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The first in a series of three essays on coherence and group processes
Cohere+
29.5.2025
I HATE GROUP PROCESSES.
I’m an introvert by nature. As an empath, I feel a multitude of things all at once, but I’m not great at translating what I sense on the spot. Group processes tend to overwhelm me. I sense the tensions, the awkwardness, the intentions, but also the power-moves. At the same time – damn – when a group lands in real coherence, it can be incredibly rewarding.
Back in 2013, after an Integral Theory Conference in the US, a group of friends and I were frustrated with the ‘developmental agenda’ and were inspired to do things differently. With my friends Mushin Schilling from Berlin and Bonnitta Roy from Connecticut we came up with an enticing idea: let’s meet with a group of people who are also curious about what a group process can do, with not much of an agenda, not much structure, and little to no facilitation. Let’s look into finding new answers, new questions.
We’d invite the right people. People who’ve done their homework. Integral thinkers who understand complex concepts. Change practitioners who’ve been around the block. People who can differentiate between schools of thought, take multiple perspectives and distinguish between the self and the experience the self is having in this moment.
Wouldn’t it be fun to get this much "horsepower" – intellectual, spiritual, relational – in one room and see what we could come up with as a group? Our intention: exploration into the power of group and process. We were after new ideas – and, ultimately, new categories of ideas.
So we met at Bonnie’s place in Alderlore, Connecticut, USA as a group of twenty curious people from all over the world. For three days, we stabbed at the beast, not even knowing what kind of beast it was. We let the process loose on itself. Just before we were ready to admit failure, on the afternoon of day three, the process gelled and we got somewhere. Up until that moment? Pure agony. My worst nightmare confirmed.
2013 Gathering at Alderlore
What I’d never experienced before: my body picking up all the incongruencies, tactics, pretence and power moves in the room as pain. Worse, it was a transpersonal pain, so I couldn’t even do “own it away”. All I could do was mirror it back to the group, like a weather report. Pain, interest, confusion, searching, exploring, confusion, pain, anger, more anger – relief.
We finally got to a place of real coherence, despite all our best efforts to get there. We threw everything at it: willpower, exercises, “follow my lead”, appeals to “come from Source”, desperate attempts to create coherence, power moves, withdrawal, theory downloads, emotional outbursts, complaining, chanting, facilitation, no facilitation. Looking back, all of it just prolonged the process.
Most people left on Monday. My friend Mushin (Mushin Schilling) and I stayed with Bonnie. We had to know what the hell hit us. We had the best intentions. No priming, no heavy-handed facilitation, brilliant people in the room. So why did it go so wrong for so long?
Digging into the process during the 2013 gathering
Over the next few days, we did the most generative digging, the best post-mortem ever. We went deeply into the nature of group processes, exploring emergent properties such as coherence and what actually enables insight to emerge. So much became clear in hindsight, things we just couldn’t see in real-time. Still today, I draw on the emerging wisdom from those days with Bonnie and Mushin.
Here are some of our findings.
Group processes have distinct phases
We saw the typical phases of a group process (outlined in more detail in Cohering the Integral We-Space: A We-Space Ecology):
Politeness – The phase where social conventions rule, and everyone avoids conflict.
Authentic chaos – The rebellion against politeness. Social dynamics and power plays surface, people get uncomfortable, and the lack of structure starts to bite. Attempts to fix or facilitate the chaos too soon only drag it out (see also Scott M. Peck).
Silence – A moment of surrender. The burnout after trying to control the process. A really strange and new space. Willingness to let go of the purpose. Feels like failure.
Authentic clarity – The fog begins to lift. It starts with sensory clarity—the social self steps back, and boundaries blur. An extraordinarily ordinary space. This can deepen into emotional, intersubjective, and conceptual clarity. This is where coherence starts to set in.
Emergence – From clarity, new insights and possibilities arise organically.
The dust settles
One thing has become obvious: emergence and full participation don’t happen without navigating the authentic chaos phase. The only way to navigate it is going through it, hopefully with as little resistance to the inherent discomfort as possible. Efforts to skip, short-cut or over-control this phase leads tend only to prolong the chaos phase. Smart facilitation of the “rapids” (such as trying to smooth out resistance, explain concepts to the group, offering to heal somebody who seems hurt, have a meditation because there is too much tension or even aggression in the room) all leads to a much shallower process, or a predictable outcome colored by the facilitator’s preference and the facilitation techniques used. In these scenarios, nothing truly new emerges.
The most rewarding stages of the process are indeed when the dust settles and clarity sets in. There are no filters anymore of any kind – sensory, cultural, conceptual, or emotional. All have been “burned out” in the endothermic chaos phase. This is the most extraordinary, clear space to sit in with others. Paradoxically, this is, at the same time, the most ordinary space ever, since you see things just as they are. It is filterless. There is no perceiving or acting through any identity: the ‘body-mind drop’. It is extraordinary only because we hardly ever spend time in this clarity.
In our case, the sense of coherence was palpable for the first time. Language and grammar shifted, pronouns moved from I to it, to we. I’d felt that kind of coherence before in nature, in a forest, hanging out with animals, with family, with close friends – but never like this, in a group of strangers.
Combined with that clarity, it felt like a crack wide open, the one where the light gets in. Light in the form of new ideas, new perspectives, new concepts. One feels unobstructed by anything already ‘known’, by resistance, by pattern entrainment. It’s a truly innovative space, and it feels like a blessing.
This is the exquisite context you can milk for ideas and in which you can witness emergence in real-time. Ideas are born, not from brainstorming or clever frameworks, but from the depth and resonance of shared clarity. The filters – emotional, conceptual, cultural, sensory – are gone, or, if there, at least in service to something greater than the individual.
And now, in that rare clarity, we can drop any question into the resonant field: how to address climate change on a regional level? What about monetary systems? Organisational stuckness? Polarisation? Artificial intelligence? We can feel the group orient around the question, not from opinion, not from theory, but from a kind of collective seeing.
The diversity in the room – people from all walks of life, cultures, disciplines, and continents – now becomes a real asset. It nurtures a kind of holographic intelligence. We’re no longer talking at each other or over each other. The filters have dropped. The signal is clean.
In this space, we can tap into – for lack of a better word – mass consciousness. We begin to sense how the world works, what solutions are crystallising, and what might be wanted tomorrow. It’s extraordinary and exquisite: a shared capacity to recognise things as they are.
Start-ups are born here.
What’s next?
Just as the dust settled and clarity set in, another set of questions emerged. If coherence is so elusive, yet unmistakable when it arrives, how do we tell it apart from other group phenomena? From cohesion? From just feeling good together? From processes that seem to work, but actually short-circuit what wants to emerge?
What followed was a deeper inquiry which looked not only at what worked but at the traps we fall into: mistaking structure for substance, method for meaning, or cohesion for coherence. The next essay will take you into some of these finer distinctions - some messy, ambivalent, but also necessary to name if we care about true emergence. Stay tuned.
(Bonnitta was host for several group sessions over the years at her retreat center in Alderlore, Connecticut, USA. Our first encounter was in 2012. Bonnitta hosts Collective Insight Practices for groups who are experimenting with new ways of being)
**This is the first of a series of three essays that Anne will contribute to Emerge over the coming weeks, as part of our exploration of coherence in the context of the Erasmus+ research project Cohere+.
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.
