He reads her words as a symptom. AI, in his account, hacks the human condition in three waves: social media went after our attention, companion chatbots go after our attachment, agentic AI goes after our agency. The common effect is atrophy, the loss of a capacity through disuse: cognitive (“cognitive debt”), relational (what Sherry Turkle calls artificial intimacy) and creative (what an MIT report calls cognitive surrender).

What she noticed concerns the social field: the quality of relationships among people, which gives rise to their ways of thinking, conversing and acting, and then to results. A generative social field lets a group sense and actualize its best future potential; great schools, in his view, activate such fields.

Three divides open a “plastic hour” for higher education

With Michael Pirson and Eva Pomeroy, under the umbrella of the Club of Rome, Scharmer has held retreats with several hundred faculty members and deans. He sums them up in one word: inversion. Knowledge transfer, comfort and busyness move to the periphery; not-knowing, discomfort and stillness move to the center.

The moment, he writes, is marked by three divides: ecological (seven of nine planetary boundaries crossed), social (polarization, war, wealth flowing to the hyper-rich) and spiritual (two out of three people worldwide say they have little or no influence over the decisions that shape their lives). It is a time of rupture that may also be a time of regeneration. AI also brings a plastic hour, when structures set for decades suddenly break open.

Four ways of relating to patterns, and the risk of an intelligence monoculture

Because AI reproduces patterns learned from past data, Scharmer distinguishes four types of collective action: pattern-replicating (executing), pattern-adapting (adjusting to context), pattern-sensing (tuning in and co-shaping) and pattern-originating (creating from the future as it emerges). Machines are at home in the first two. The last two call on two more intelligences: the organic intelligence of living systems (OI), the source of empathy, and the source intelligence of the social field (SI), which connects us with deeper sources of knowing.

Higher education works mostly at the first two levels, and the danger is a Jevons effect of the mind: cheap cognition crowds out the costlier kinds, and the machine becomes the head, the human the tool. Behind it lies an intelligence monoculture: according to Gartner, more than a trillion dollars go into AI in 2026 alone, a tiny fraction to OI and SI. Universities excel at adding apps; what they need is an upgrade of the operating system, the vertical development of the awareness from which people think, talk and act together.

Athens, Jena and the polytechnic: three foundings that opened mind, heart and will

Each founding of higher learning, Scharmer writes, began as a small living field before it became an institution. The first grew in the Axial Age from plural roots, from Taxila and Confucius to the Academy of Athens, Baghdad, Timbuktu and Indigenous knowledge systems in which nature is the teacher. Socrates drew out what learners already carry. This founding opened the mind.

The second took shape in Jena around 1800, with Fichte, Schiller, Novalis and the Humboldt brothers, Goethe nearby in Weimar. Wilhelm von Humboldt turned it into the University of Berlin in 1810. Its offshoots run from the Danish folk high schools and the Concord Transcendentalists to the Highlander Folk School, where Rosa Parks spent two weeks in 1955, and Paulo Freire’s culture circles. This founding opened the heart.

The third is the polytechnic, from MIT in 1861 to Silicon Valley. It taught the university to be relevant and built the extractive industrial paradigm whose latest product, AI, now eats into the university’s core. Other currents ran inside it: Kurt Lewin’s action research, Ed Schein’s action learning, and Jay Forrester’s system dynamics, whose students Dennis and Donella Meadows led the team behind The Limits to Growth. This founding opened the will.

The fourth founding regenerates the social soil

The fourth founding opens mind, heart and will together. Every social field has a visible layer, the social system of programs and degrees, and an invisible one, the social soil of attention, conversation and agency. The threefold hack depletes that soil, and the real danger, he warns, is that humans become like machines. A soil that is constantly mined loses its ability to regenerate; it needs an enabling infrastructure, the way a watershed needs its wetlands. Higher education should be that infrastructure.

