The Hope of Emergent Spaces
A few years ago as is our custom to this day, LeaderWise staff was engaging in cultural competence work. Being led by our own Okokon Udo, discussing the insightful book Sitting in the Fire by Arnold Mindell, one of Okokon’s mentors, we were seeking to understand more deeply the role of power and rank, and how conflict happens in the midst of group process. Like being hit with a baseball bat, I became aware of how I was inadvertently centering white supremacy culture during group formation processes. I realized the simple act of creating group norms, which we do to keep groups “safe,” can be laced with white privilege (making them decidedly unsafe for some people). For example, in white spaces in which conflict is happening, it’s common to create a norm around policing one’s tone (which can be disguised with words like “treat people with respect”). Different cultures engage conflict differently, and demanding conflict be done without raising voices centers white privilege and silences other cultures.
As a facilitator who is regularly designing opportunities for people to gather to do good hard work, I would naturally think about the container in which the work is happening. “Is it a safe space?” I ask myself. (But, can you make any space truly safe and expect good hard work to be done?) I further reflect, “Is it a brave space?” (But, brave for whom? Stepping in might be helpful to one person and yet trauma-inducing to another.) Finally, “can it be both safe and brave?” When that baseball bat hit and I woke to my facilitation style being potentially racist, biased, or oppressive to some, I started digging in. I’ve recently learned about an alternative to safe or brave space: emergent space. And so, these days, I’m asking myself, “Am I creating emergent space?”
What’s emergent space? According to the National Survivor Network, it seeks to bring the best of safe space and brave space together, with a healthy dose of anti-oppression thrown in.
An emergent space is co-created by the group—its creation is not solely the responsibility of the facilitator—with a goal of creating a container in which people are free to learn, make mistakes, and to still feel held.
Core principles of the emergent space framework include:
The first (perhaps several) meetings are dedicated to activities that build trust and establish norms. (Emergent spaces can take more time to carefully form.)
Participants acknowledge their own privilege to reduce identity- or power-based harm. This is a critical element that can’t be ignored or faked.
The group is solution-oriented with an emphasis on process. HOW the group is interacting is as important as the outcome.
Individual readiness work is encouraged, so that individuals are ready and open for change when the work begins. This means some folks may have to do their own work prior to entering the group.
The group takes ownership of the space and collaboratively creates it. The group shares in the success and the challenges encountered along the way.
The space is necessarily trauma-informed and healing-centered, so that logistics, norms, expectations, decisions, and process take into account the experiences and needs of the people in the space.
For me, inspirational hope is the best part of emergent spaces. Hope is about what’s possible; likewise, emergent spaces are about what’s possible. The term emergent space originates from the work of adrienne maree brown. brown wrote Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (and an accompanying series), in which she uses the natural world to explore how change happens and how we lead change. In her book, she defines six elements of emergent strategy, of which, for this topic, I’m particularly interested in one. As I describe this first element, I want you to think broccoli! Are you ready?
The first element of emergent strategy is the fractal. (If you know all about fractals, feel free to skip the rest of this paragraph!) “A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop.”[1] Next time you eat broccoli, look at its shape. The tiniest piece of broccoli (the one that gets stuck in your teeth!) is repeated over and over forming bigger and bigger instances of the same shape. That’s a fractal.
What do fractals have to do with emergent spaces (and for that matter, hope)? brown says that fractals apply similarly to emergent strategy (and therefore emergent spaces). What happens at a very small scale happens at increasingly larger scales. In emergent spaces then, what happens at the individual level happens at the group, organizational, institutional, societal, and world levels. So the hope lies in the fact that if we each individually work to create emergent spaces, and do it together, we will eventually make an impact on the world.
What kind of spaces are you creating these days? Are they safe spaces (ask yourself for whom are they safe)? Brave spaces (ask yourself who might be harmed by creating expectations for brave space participation)? What would it be like to experiment with emergent spaces?
If you need some guiding resources, we have you sufficiently covered:
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, by adrienne maree brown
Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, also by adrienne maree brown
Creating emergent space is the work of adaptive change, which would suggest that small steps while we learn new ways are important. Experiment, practice, learn; be humble, vulnerable, and diligent. Above all, remember the hope that lies in fractals—you can change the world by engaging…one group at a time.
[1] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. 51.
