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IN THE FIRST TWO ARTICLES OF THIS SERIES, I explored transformative participative group processes, what they can make possible and where they can lead into tricky terrain.
In Chasing Coherence, I explored how coherence is not about agreement or harmony, but about an emergent resonance that arises when people are willing to stay with difference and complexity. It is a field quality, not a consensus or a constructed alignment. Coherence appears as an emergent property when a group can hold tension, work with ambiguity, and allow something larger than individual agendas to surface. It is less about fixing or achieving, and more about cultivating the conditions where clarity, insight, and new patterns can emerge.
In The Trouble with Participative Processes, I looked at how easy it is to fall into traps that prevent coherence from forming (belonging traps, fixing traps, drama traps, and others). Participative methods, while powerful, can become self-referential if they overemphasise process for its own sake or shy away from discomfort. True participative work requires courage to stay with chaos and resist premature closure or the urge to control, steer, rescue or heal.
This article now takes a step further. While coherence can be transformative in a contained group setting, scaling that quality into larger collectives or systems requires a different lens. The question shifts from “How do we create coherence in the room?” to “How do we work with the complex, often fragmented landscape of meaning and interaction across a wider ecology?”
After coherence, some ways forward
In the previous articles, I stopped at the threshold of coherence but didn’t explore what happens once a group has landed there.
Coherence, that emergent sense of clarity and flow, is a powerful experience, yet it is not an end in itself. It opens doors. What comes after depends on how the group chooses to continue.
One pathis to take the insights and run with them. The stage of coherence comes with novel ideas about anything you focus the light of sensory clarity on. This is harvest space, easily milked for novelty. Satisfied, you leave inspired, and perhaps, spin out a project, co-found a start-up, or design a new workshop with a few others. You stay in touch, you learn, and you carry this experience with you. This experience stays with you – not just the ideas, but the embodied memory of what’s possible when things truly land. You will always have this feeling reference point. Heads up: this can also spoil you to the point where you can no longer tolerate mediocre facilitation.
Another way forward is to form a community. You have been through a bumpy ride with the others. Judgements have been burnt away, and you realise you actually like those other mad people. You form a team, and something like a community of practice begins to take shape for these methods. You create a common language; you might recruit others. Now, there is another phase shift somewhere along the way: Over time, coherence fades into the background, and a healthy cohesion is mixed in. Other values may take precedence now, like sharing views and being together, like-minded. You start to form habits for how to be together. Over time, this generates familiarity, common values, and shared language. This can create a powerful sense of belonging. Just be aware if it turns sticky.
A third optionis to stay in inquiry mode.You have become curious, asking: What else is possible? This means coming back for more process, deeper insight. And this means doing something slightly counterintuitive: disturbing the system again, deliberately.
It doesn’t mean starting over from zero. The group’s ability to navigate the shallows and the traps, their capacity for holding the process ‘despite it’ and for reaching coherence have already been trained.
And still, if you want to keep tapping that deeper field of clarity and emergence, you need to reintroduce difference again. Rattle the stage, reintroduce diversity. Invite different voices, fresh perspectives, and look at other, deeper challenges.
Each cycle brings new coherence – richer, sharper, more layered, more fun. Repeat until satisfied.
This is an incredibly rewarding mode. For me, it brought an incredible amount of life wisdom and insights through many group processes – four of them at Alderlore with Bonnie and Mushin – and in the time afterwards in other places, with other groups.
However, on a parallel track, I kept wondering. How can we possibly rely on individual growth or on group processes for wider change?
Beyond the Container into the Wild
All three paths are valid and rewarding in their own right. Yet none of them, on their own, create transformation at scale. They remain bound to the container – the place, the specific group, the shared moment in time. To reach larger collectives or systems, we need to step out of the container and into the wild.
Group processes, as rewarding and powerful as they are, hit their limits when we look toward systemic change. Two major constraints stand out.
First, the input costs are high: energy, attention, discipline, and a willingness to engage deeply. Not every context can sustain that.
Second – and more fundamentally – group processes don’t scale very well. You can’t simply do such a process in a larger, diffuse collective.
Scaling: From Individual to Group to Collective …
…doesn’t work, at least not linearly.
It’s easy to assume that transformation scales in linear ascension – first the individual, then the group, and then the collective. But this is a false friend. The shift from individual to group already involves a phase change: a group process operates under its own dynamics and logics: Individuals develop, collectives evolve (Roy & Trudel 2011). Collective change is, by its very nature, an ecological process. They operate by different principles.
You can’t add up individual transformations and expect a system to shift. This, along with the developmental bias, remains one of the most persistent misunderstandings in the change field and in many leadership programmes: the belief that a) change works linearly, in a mechanistic way, and that b) collective transformation is just the sum of changed individuals.