The practices that cultivate it, developed at the Presencing Institute, run from listening and dialogue to co-creating and co-governing, and open three capacities: humility, compassion and courage. The fourth founding rests on four shifts: dialogic inquiry as the backbone of teaching; whole person and whole systems learning, from the individual to the group, the city, the region and the planetary community; deep systems transformation aimed at the social soil; and a broadening of knowledge toward fourth-person knowing, in which the knower, the community and the land are part of what is known.

Scharmer carries the point beyond the university. A system that can see and sense itself can change itself, and he calls the capacity to make that happen perhaps the most critical leadership skill of our time. Leaders learn to shift a social field from transactional to co-creative, from debate to dialogue, from a collection of individuals to a generative field. Our institutions, he adds, are built to replicate and adapt; today’s challenges ask them to co-sense, to slow down and then to co-originate.

The stakes reach democracy. Scharmer cites student movements in Serbia, Nepal and Bangladesh that moved from protest to the ballot box. If the essence of democracy is conversation, its quality is the main leverage point, and that is precisely what the threefold hack has degraded.

A Bauhaus for generative social fields

His model is the Bauhaus founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919: a foundation course for unlearning, two masters per workshop, one of form and one of craft, and constant movement between workshop and real world. Scharmer keeps the method and changes the material: the social soil in place of wood, glass and steel.

Its foundation course would teach vertical literacy; its workshops would pair a practitioner of awareness-based systems change with a master from the field, such as a farmer, a mayor or an entrepreneur. Learners would move between the frontlines of disruption and the campus, with AI serving the visible layer and freeing attention for the soil. The whole would form a multi-local social enterprise, living inside existing institutions and beyond them, sharing its practices and tools as a commons, and rooted in three words with the same origin: humanity, humility and humus.

The seeds are already here, he writes, from student circles in Boston and Belgrade to the u-lab network, which has reached more than 260,000 participants in 190 countries through radical localization: small circles, in-person connection, technology linking places. What these seeds need is common ground where their roots can meet and form a social mycelium. His closing line: form follows the field.

What Otto Scharmer’s thesis shares with regenerative leadership

Regeneration is about capacities

Scharmer describes the harm of the moment as atrophy, and the purpose of a generative field as actualizing a group’s best future potential. In our white paper on what regeneration changes for business decisions (in French), we define regeneration in the same terms: giving living beings, humans included, the resources that enable them to reach their full potential in their environment. The capacity of the living sits at the center of both approaches.

In our work, that capacity grows in a set order: an organization first reduces its negative impacts, preserves and then restores ecosystems, then increases the capacities of the living, and finally delivers a triple impact on a territory. Each level prepares the next, and the last one integrates the others with a shift of purpose. American companies frame this progression in their own words, as we showed in our reading of the American approach to regenerative ambition (in French). Scharmer’s four responses follow a similar movement, from replicating existing patterns to originating what is emerging. In both cases, the decisive step changes where action comes from: for him, the emerging future; for us, the purpose of the activity, which turns toward the capacities of the living. For a leader, this means steering by what the organization makes possible for the living around it.

Leaders as gardeners of living systems

Scharmer calls us the gardeners of the social soil. The regenerative tradition we draw on uses the same image. In our reading of Regenesis and regenerative development (in French), Charles Krone’s framework separates work on what already exists, operating and maintaining, from work on potential, improving and regenerating; Carol Sanford’s four paradigms end with evolving the inherent potential of each living being. Like Scharmer’s pattern-originating, the decisive level works with what is emerging. Regenesis draws the role from it: the leader moves from architect of a system under control to gardener of a living, changing ecosystem, cultivating the conditions for others to grow by themselves.

AI reshapes our bonds and our capacities

We follow the same question in our series on AI (in French). Scharmer’s three waves, attention, attachment and agency, match what we have described: ChatGPT turning into a life coach in a world facing a crisis of bonds, what an AI revealed about our biggest existential lie, separation, and the contrast between digital AI and animal intelligence, which senses the weak signals of the living in contact with the real. Like Scharmer, we give AI its place as a tool at the service of human capacities, and we set out the conditions under which digital technology can become regenerative.

