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Facilitate as the sky

April 28, 2006 By Facilitation, Organization, Practice

SUn and clouds above the Strait of Georgia

Sun and clouds above the Strait of Georgia

I was listening to this podcast this morning, a conversation between Krista Tippet and John Polkinghorne regarding the marriage of quantum physics and religion (which incidently is a subject Ken Wilber has also taken on recently in a podcast). It is an excellent conversation and I found myself grooving along with the theme of the universe as both predictable to some extent and unpredictable at the same time. Polkinhorne makes the analogy with clocks and clouds, saying that the sun rises and sets and we can predict when that will happen using Newtonian physics (and clocks), and also there is much uncertainly in the world, which he calls “clouds:” unpredictable possibility, structure on the edge of chaos and order.

My mind got busy and I started thinking about how peering into the sky, one can see this all the time. The sun, stars, moon and planets that we see in the sky can be predicted and clocked. The clouds that move across them are full of potential and beauty and complexity and there is no way we can account for or predict the specific form of any of them.

And then I began to notcie the sky itself – clear, transparent, irrelevent to both the objects and the clouds and yet the medium in which both exist, and I began to think that this is a good model for thinking about facilitation. As facilitators we hold space for both order and chaos to play at the same time. We are barely noticable when we are working well, and when people gaze into our container they see only the play of clouds or the precise edges of stars and moon, and forget that they are also looking at the sky itself.
Facilitating as sky means opening THAT big and inviting both clouds and sun to play with one another and to admit the possibility for amazing and astonishing beauty to arise from their coexistence.   It is the essence of holding space in chaordic process.