A few years ago, while exploring the German and Swiss markets, I interviewed with a company in the car manufacturing sector. They asked how I would allocate 100 consultancy hours for a merger. I laughed, refusing to step into the obvious trap of a reductionist answer. Later they called:
“Mrs Caspari, you see change as a process?”
“Yeeees…?”
“Then we can’t work with you.”
The next shift, from group to collective, is different again. A contained group has clear boundaries, a shared container, and curated conditions. The trust generated in a group process, the coherence-as-emergent-property of a well-held group can’t be rolled out by widening the scope to include a whole team, department, company, or neighborhood.
Scaling change requires a different lens, one that can work with the rich, complex, fragmented landscape beyond the contained room. The logic of a wider collective is ecological in a different sense – it requires working with patterns, flows, and attractors rather than with structured processes or shared intentions.
Landscape ecologies
The ecological approach has been the common thread in my work for nearly four decades: tracking the deeper substrates and systemic patterns that shape how things grow, connect, or come undone.
In landscape work, the starting point is always the current conditions and their potential for rewilding or harvesting – the soil, the exposure, the existing biodiversity. In human systems, the substrate and site conditions are more abstract, but the principle holds.
The starting points and boundary conditions of larger collectives are fundamentally different from those of a group coming together for exploring processes. A larger collective is diffuse. People come and go. They participate with varying levels of attention and commitment, and most of life happens in between the moments of gathering.
This is why, for example, the popular “law of two feet” in open space formats can sometimes be counterproductive to coherence or emergence, when participants simply leave when things get uncomfortable.
Moreover, in departments, organisations, neighbourhoods or cities, there is rarely a meaningful common denominator in terms of direction, unarticulated needs or explicit wants. The often-invoked pillars of “shared values” or “purpose” may be helpful, if they are allowed to show up as emergent properties, but are usually too coarse, too abstract or too prescribed to function as genuine common ground.
We are dealing with a richly textured and detailed ‘landscape of attitudes’, that includes convictions, behaviours, fears, frustrations, ideas, goals, and ways of making meaning – all shaped by the complexity, ambiguity, and tensions of everyday lived experience.
This diversity is not a problem; it’s what makes a system adaptive. But it does mean that rather than focusing on scaling up what works in small groups or with large top-down change initiatives, we might begin to look beneath the surface, to the underlying conditions that give rise to patterns of behaviour, resilience, or stuckness in collectives.
Reading the landscape through sense-making
To tend to a human ecology, we must first learn to read it. This is what we learned from Dave Snowden and his work, a thought leader in the field of applied complexity science and, luckily for us, a friend and mentor. His work introduced us to sense-making andanthro-complexity as vital ways to engage with change in larger collectives.
What first intrigued me about his work was this: when we ask differently, when we invite people to share descriptive accounts of their own lived experience, everyone can contribute. It opens the door to genuine collective sense-making. No one needs to be trained, changed, developed or told to change their values. This resonated with my growing discomfort around the question of scaling and the pervasive developmental bias we noticed alongside Bonnie and Mushin in much of integral thinking.
Sense-making, at its core, is how people orient themselves in the world – how they assign meaning to everyday experience in order to act. In complexity, it’s not about gaining full clarity. It’s about making just enough sense to make the next best step.
Dave’s methods of distributed ethnography, supported by the SenseMaker apphelp us stay close to what is actually happening in the system. By collecting micro-narratives – short, self-interpreted stories – we gain a textured map of lived experience across a human system. These fragments of frustration, insight, tension, or possibility, told and qualified in the language of those who live them, form a real-time understanding of the collective landscape.
SenseMaker® enables the gathering of large volumes of such narratives across diverse contexts. These fragments don’t produce abstract conclusions but reveal a textured, fine-grained “landscape of small noticings”. Within that landscape, patterns begin to show: emerging themes, tensions, outliers, and coherence forming in unexpected places.
We then use these narrative-based maps to design small, localised action portfolios. These are interventions that are not imposed from outside but respond directly to the contextual realities revealed by the stories. These actions can be tested safely, enabling us to learn with the system what is already working and what isn’t, long before committing resources to larger-scale initiatives.
Rather than generating a fixed plan, this gives us a strategic view made up of many local, contextualised action portfolios. These are not top-down interventions but small, adaptive responses and experiments that can be tested safely in context.
They help us learn with the system what is already working, what isn’t, and what might need to shift before committing to broader change efforts.
Over time, these small moves can shift constraints, alter interactions, and change conditions in ways that make new behaviours possible, without requiring any personal transformation. These openings are what we call “adjacent possibles” – areas of movement that exist just next to what is currently real.
What emerges is not a master plan but a strategic map of many contextualised action options. These interventions can shift constraints, conditions, or interactions in ways that allow new attractors to form and new behaviours to emerge – without requiring people to “change” in the conventional sense. We call these next-step opportunities within current realities the adjacent possibles.