The crisis is a crisis of relationships

For Scharmer, the quality of relationships shapes the quality of results. Depending on how one sees nature, ecology reads either as a resource crisis, calling for limits, or as a crisis of relationships, environmental and social, calling for mutually beneficial ties so that everyone can live well together on Earth. Our work starts from this second reading. It leads to stories of prosperity, about what everyone stands to gain, the ones we explored in the emotional approach of regenerative brands, the same horizon Scharmer opens when he speaks of a time of rupture that may also be a time of regeneration. For a leader, the quality of bonds, inside the organization and around it, becomes the first lever on results.

Three divides, three bonds

His ecological, social and spiritual divides line up with the three bonds we work on: the bond to nature, to others and to oneself, which we draw from Edgar Morin’s idea of reliance, from Patrick Viveret and from Dominique Bourg. His three capacities, humility, compassion and courage, carry the same conviction: caring for oneself, for others and for nature go together. Each relationship to nature tends to favor one of these bonds. Regeneration is the path that integrates all three, and the one that promises to live well together on Earth. Scharmer’s two layers say the same thing in his terms: the visible results of a company, a school or a territory grow from the quality of these bonds.

Knowing from within the land

Scharmer’s fourth-person knowing, in which the knower, the community and the land are part of what is known, and the place he gives to Indigenous knowledge systems where nature is the teacher, express a relationship of living connected to nature. Among the four relationships to nature drawn from environmental ethics, this one is multicentrism: humans as partners of the living, each integrating the viewpoint of others in search of mutual interest. It is the imaginary of regeneration. The IPBES Values Assessment, approved in 2022, names it living as nature, alongside living from, in and with nature. Scharmer’s Bauhaus, with a farmer among its masters, gives that relationship a place in how knowledge is produced.

Change happens in a place, with those who live there

Scharmer scales through radical localization, and his workshops bring in a farmer, a mayor and an entrepreneur. Regeneration, as we read it, also happens in a territory, as brands committed to local regeneration show, with all who inhabit it, humans and non-humans, in inhabited ecosystems where soils, biodiversity, people, social ties and the local economy move forward together. Regeneration takes place in a community of shared destiny at the local level, where each inhabitant acts as an auxiliary of nature to improve living conditions in the place they share. His multi-local network sharing its practices as a commons matches the way we see regeneration spread: from one territory to the next, through the actors who carry it.

From ego-system to eco-system economics

Scharmer links the misalignment between money and intention to the way we think about and teach the economy, from ego-system or eco-system awareness. Our work carries this shift into the economic model. A regenerative company, in our definition, is a profitable company whose economic model increases the capacity of the living to thrive. The regenerative economy offers viability across several forms of capital for shared prosperity in our territories: the business activity itself strengthens the territory, and the territory strengthens the activity. Inspired by the economics of mutuality, this model co-invests and shares the gains between those who take part in it, which is one way of putting money where intention is.

Value is created with nature, and it reads as a triple impact on a territory: environmental (soils, water, biodiversity), social (health, well-being and fairness in how value is shared) and economic. Scharmer closes on the cultivation of the social soil and the planetary soil together. Our work joins him there: regenerative agriculture rebuilds the organic matter and the biology of soils, the heart of the climate and soil story of regenerative brands, and the same logic applies to the ties between the people who live from them.

Regenerative leadership in practice

Scharmer pairs practitioners with masters from the field. We set out what we mean by regenerative leadership (in French), and we train leaders in the same spirit: our Regenerative Circle Leadership program (in French) treats leadership as a collective function and works on how an organization makes its decisions, through the five workshops of the regenerative business model.

The starting point is the Capacity Score, which gives each participant a leadership profile among four, and the lever to work on first.