Guy Spiro: Betty Sue, I usually begin my interviews having people tell their stories. A little bit of research shows that you have a wide and varied background.

Betty Sue Flowers: I’ve always been interested in how things are designed and how they could be designed better. It’s one reason I’m in poetry. When you come to talking about how human beings could design themselves towards a better world, that is design conversation, design systems, and even understand the implicit design they’re caught in when they talk to each other about the environment or anything like that, there’s some possibility for change, especially given the large issues that face us today. So having been interested in that and how people work, I did a lot of things in literature, in story, because stories are a form of design at the deepest level. We design around implicit stories because we’re human; one of the ways to change that is to be aware of what the implicit story we’re telling actually is.

     Going from there, I got into some scenarios, certainly in mythology, and doing some consulting with corporations and NASA and other entities about future work and that potentially is a story, the future is the story, as is the past. What we have is the present moment, but these other two things exist as stories. The present moment is shaped by the story you’re telling about the future, and about the past. When you work with people around their stories, you get some different results. When I started working with Joseph Jaworski, we worked on his story, called Synchronicity [Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership], and it’s about what happens when you begin to see the interconnectedness of things. From there we collaborated again with Otto Scharmer and Peter Senge and we had a conversation that we taped and edited and completely rewrote and that produced the book, Presence [Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society].

     So that’s a very short version of how I got from there to here, through the prism of presence. Along the way, too, I’m here as an archivist which is the raw material for stories that historians tell. So I direct the LBJ Presidential Library, and one of the stories that really interests me that’s in this place implicitly has to do with the Great Society. In a short five year period, not only were huge changes accepted through legislation, the Civil Rights Bill, the Voting Rights Act, Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, PBS, but Johnson had this vision of the Great Society. When I became a Director, you couldn’t even talk about it. It was considered a little naïve to have such an idea, such an aspiration. Now I think that, given hope as a theme, we’re back to where that can be a conversation again.

GS: It’s refreshing to have liberality rehabilitated.

BSF: And a different version of the future and what the outcome is.

GS: Wasn’t it just appalling in the 80s when “liberal” became a bad word?

BSF: Yes, I think it was Reagan who said, “We declared a war on poverty and poverty won.” But actually in those five years, there was the single largest decrease in poverty in the history of our country since we started keeping records. But it was a story we believed.

GS: Well, it’s interesting how things go around and come around again. Because what LBJ tried to do was really kind of the culmination of the New Deal.

BSF: Yes, and he thought of it that way, too.

GS: It sort of ran its course, more or less, and we went into this dark 28 years since then. Now it’s come full circle again and it’s fascinating to watch.

BSF: It really is.

GS: What did you do for NASA?

BSF: I was part of a team that sat around imagining things like what to put on the moon; if we actually had a station, there, what would be there. Another time I worked on the scenarios for an invigorated interest in the space program by ordinary citizens.

GS: Sounds like nice work if you can get it.

BSF: It was fun.

GS: Talk a little about your collaboration with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers.

BSF: When I first met Bill, I talked a lot about mythology, and especially mythology from a union perspective, because that’s really what made Campbell and the Campbell series popular, not just mythology but his approach to it. Jung, as you know is not fashionable in the Academy [ Distinguished Teachers Academy at the University of Texas at Austin ]. Here at the Academy, I speak now from my hat as a professor, we look at the differences in things and appreciate the differences and distinctions. Both Campbell and Jung were interested in the similarities among things. So Campbell ’s approach was very inspiring to a lot of people and I talked to Bill about it, and many years later he called me back to see if I would be the series consultant on an idea that he and his partner in public affairs television, Joan Connor, had to interview Campbell in a series. It was kind of funny because the PBS network at the time said, a mythologist? An 84 year old mythologist? Moyers, are you losing it? They didn’t think there would be much interest.

GS: Didn’t sound like a lot of sizzle at first.

BSF: No, a six part series on an aging mythologist didn’t sound like great television. So I served as series consultant on that, and helped both to edit and did the television Time book, which led to three other projects with Moyers. Those were great fun, really a wonderful opportunity.

GS: Did you interact much with Campbell himself?

BSF: Yes, I did all the pre-interviews, so I did the briefing book. I had a lot of fun with Campbell , we would start talking and not stop.

GS: It sounds like you’ve had four or five people’s fun in life.

BSF: Certainly more than my fair share.

GS: You have collaborated with on a book called Presence. Talk about what you mean by that and where you’re going with it.

BSF: Otto Scharmer and Joseph Jaworski came up with what they called a U theory. They had a grant to go around talking to all the creative people they could think of, I think about 120. They began then to talk between themselves about what is it that all of these people had in common? It seemed that they all had in common, first, a period of great observance. They would observe things very finely. Then there would be something to emerge, you can say from the unconscious, if you were being Jungian. And then there was rapid prototyping which would lead you back into the circle of observing, emerging, and then back to prototyping. Presence is really what we call the bottom of the U. If you imagine this as a U, at the very bottom, when you are with a creative group and a great idea emerges, it emerges as if from the future and not from any one person’s brain. We call that state of being which allows that emergence to occur, Presence. Different experiments have been done with this now, and different settings of groups. One of the things it requires is for you to leave your ego at the door. If you’re going to be in a group which is fully present, with no separation due to egos, there can’t be that kind of defensiveness and chip on the shoulder that sometimes egos have. So it really helps, when a group of highly creative leaders are doing this U work, if they have some other type of discipline, whether it’s meditation or yoga or some type of discipline that allows them to take off their egos.

