“The planning process had its own rhythm, and what emerged began to move in ways that felt alive and organic.” – Julia Heiroth

With these words, Julia was describing the collaborative process that led to a trailblazing 2-day conference for the Yukon tourism sector, though it could have been for people in any context. I had written about the experience in an article called The Courage to Host Regeneration. But I hadn’t named this quality of organic emergence. It seemed too nuanced to include as one detail among half a dozen I was sharing as guidance and encouragement to those who feel called to host inspired, purposeful gatherings.

Reading her words in response to the article, though, I again felt the power and importance of this way of working. If my article had described the tending of a garden and the harvest that may result, Julia was pointing to the very soil that holds and enables it all. She was naming the invisible realm that our dominant, mechanistic worldview overlooks – denies, even – in its push to plan and control. And we can well take note of how that singular approach is working out for us, as we plan and control our way to the edge of extinction.

Likewise, in the wild rush to wave the flag of regeneration in tourism, agriculture, leadership and other contexts, I don’t always find recognition of this ground and depth.

What I believe many don’t yet realize, and where the real courage comes in, is this:

If we are to host regeneration in our organizations and communities, then we must allow ourselves to be hosted by life’s emergence.

Exploring emergence

As I reflected on a possible theme for an online “Community Campfire” I hosted earlier this week, this deeper practice and experience of emergence was what I most wanted to explore.

We likely wouldn’t be breaking new ground: there are many modern guides, like Joanna Macy with “The Work That Reconnects” and Otto Scharmer with “Presencing,” along with centuries of reflective spiritual traditions and millennia of discernment practices from the world’s Indigenous cultures. Each of these offers wise alternatives to rigid planning and control.

Still, through our conversation, I felt that we might connect more deeply with our own experiences of emergent process and in that way find more courage to draw on its unseen depths.

The need for courage

Crafting the Campfire invitation, I was intrigued to notice that word come up again: “courage.”

It turned out to be fully justified. In an initial sharing around the “fire” on the call, each person spoke with open-hearted yearning for a world more aligned with life’s creative flow. And each also spoke of the challenges we face, of how hard this work of somehow serving life can be, how “terrifying and depressing” and “weary” it feels to work in “spaces where there is no emergence.” “Maybe these are the places that need this work the most…” one of us offered, clearly not convinced.

In our exchanged stories, the experience of emergence was often a surprise. Several spoke of being unexpectedly forced to let go of planning and control. “It’s happened when I’ve hit a wall,” shared one woman. “Being willing to walk away opened up new possibilities.”

But do we have to wait to hit a wall, only to discover – bruised and battered – that it was actually a door? Surely we can recognize the stuckness before impact and adjust our approach.

The experience of flow

Indeed, one participant told just such a story. It started with a gathering weighted down by hierarchical power dynamics and a rigid focus on a single problem-solving method, without much success. But then the person with disproportionate power had to leave. Uncharacteristically, the group decided to go for a walk. “I’m not sure who initiated it,” our campfire storyteller recalled (and isn’t that so often the case with emergence?). As they walked, they talked without specific focus, eventually finding themselves gathered in a circle on a hill. “We slowed down, gave ourselves spaciousness. We let the work work us.” It felt kind of rebellious, she confessed (and I wondered if that might be a special category of fertile condition for emergence). “We came back hugging.” And more than that, they came back with clear inspiration. “The project leader was in awe, in tears, actually. She said: ‘I’ve been stuck on this for months, with just the same ideas over and over again.’” And now she had a way forward.

What I take from this story is not that every meeting should involve an aimless walk, or that every problem can be solved in this way.

Instead, what I take away from this story and my own experience is that:

• There is unforeseeable, invaluable insight, energy and inspiration available, beyond our planning and control and beyond our individual intellect alone, no matter how brilliant any of us may be.
• A walk is one among countless methods to access such collective intelligence.
• What we are accessingis life itself in all its complexity and all its urge and regenerative ability to thrive.
• What is emergingis the potential that is waiting to be expressed through us and through the particular circumstances we find ourselves in.
• We can open up to this reality as a worldview, a strategy, a growing collection of methods, and a way of being and becoming through our work and in the world.

What I see in story after story in every conceivable context is that this approach so often feels better and works better.

Why, then, isn’t it more widespread? Why should so much courage and struggle be required? Why should I hear so much yearning and even grief among those on the call? In this growing movement around regeneration, I’ve noticed that it’s almost a rite of passage to have your heart broken as something beautiful and emergent, cultivated with immense care, is thoughtlessly killed by those who can’t see it.

Obstacles to emergence

What most often gets in the way, in my experience, is the dominant mechanistic paradigm, with its assertion that everything and everyone in an organization (and in life!) can and should be tightly controlled, like so many levers on a machine. According to that worldview, our role is either to manage or be managed in service of a knowable solution that can be implemented like a simple production line. And this is certainly true for some aspects of our work – just not the living aspects.

