Emergence International

Yesterday I happened to come across this statement in an abstract for a conference paper:

“… ‘messiness’ can be seen as problematic when viewed through the lens of more traditional governance processes. Looked at differently, however, it reveals a level of richness that can fuel innovation, enthusiasm and commitment if we design processes specifically to harness that energy – in essence, if we put the ‘messiness’ at the heart of the conversation.”

Trudi Lang and Lynn Allen

So how do we put the “messiness” at the centre of the conversation?

Here are some of the ideas and approaches that I have been finding helpful. They certainly don’t constitute a “method” or even a methodology. They are more like a collection of “resources” I draw on that direct my attention to aspects of situations that more linear approaches may cause me to miss seeing. In effect they are becoming part of my broader approach to sensing or noticing what’s going on in organisational contexts. They are in no particular order!

• These days I pay a lot more attention to how I am feeling, both physically and emotionally as I engage in conversations about the messiness. I find that these are often signs that there is something going on in the conversation that I need to be more aware of or pay closer attention to.
• As a consequence I am also much more likely to articulate the feeling I have. In a conversation last week one of the people I’m working with referred to a feeling of “weirdness” in particular conversational settings. Maybe wisely they didn’t articulate that feeling at the time nonetheless my experience is that doing so can often open up a new direction in conversations that may not have arisen otherwise. Of course it is also possible that people just look at you strangely when you say that something feels weird about this!
  I try to listen for patterns and themes in conversation – repetition of words and phrases are often the first clue but it could equally be the use of a range of words and phrases all in relation to a particular topic – what I’m really trying to get a feel for is how people’s sense of what’s going on is being framed by the language that’s being used.
• These days I have a stronger sense that the present moment is something I can be in for more than just an instant. I no longer see the present as just an instant or point in time between the past and the present but rather as something that endures for a while, that can, in a way, be experienced as the place and time in which our “senses” of the past and present are created and re-created in the light of today’s issues and concerns. This is tricky to put into words but as I sit at my desk the present for me is not just the instant that I have paused to think about the sentence I am now writing but in fact a “landscape” that is alive with many things: my reason for writing, its connection into the work I am doing, the thinking I have done over the past few years, my sense of connection to the “audience” who might read this and my anticipation of how they might respond. It is also alive with my awareness of where I am sitting, what I can see out the window, my physical state and my relationship to the tools of my practice: computer, phone – will it ring and disturb me, will I answer it if it does? – and the environment in which I am fortunate to live and work. So to take this point a little further – these days when I am working with clients and we are engaged in a particular conversation I have a much more powerful sense of that conversation sitting in a landscape of something that is developing or becoming. I have a sense of this conversation’s connection to a future that we are in the process of creating but which we cannot describe in detail.
• Last, but certainly not least, nowadays I have a much more powerful interest in the “stories” that people tell and use as their way of conveying their knowledge about situations and the dynamics that are at play in them. Central to this is an increasing alertness to when these stories are backward looking (retrospective), forward looking (prospective) or fragmentary observations about the now. Typically retrospective and prospective stories tend to have more structure to them and represent a more “ordered” view of how things were or how they ought to be in the future. In contrast it is the fragmentary stories that float around in the “landscape of now” that often provide useful clues as to what themes and more ordered narratives are beginning to emerge.

For me these are all “resources” that are in fact familiar to us. We use them in our everyday relating with one another. It’s just that we no longer need to do so consciously. They are, as the philosopher Wittgenstein put it “hidden in plain sight.” In my view rediscovering these and other fundamental resources we use to relate and respond to one another as we continuously work out what action we will take next makes being caught up in the “messiness” much less daunting and much more like real life.

”…  in our interactions, we do not experience ourselves as living and acting in a neutral space of simply inert physical objects. As living, embodied beings, we can, at each moment in our interactions with the others and othernesses around us, not only ‘go out to meet them’, so to speak, with the appropriate anticipations and expectations at the ready, but we can also have an evaluative and anticipatory sense of ‘where’ we are with them, and of ‘where next’ we might go with them – that is, we can have a shaped and vectored sense of how we are placed and how things are going for us in what we might call “the landscape of now.””

John Shotter (2009)

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