WHAT WE DO

At Emergence we are committed to supporting public sector and not-for-profit organisations and their leaders as they seek to create public value by tackling complex, adaptive challenges and opportunities.

With this in mind we help people in organisations:

• Meet and talk about the things that are most important to their work.
• Discover what they need to know, when they need to know it.
• Talk about what they know.
• Connect, collaborate, partner and co-create.
• Take joint action (do things together in a co-ordinated way).
• Make sense of what is happening in a particular situation
• Take responsive, effective and timely action
• Create new ways of thinking, acting and working
• Negotiate the way forward
• “Find their way about” in complex and paradoxical situations
• Improvise their way forward
• Work out where to go and what to do next
• Notice the patterns in how they are talking about their work and practices and identify what they enable/constrain
• Translate what they know into new and different contexts
• Transform their ways of knowing, acting and being in response to new and different circumstances.
• Collaboratively and discursively construct the tasks, solutions, visions, breakdowns, interventions and innovations that make up their work.

As you can see these are not definitive statements, in the form of outcomes, for example, but rather evocative suggestions that are meant to convey something of the approach, as well as some sense of what might occur as a result of working together.

We think that what makes what we do somewhat unique is that we strive to do our work “from within” the experience people have of their work and their practices of leading and managing.

Sometimes what we do looks like conventional coaching, facilitation or consulting, but the stance we take is non-idealistic and not theory-based. In other words, we don’t come with a particular approach in mind and try to apply it to the situation, nor do we identify an “ideal” way of working and then seek to have organisational action and behaviour conform to that ideal. What we do is always tailored to circumstances and situations especially when conventional, known solutions and ways of working are no longer effective and a more open-ended, improvisational and exploratory approach seems to be needed.

We see our role in these circumstances as a kind of combination of hosting, co-creating, and catalyzing. We work with people to:

• Host meetings and conversations that matter;
• Co-create new understandings about their work and the changing contexts within which it is taking place;
• Catalyse new thinking (often about very familiar things) and new, improvisational and experimental action.

At the same time we are constantly on the lookout for ways to share what we know about working differently “from within” unique situations and circumstances and a dynamic set of relationships.

We have the capability, experience and technologies necessary to operate across the full spectrum and can work with individuals, groups and teams, whole organisations and communities.

For more information about how we work please follow the links below:

Executive coaching

Facilitation

Emergent action inquiry

Strategic planning and policy development

“Embedded” consulting

Alternatively, for a confidential discussion about your needs, please email or call Phillip Bonser.

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