3. BIRTH OF THE U-THEORY

IN A SENSE, THERE IS NO DECISION-MAKING. WHAT YOU DO JUST BECOMES OBVIOUS. A TOTALLY DIFFERENT SET OF RULES APPLIES.
– Brian Arthur

A week later, Otto and I were in New York, seeing Professor Rao and Dr. Lipson, and the following week, we were in Palo Alto, meeting with Professor Ray. We were in a car near Menlo Park when my business partner, Susan Taylor, called me. She had located Brian Arthur at Xerox PARC and learned that he was writing a book and wasn’t taking any meetings. Susan informed me that I was going to have to call Brian directly.

I called immediately and managed to get through to him, introducing myself and explaining our project. When I said that we needed two hours of his time for an interview, he politely declined, explaining he was working on a new book and wasn’t taking appointments. I pressed him, telling him of the others who had agreed to see us. There was silence on the other end for a moment – then he said, “Okay, you can come by this afternoon for a couple of hours at two o’clock.”

I immediately called Gary Jusela and told him of the importance of this meeting. To this day, I don’t completely understand why I did that, except to say I was operating spontaneously from a deeper source, without conscious thought or control.

Gary, to his credit, said, “If it’s that important, I’m going to be there. Postpone the meeting until tomorrow morning. I’ll catch the red-eye and meet you at Xerox PARC.”

That next morning, Dr. Arthur was extremely cordial. He introduced us to John Seely Brown, the director of Xerox PARC, showed us all around, and took us to the large conference room. We set up the recorder and explained to Dr. Arthur that I would lead the interview.

He settled back in his chair and said, “Good. Now, what can I tell you about increasing returns?”

I hesitated for a moment and said, “No, Dr. Arthur. We’re here to talk about the source of the entrepreneurial impulse – how to sense and actualize emerging futures.” I showed him the Fast Company article and said, “This is what led us to you.”

He glanced at it, and then there was a long silence in the room. He grew quiet. Finally, Arthur said, “This is not what I expected – it’s going to take much longer than we had planned.” He then asked us to be extremely protective of the audiotape – that this conversation would involve personal reflections he had shared with no one else.

From that moment, the atmosphere in the conference room shifted in an unmistakable way. We were together in dialogue with Arthur almost five hours, and over this time, the energy field became palpable, just as it had during the crisis in Waco. I felt completely connected to Arthur, as if we were joined together by the same umbilical cord.

Since that day, Brian Arthur and I have spoken about this phenomenon many times, even using the word “sacred” – a time when all of us felt deeply committed to one another in a singular way. It was as if we were acting together as agents to deliver important new knowledge into the world. For me, it was the fulfillment of the promise I had made in the back of the auditorium at the Woodlands – an important moment in a decade-long journey that ended with the writing of this book, Source.

Then Arthur began to outline the process for tapping into this source – what he called “knowing.” He said, “This inner knowing comes from here,” pointing to his heart. “In a sense, there is no decision making,” he said. “What you do just becomes obvious. A totally different set of rules applies. You hang back. You’re more like a surfer or a really good racecar driver. You don’t act out of deduction, you act out of an inner feeling; you’re not even thinking.”

Arthur described the process to us in unmistakable terms, explaining that it entails three major stages or “elements.” The first thing you do, he said, is “observe, observe, observe.” This kind of intense observation “might take days, or hours, or fractions of a second as in martial arts or sports”; then you “reflect and retreat – allow the inner knowing to emerge.” Finally, he said, you “act swiftly, with a natural flow.”

The conversation around each of these three elements went deeper and deeper as the hours passed. There were long periods of silence where we all four sat absorbed in the moment – experiencing the depth of the field surrounding us. We were communicating on a different plane. It was unmistakable, powerful, and deeply moving.

Arthur spent a good part of the final two hours of our dialogue describing in great detail the daily work he did with his Taoist teacher in Hong Kong from 1988 to 1992. He went back and forth to Hong Kong during those years, learning and perfecting the practices that helped him gain access to that “place of deeper knowing.” He had then returned to his home in northern California and continued his study with the pioneering ecologist, explorer, and educator, John Milton. Milton himself had trained for decades with Tibetan Buddhist and Taoist masters. As it turned out, both Arthur and John became two of my closest friends and guides, and both played key roles in my life in the following years.

The dialogue at Xerox PARC ended with my committing to reconnect with Brian as soon as reasonably possible.

When we walked from the building and got into our car, we all three sat in silence. I was in the driver’s seat, and finally looked to Otto who sat next to me. “This is the Holy Grail,” I said. “Brian just gave us the very essence of what we’ve been seeking!”

Go to That Place of Deeper Knowing

Then with a sense of high excitement, Otto pulled a tablet from his briefcase and said, “Look – we can model Brian’s three elements along a ‘U.’”

We drew the first U-process model right there in the parking lot of Xerox PARC, a three-stage sequence around a big “U” on the tablet. On the left side of the U, we wrote “Observe, observe, observe.” At the bottom of the U, we wrote “Go to that place of deeper knowing.” And on the right side of the U: “Act swiftly in flow.”

And with that, we had a preliminary understanding of the core process we had promised Jim Morgan – a process by which transformational breakthroughs in any field occur, the creation of knowledge that changes the world as we know it.