How does the new get into the world?

How does the new get into the world?

I love this question. It is the question that drove Nora Bateson to create Warm Data, a question that captivates and confounds systems thinkers, complexity scientists, artists, policy makers, and everyday people working to enact the visions we hold in our hearts.

It’s the question asked by everyone and anyone attracted to the word “emergence” — which is approximately synonymous with “the new getting in.”

It’s weighty question. After all, so much of what we hope for is bound up in our ability (or inability) to live into the new. As old systems unravel around us, we feel the poignant necessity for emergence.

Last week in Brussels, I co-hosted The Invitation with Rudy de Waele and Alex de Carvalho of Voices of Emergence. It was an experiment none of us had done before — an offering designed “to strengthen our capacity, individually and collectively, to respond to this threshold moment with clarity, coherence, and meaningful action.”

Working in collaboration with Commons Hub Brussels and Weaving Wolves, we gathered a community of 50+ regenerative leaders from Belgium and across the EU for a 2.5 day gathering to meet this shared moment of civilizational transition.

We intended a space where the new could get in.

It did.

New relationships were forged. Ideas bloomed into initiatives. Existing projects gained granularity and emergent direction. Commitments were made. And it’s all still flowing forward in a tapestry of love and solidarity that far exceeded our humble ambitions.

How did this happen?

Nora makes the point that the new doesn’t emerge in the ways we think it does. It doesn’t just arise because we want it to, or because of an “easy step-by-step process.” It emerges through a transcontextual fabric of relationships, processes, visible and invisible deaths and rebirths, combinings of ingredients — a fabric of continuity and change that is greater than the sum of its parts.

She asks, “How is the meadow meadow-ing? And, “Where is the edge of the meadow?” A community of emergence is like a meadow. It is more of process than thing. It is edgeless, yet it has some parameters, defining je ne sais quois characteristics and values that make it itself.

Last week, we co-created a community of emergence, a space that genuinely nurtured the potential of the new — not of any specific thing or initiative or innovation, but the kind of newness that arises when people listen, to unwind, to embody, and to express their love and cares openly, slowly, honestly.

To do this, we worked with Alex de Carvalho’s beautiful Enactment Arc as the backbone of our facilitation. This gentle, seven part scaffolding is more of a pointing-out than a framework. Grounded in ancient wisdom, it helps align attention with the way emergence actually happens and brings new things into form.

In Alex’s words,

The Enactment Arc maps how experience becomes action: from a first stirring (spanda) through salience, desire, knowledge, and will into action and integration. It gives emergence a felt, repeatable shape, so insight can become lived practice instead of staying an idea.

Over the course of our days together, we gently wove the Enactment Arc into additional layers of transcontextual, relational tending. We immersed in the ancient glory of the Sonian Forest, we gathered in circle, taking the time to share each person’s deeper calling, we shared food, we danced, and we moved in groups of affinity that arose through cycles of shared listening, harvesting, and re-grouping. Just as the meadow does meadow-ing, we communed the way community does.

What emerged from the cycling of our breakout groups and creative processes had a different frequency than anything I’ve experienced coming out of other such convenings. The initiatives were surprising, centering on friendship, intergenerational relationships, new (and ancient) governance structures, and bridging inner and outer healing. They spoke of the adjacent possible that comes to life when we stop trying to “solve” things head on and instead listen to the ways in which our love, pain, and living experience guide adaptive response.

We closed with 55 commitments that are continuing to unfold through the fabric of the relationships we built.

I will be very curious to see — an participate in — what continues to bubble up through this web of relations.

I entered skeptical of frameworks attached to emergence. As a person who’s spent 30 years facilitating transformational process through dance, theater, wilderness vision quest, and immersive technologies, I’ve co-created shared experiences of emergence many times. I know how to tend the balance of freedom and safety that supports individual and collective nervous systems to unwind into magic. Yet, I’ve never “tried” to facilitate emergence. And, in almost every case where others have tried it, I’ve seen the effort fall completely flat.

But, the Enactment Arc is different. It gently steers attention while liberating improvisation, inquiry, care, and embodiment, inviting genuine possibility. It tends the meadow.

I — and by all accounts everyone present — experienced real newness.

This is not a small accomplishment for an experimental social technology. It’s something to try again and learn what happens.

We shall be metabolizing for a while. We are already exploring opportunities to bring this work to the business sector and to share it with other communities. There is a call to continue. Because the energy was lit. And because our changing world needs spaces where the new can get in.

I’d like to close with gratitude — the great door opener and closer. Thank you to Alex, Rudy, Weaving Wolves, Commons Hub Brussels, and the whole community for bringing your all and for trusting me in this co-creation. And thank you to the spirit of the new. We welcome you.

Let us continue to continue. Together.

ps. Please PM me if you’re interested in bringing the The Invitation to your company, sector or community.