I don't love using Jeff Bezos as an example of anything virtuous, and the anecdote in this post may just be apocrophal, so let's treat it like that, but this is a useful quote:
A group that gathers but doesn’t know how to fight without ‘un-gathering’ won’t remain a group for long. A group that can’t disagree and commit will disagree and dissolve.
The point here is that "conflict preservation" is much more useful to a group than "conflict resolution" for most things. When clients ask me to help people come to "alignment" on things like the organization's vision or mission statement, they often talk about a river, with everyone travelling in the same direction. My response is often to unpack that image.
If "alignment" is like a river, let's really look at how a river flows. When you do you will see that healthy rivers flow slowly, and in many different directions. There are pools of still water, eddies that cause the flow to reverse itself, vertical upwellings, places of rapid flow and others where the flow is slow. And yet, everything is going in the same direction.
It's a question of scale. At fine levels of granularity, conflict and difference are critical. Held skillfully it can also create and sustain the relational capacity that can withstand times when the river goes over a waterfall. In those moments, relationships can come apart just when they are needed the most. Simmering conflict embedded in a reluctance to work with difference requires a tremendous amount of energy to later resolve.
It's a practice.
One of the projects I’m engaged in is a rigorous exploration of my own theory-informed facilitation and hosting practice. I have been keeping extensive field notes of my work, in a hand written journal, that contains observations about myself and the group I’m working with in real time. It is an effort to refine my practice along the lines of the triangle I’ve been working on, to notice deeply the ways in which Structure, Interactions and Design coalesce into a container. It is also becoming a practice of discerning how to modulate my influence in the emergence of a container through working more deliberately and precisely with constraints, in general to see what happens when the emergence of dialogic containers happens largely through the Structure <-> Interaction relationship. What does it look and feel like in real time to withdraw Design (including intention and intervention and my own attention to what is happening) as far as possible into the background.
I’ve been engaging in the project with an LLM (ChatGPT 5.6 sol, currently). I offer this LLM my field notes and I’m able to explore areas where my theory work encounters praxis. The LLM also has access to my blog archive so it has nearly 25 years of field notes about my facilitation practice, and theory at hand. I’m able to track long term threads in my thinking, how things have evolved and generate summary reports that help me see where my practice has been coherent with theory and where it isn’t. It has allowed me to develop new experiments in hosting and group work that are always aimed at helping groups use more of their capability and less of mine, but which are helping me to find a set of practices and heuristics for facilitating, teaching, hosting and coaching.
I call this experiment a Praxis Log. Every mot I have the LLM write a learning report that summarizes my chats and notes. I’ll start publishing blog posts based on these learning reports and Praxis logs at the end of the month. A monthly cadence for this work is about right. I’m appreciating having an LLM to track and engage with the material and help me see things I would otherwise miss. And then as always, blog readers and commenters help tremendously.
In addition to improving my work, I’m appreciating the method of keeping a praxis log and using it to refine both my theory and practice. So stay tuned for the first set of learnings.
Corina Enache îs fast become one of my "must read" writers. Her perspective and reflective capacity as practitioner is inspiring. Her deep understanding of story and narrative and her wealth of experience gives her lots of material from which to generate beautiful essays. And her generous engagement with commentators and connections is exemplary.
Her latest post is about "making rules you are willing to be bound by" and has a number of gems. I encourage you to read the full thing, because among other things it will probably change your mind about pirates. But if you are a person who works with groups, this story will land with you:
…the alarm rings, and the anxiety arrives on top of me before my feet are on the floor. Did I account for everything in the design? Is there enough time for all the topics? Can I do a good job?
And then we are in the conference room and it is about to start, serious men in a serious room, a tidy little chess game, and Anansi is somewhere at the back of my mind smiling, and I hear myself say, before we begin I want to draw your attention to this chair. A red plush chair at the back with a small bell on it, and it had taken me some time to find one. I want one of you to be our disrupter for the day. Your only job is to watch us, and any time you feel something is missing, that the energy has gone, that we are too boring or too structured, or you just feel we need disrupting, go and sit in that chair and ring the bell, and all of us will stop whatever we are doing and look at it and change it.
My colleague Jen Williams and I decided that we were going to try this. But it requires this of the host:
I could not free those men, dear reader, I could not make them pirates, nobody has ever freed anybody. What I could do was write one new obligation into the room and put it where I could not reach it. A chair, a bell, a named role, and a rule with teeth, which is that when it rings we stop, agreed in advance and binding on all of us including me. I could have built a hundred other things into that room. I could have kept the disruption in my own hands where it was safe and deployed it when I judged the moment right, and I did not, because smuggled freedom belongs to the smuggler, and a disruption I kept in my own hands and deployed at the clever moment would have been one more thing I was doing to them. The bell was for somebody else to ring and I put it at the back of the room in a red chair and gave it away before the day started. The agenda I had worked on for a week, the timing I was anxious about at six that morning, the whole careful structure that was the only thing standing between me and a room full of serious men deciding I was a strange woman, all of it surrendered in advance to whoever felt like walking to the back of the room. Written into the agreements, it was theirs, and I was under it with them…
Then I stopped caring whether anyone rang it, because the point was that for one day the room contained a thing a person could be, someone who stands up in front of his superiors and rings it, and that whoever saw that done would know it was survivable.
That, dear reader, is really what is asked of us.
We don’t actually “host emergence.” We host interactions and work with constraints that change what is possible. In human systems, interpretation matters too: how people, including facilitators, make sense of what is happening changes what happens next.
A group’s capability is related to its internal differences. Work with those and all kinds of capabilities can be revealed.