This invites a different kind of inquiry:
What are people’s underlying, often unarticulated needs (not opinions)?
What patterns do we want more of? What is unexpected or surprising?
Which patterns might we dampen or disrupt?
Where is something already working, and how could we support it?
As Dave puts it: “What can we do tomorrow to have fewer stories like those – and more like these?”
This kind of mapping doesn’t aim for agreement or alignment. It’s about tracking where energy is gathering and adjusting accordingly. It opens up concrete possibilities, with small actions that can be strengthened, paused, reversed, or withdrawn. What emerges is a living picture of how and where to move next.
Change as the Sum Total of all Micro-Shifts
Small, rich interactions
Change does not happen by aligning everyone to a single plan, but through countless small interactions – in how people pay attention, engage, and participate differently.
People don’t change by being told what to become; they change when the nature of their relationships shifts. Change happens when the relational field around them shifts, when conditions change, when familiar patterns begin to lose coherence and when new patterns of behaviour begin to make more sense than the old ones. Change also takes root when the new path is less costly – socially, emotionally, or economically, when energy gradients are favorable.
Beneficial coherence
In complexity work, we don’t set fixed outcomes or goals. Instead, we describe the current terrain in enough fine-grained detail to see where movement is already possible – where energy is gathering and where people are open to something new.
From there, we make small, contextual nudges that support beneficial coherence – the spontaneous alignment that forms around local attractors.
Fun fact: Trying to go “holistic” with this approach makes little sense. No one can hold all viewpoints at this level of granularity. Nor should they. Nature itself optimises without any central intelligence or complete knowledge of the whole.
This is about cultivating the conditions for a system to respond, adapt, and self-organise. It’s a landscape ecology approach to change.
The role of granularity
Dave Snowden’s playful example of how to organise a children’s party illustrates this beautifully: success doesn’t come from a rigid plan but from setting enabling constraints and responding in real time to what emerges.
Coherent change arises from the micro-level – from the fine granularity of real interactions, not from big-picture frameworks. Most change programmes misunderstand this. They operate at too abstract a level, missing the subtle shifts that actually move the system. But when we pay attention at the right level, to the interactions themselves, we start working with what’s genuinely generative.
Two years ago, we watched a large, costly cultural change project for leaders in a car manufacturing company fail like the 23 initiatives before it. The metaphor they chose was “systems engineering.”
Learning from Nature
Nature offers plenty of examples: swarms, rhizomes, and mycelial networks all create order without central control or grand design. Termite mounds, for instance, emerge from countless local interactions – the final shape can’t be specified or engineered. Coherence shows up as regularities in recurring patterns, which can then be supported or amplified.
Emergent patterns must be spotted early. This is what determines whether a given vector – the directional momentum of change – is favourable or needs adjustment (Vector Theory of Change).
Micro-shifts all the way down
In complex systems, interactions, not individuals, are the smallest coherent units.
Change becomes visible, often in hindsight, as the cumulative effect of many micro-shifts of interactions in the relational field. These shifts are subtle adjustments in attention, expectation, or behaviour. They are contextual and non-linear. Sometimes they build gradually; sometimes they hit a tipping point, reshaping the whole field. Like changes in soil composition, they alter what can grow.
This approach propagates change through two mechanisms: amplifying beneficial patterns and disrupting entrenched assemblages. Recombination occurs between these local interactions. System-level shifts arise when enough micro-shifts begin to entangle and cohere.
This is where scale begins to emerge. Using SenseMaker®, we can map a narrative landscape across a large collective with the necessary fine granularity. We then work with the system, following what is already moving instead of forcing what can’t be moved. This saves energy and reduces resistance.
We’re not trying to yank the system in a predetermined direction but reading its current disposition and nudging where it is ready to shift. This makes change more sustainable, resilient, and elegant – and often far more affordable than top-down initiatives.
In this view, scale doesn’t come through replication or linear rollouts but through ecological responses. Dave Snowden summarises this well: “In a complex adaptive system, scaling works by decomposition to the smallest coherent unit and then recombination.” Think of how organic matter decomposes and becomes part of new life, or how DNA propagates. More mycelium than gears or cogs.
References & Links :
Baeck, Ria (2020): Collective Presencing: An emergent human capacity. Self-Published E-Book.
**This is the third of a series of three essays that Anne has contributed to Emerge over the last two months as part of our exploration of coherence in the context of the Erasmus+ research project Cohere+. In the Cohere+ project, we have used the SenseMaker App to determine if and when groups are falling out of coherence.
**Lead photograph courtesy of Anna Caspari
Words by Anne Caspari
Anne works in complexity coaching, transformation and sensemaking – exploring what works (or doesn’t) in relational systems. She tracks underlying patterns to see what can be shifted, relieved, released or rewilded.