What I have also seen is that if someone hasn’t experienced the flow and effectiveness of emergent process, they likely can’t even imagine it. For these people, there is no conceivable alternative to the tightly managed, leader-driven meeting and change management agenda. Anything else would be irresponsible, undisciplined, with an unnecessarily indirect path to success.

I’ve also encountered many whose scope of possibility and sense of what is at stake is too narrow, and so these alternative, emergent approaches seem like too much trouble. Or the fear is that “we might alienate people.” But as I wrote in an article called Alien Nation and the Need for Brace Spaces:

“When I hear groups express the fear of alienating some members, I often wonder about the corresponding risk of alienating those who silently crave the very new approaches and topics that are thought to be too risky. Sticking to safety and the status quo is not a guarantee that no one will be alienated. What creative impulse is stifled – or alienated – by accommodating only the way things have always been done?”

In perhaps the most significant obstacle of all, if your narrative of self worth is grounded in having all the answers and controlling all the process, then what I’m describing will be an existential threat.

Growing openness

Fortunately, practices for working with emergence are growing more commonplace, enabling more of us to experience and imagine what is possible.

At the same time, the many intractable crises we face are forcing more of us to question the dominant worldview.

The result, as I wrote elsewhere, is that:

“More and more people are recognizing that an organization is not a static [machine to be controlled] but a dynamic, ever-evolving pattern of interactions. It is people and matter in a state of transformation. What animates that pattern of interactions – and what enables ongoing transformation – is the life we bring to it. With this understanding, our concept of organizational leadership is evolving into stewardship: listening for what is needed; creating the fertile conditions for life to thrive; tending to the living [emergent] pattern of transformation.”

All of this is just as true in our communities as it is in our organizations.

I liken this process to firekeeping. “As a leader…we keep the fire but we don’t control it. Life is too complex for us to be able to predict or control the transformation. We can only tend to the fertile conditions for it to continue and evolve. When those conditions are in place – when the fire is burning brightly – life flows. Intelligence emerges. Creativity sparks. Joy shimmers.”

This is what I heard in the stories shared yesterday around the campfire (how appropriate!).

And this is how regeneration happens – through the focused cultivation of wisdom, creativity, collaboration and joy, shaped by the fullness of a system’s emergent intelligence.

Fertile conditions

So how do we do this? How do we allow ourselves to participate in life’s organic unfolding, in ways that are purposeful and effective?

These are some of the fertile conditions and courageous practices I noticed across our sharings on the call and in my own experience:

• Paying attention to the narratives that guide our thoughts and assumptions, that feed our courage or deplete it. “Letting modernity be composted in me and in the relational field,” as someone said poetically on the call  – modernity as a worldview that prioritizes speed, efficiency, and control above all else and at all costs.
• An intention to “make space for feeling and resonance to happen.” A space to “move toward a future that’s not bounded, trusting that well-intentioned people will create a future we all want to be part of. Not setting objectives, but allowing emergence with the intention of wanting to thrive.” This includes the spaciousness of time, knowing that time spent cultivating the conditions for emergence is rewarded with greater speed and effectiveness in the action that follows.
• A shared commitment to convergent purpose, something more important than our fear of new narratives, new approaches and new identities, something that holds us together through the discomfort of uncertainty.
• A growing repertoire of skilful practices for dialogue, discernment and creativity, including the aimless walk outside.
• The confidence to be humble, to be genuinely curious, and to “sit with what happens even if it’s messy and uncomfortable.” Inviting in the “fire and messiness and playfulness.” “Embracing failure, being willing to make mistakes.”
• An openness to multiple sources of intelligence, including our bodies, the arts, nature and intuition.
• Attention to relationship, to “safety and how we welcome each other in the space. How we build trust [through] deep listening, space holding, witnessing. It needs to be practiced.” Not as nice-to-have “soft skills” but as essential soil-building, as what one brilliant article calls “structural capacity.”
• Finding others, and finding courage in each other. “I’m left with the clear sense of how much we need each other for this kind of work,” shared one campfire participant.

This practice of allowing ourselves to be hosted – to be shaped and informed – by emergence is more than a planning or facilitation method. It’s a worldview that sees life everywhere. It’s a way of being and becoming in the world, with curiosity, care, trust, patience and commitment to enabling thrivability. Ultimately, it’s a practice of healing ourselves, each other and the world. This is how every meeting, every project, every interaction can be crafted as a practice ground for a more thrivable world.

“Imagine if we could live this way every day,” one person shared at the end of the campfire, with cautious excitement at the possibility.

We can and we must.