Holding Onto the Emergent

Since February 2022, the SheEO and GreaterThan teams have been meeting biweekly to learn, play, and journey together. We have been practicing processes for collaboration and space holding and exploring ways to bring our gifts together to support each other.

GreaterThan is a collective of experienced practitioners, coaches, network weavers, product builders, experimenters, space holders, and alchemists that is supporting companies, communities, networks and individuals in new ways of organizing.

Partner and co-owner of GreaterThan, Susan Basterfield, is an Activator in New Zealand, and also a founding member of Enspiral, whose handbook was a source of inspiration for our Community Tealprint. Our organization operates with a self-managing, distributed leadership model, and are deeply inspired by GreaterThan and Enspiral’s work.

As we move towards enabling community-led learning circles and gatherings, we will be working with GreaterThan to offer hosting/facilitation training sessions and weekly practice spaces for community members who will be leading future gatherings.

Here’s a reflection shared by Activator Moira Were after a recent session with the GreaterThan team…

The clouds in the sky reflected on the surface of the Murray River somewhere near Renmark in South Australia. Apparently, Renmark refers to a local Erawirung word meaning “red mud”.

As we embarked on a conversation about what kind of ceremony or indeed ceremonies we might have to farewell our old name and welcome in a new one, I thought about this photo I had taken a few years ago. It came to mind because of the reflection in the water and how the river continues to flow regardless of what is reflected in it and how after dusk comes night and after night comes dawn and then day.

As I was in the conversation it was an opportunity to practice some of the lessons from the Greater Than team. With that in mind and the conversation coming to a close for this first discussion, I prompted one of the SheEO team, Nat to help us close out. This was done privately in the chat. Nat formed a question about what had we noticed emerging in our conversation. This question was a veritable harvest!

Some themes emerged:

• How we held each other with ease
• That we had all we needed to keep being in conversation
• Rituals from our diverse cultural heritages were in the mix
• There is a beating heart that continues in all processes
• Grief, gratitude and the spaces in-between hold us

Holding onto the emergent, we are in a process of be-coming, be-tween and be-going. Just like the clouds.