GS: Presence is spoken of by Eckhart Tolle.

BSF: Yes, I certainly had never heard of him before we did this book Presence. It’s kind of synchronistic that suddenly comes his book.

GS: Synchronicity is. I’ve always found it fascinating how big ideas do seem to happen simultaneously to many people.

BSF: Yes, and even the same words.

GS: Oftentimes. If not the same words, certainly the same meaning. So go into more detail on what is in the book.

BSF: It’s a conversation amongst the four of us, beginning with what we call, from having read an article by someone who’s name I can’t call up in the moment, the Requiem Scenario. Often people change their lives when they know they are about to die. Would human beings change their lives if they really thought the species might die? And at that starting point, we asked the question, “What would it take for large scale change to occur in the world?” That’s what the rest of the book is about.

GS: Did you come to conclusions?

BSF: The best we could do, of course, is this process, whereby this can happen. Which is groups together going through the U Process, although they don’t have to call it that. But coming from observing and setting aside their former models, and then allowing the future that ... it’s a certain kind of listening ... then allowing the future to emerge within the group, so that you actually come up with ideas you never would have had before.

GS: Talk about what you’re finding most important to communicate.

BSF: Communication is always two way, even if you’re doing all the talking. So what’s most important to communicate is what people can listen to at any given time. Lately, I’ve been speaking a lot about a theory I had some years ago that I imbedded in scenarios for the future of the world’s environment, that I did for the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in Geneva, which is something I call the economic myth. The reason I’ve been talking a lot about it lately is that it seems to me that we are emerging into the possibility of a new myth, a new global myth. Teh economic myth is the first truly global myth. We’re emerging into one that you can call the environmental or ecological myth. It comes out of the interconnectedness and the global nature of the economic myth, but has a different value system to it. It’s not aim, it’s not growth, but health. So I’m writing scenarios now with a group at Oxford on the post-global financial world. There are two worlds, when you write scenarios, there are at least two futures, and one of them I’m calling growth and the other one I’m calling health. That’s what I find is important to bring up now, the possibility of going from a world economy based on growth to one based on health.

GS: What do you think the prospects are for that?

BSF: It’s always two steps forward, one step back. I think it’s pretty good that consciousness has changed. I can actually talk about this to a lot of groups and they get it.

GS: In a time like this, when you’ve had this apparent collapse, it makes things possible that weren’t before, that’s for sure. People are willing to entertain notions that they weren’t previously.

BSF: And the old gods have fallen, the old assumptions, the old stories have changed. I think that there’s great possibility there.

GS: It seems that we’re in one of those fascinating times. There’s so much doom and gloom out there that there’s almost unprecedented opportunity.

BSF: It’s times like these, not times of ease and self-satisfaction, that real change is possible.

GS: I’ve always said that I wanted to sit down with whoever decided that we learn the most through times of hardship.

BSF: As the old story goes, we’re the suffering planet. A lot of people here are the slow learners.

GS: I’m guessing that may be so. I’m finding it important for you to have the opportunity to say to our readers whatever it is that you want them to know, to think about, to be focusing on.

BSF: Well, as I say, the main thing is the opportunity we have now, to move from our global economic myth into a new myth. And by myth, I don’t mean something untrue, I mean a large story that people accept as the truth without analyzing too much, as we’ve accepted the economic myth for many years.

GS: I find it interesting that people don’t seem to realize that it’s pretty much all data.

BSF: The myth?

GS: The economic system itself. People think it’s real.

BSF: Well, people always think their stories are real. There have been lots of myths in the different periods of the West and this has been the one for the last couple of centuries. It’s interesting to see potentially something new emerging. It’s exciting.

GS: You think we will be able to wean off the growth model to the health model.

BSF: I’m a scenarist, not a forecaster. So I can do it either way. In one we just fix the economy by going back to what we knew. And in the other we see the deep interconnectedness between the systems of ecological health and the systems of financial health. And there’s some awareness of that emerging. To reach a critical mass may take a while longer, but certainly people are talking and the assumptions are quite different from even, say, twenty years ago.

GS: What a time to be here.

BSF: Absolutely.

GS: You’re a real example of what a toy store of a lifetime this can be.

BSF: Couldn’t have happened in any other decades that I can think of.

GS: I can’t think of another time to be alive on the planet. People not understanding have a tendency to say that things are so bad they’ve never been worse. No, they’ve never been better.

BSF: Just a little dip into history will tell you that.

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Betty Sue Flowers is the keynote speaker for Awareness into Action: The Power of Living and Working as One. This June 27th conference is for individuals and organizations interested in the power of human unity. See Pulse Calendar and ad for further information.

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