Summary
Social soil is Otto Scharmer’s image for the unseen conditions a social system grows from: the quality of people’s attention and intentions, and the quality of their relationships. Scharmer, of the Presencing Institute and best known for Theory U, uses it in his essay ‘An Emerging Third Option’, contrasting what grows above the ground with the soil beneath.
His argument is that lasting change in a system needs both to be tended, and that the soil is the neglected half. The essay goes on to propose practices for cultivating it, building people’s shared capacity for change from the bottom up and across sectors.
Rationale
‘Cultural soil’ is one of the earlier terms Part 2’s first footnote lists, and gardening language runs through our writing. Where Scharmer speaks of upgrading operating systems we part company: dispositions are “not simply software”.