It might seem strange to start this post by writing about ants. After all, it’s winter and they are not doing their best to invade my house through every unsealed nook and cranny. Last summer, the sheer number of ants invading my house nearly pushed me over the edge. One summer afternoon I discovered an army of them pushing through my white shag rug in my home office and I just about lost it.
Yet, I’ve got ants on my mind because they are a perfect illustration of a topic I’ve been reading about, and that is the underlying principle of “Clean Space” as imagined by Maori psychotherapist David Grove. I first heard his name when I was in the year-long certification program to become a certified Soul-Based Coach. In some ways, he can be thought of as the “grandfather” of many Clean Language, Clean Space and Emergent Knowledge processes. The methods I first learned came through Penny Tompkins and James Lawley who systematized Grove’s methods and developed what we now call “symbolic modeling.” After getting my certification as a Soul-Based Coach, I’d attend several trainings facilitated by Penny and James, in awe of their depth of knowledge and insight about the ways in which the human mind can work.
But, what about the ants?
Trust me, it will make sense in a minute.
One of the principles of Soul-Based Coaching —of holding space for a client’s capacity to transform themselves— is to let go of outcome. This may seem counterintuitive, but unlike many coaching systems or modalities, I don’t show up with an agenda. Instead, I am fully present, aware of the energy that exists between the client and me in the safe space that we create together. The client, of course, will state what they would want to have to happen in the session, but how exactly that unfolds—and when it unfolds—is out of my control.
While I was in the certification program, I admit that this was one of the hardest skills for me to truly embody. A former athlete, for many years my life was defined by outcome. The time it took to run or ride a certain distance literally defined the kind of athlete I was or could be. So too, I carried performance-related outcomes out into my life in the world. How many pages could I write or edit per week? How many grants, RFPs? How many pages of technical documentation—all metrics used to measure “productivity” which is Corporate America’s code word for “self-worth.”
And I wanted the best for my clients. I wanted them to be safe. I wanted them to find what they were looking for. I wanted them to leave our session “satisfied” by what had occurred. But when I really investigated this desire, I realized it came from a very self-centered place: I wanted validation that I was doing a good job— back to those old patterns from the corporate world. It really wasn’t a metric that could measure whether or not my client found what they needed to have happen.
So, let go of outcome? What does that really mean?
It took a while.
It wasn’t easy.
Yet, by letting go of outcome I was allowing someone else to use their own process and system to find the solution that was right for them. Outcome was an interruption, a distraction, my attempt at trying to control what didn’t need my control.
As a facilitator—a coach— I provide the kind of space we don’t usually have in our day-to-day lives to explore ourselves. Other people also don’t let us explore in the way that serves us best. We’re always interrupted, given advice that (typically) isn’t very useful, talked over, talked down to or ignored.
We are never offered the opportunity to:
Say exactly what is on our minds and to have someone receive that without judgment
Explore what we know
Explore what we want
Explore what could be
Explore what we don’t know we know
The last one is key.
Remember the ants?
Emergent knowledge is an idea from David Grove that, basically, can be understood as “what we know we don’t know.” Yet, if we don’t know we know, how can we, ourselves, discover what we know, but didn’t know, and use that knowledge to help us? (Wow, that’s a sentence!)
As Philip Harland writes in The Power of Six, “Clients know best. But clients don’t always know how to sort and retrieve the knowledge they need. Where is the key to this subliminal store? How can people be facilitated to find it themselves?” (15)
It comes from surrender— or, more accurately, humility—a word that literally means “close to the Earth.”
One aspect of the problem comes from how we understand intelligence. Human beings tend to see this from the top-down. Corporations have CEOs, countries have Presidents, Dictators, and Prime Ministers. For those models, intelligence is derived from the top and disseminated to the masses (from the top down, in other words.)
Emergent knowledge is a more organic arrangement and can be illustrated by ants. While a single ant lacks any special knowledge or insight and is actually quite helpless on its own, a colony of ants creates a fascinating society of intricate systems and modes of attack and seems to develop a higher intelligence, not from the top (the queen ant’s function has more to do with reproduction than issuing orders to the workers) but from the collective—from the bottom up.
The system itself—how ants fall into an organizational structure—carries information. And this is the insight that not only sparks the impetus to allow clients to explore (gaining knowledge from their own system instead of information imposed on the system from a coach) but for another modality that fascinates me called “Clean Space.”
Very simply put, the premise of Clean Space begins with the notion that the physical space around us can also carry information and insights. If a facilitator can invite a client to create their own network within space, that network can offer information that wasn’t available to the client before. Through the establishment of specific “nodes” intelligence bubbles to the conscious surface where it can be glimpsed, perhaps or the first time.
Therefore, a gateway, a portal into “what we don’t know we know.”
*
Six nights after its birth the chosen child of the Maori is immersed in a stream and hears the Karakia, the formula of words with power that opens its mind to the world for the first time. Then six red stones are taken by the mother and placed in the earth in the sacred place. And those stones join the six of the last generation, and the six that went before, and all the others put there through time.
During the first six days and six nights, the spirit of the baby is kept safe by twelve companions who travel with it. Twelve is the number of stars we try to reach and touch during our journey through life. Twelve and multiples of twelve are numbers for the trails of the sea, the land the mind, and the spirit.
Those born on the bright moon come to the world when all doors are open to the thirty-six houses in the heavens. Their winds fill with the light of the Universe and open to trail reaching out to the stars.
-From the Song of Waitaha, cited in Philip Harland’s The Power of Six
*
I don’t want to do a deep-dive into the process of Clean Space (if you’re interested, I highly recommend Harland’s book which offers a fascinating in-depth examination of Grove’s processes and why Clean Space works the way it does.) I can say with some authority that it’s the most contentious method of facilitation I’ve ever used. No matter the group, the process invites the rawest, most honest emotions to the surface.
Six iterations rest at the heart of the facilitation process for “Clean Space,” in addition to an exact set of Clean Language questions. Despite its simplicity (on the surface at least), participants tap into places within themselves that they didn’t know existed.
I’ve written about this. In an essay I hope to publish soon, I recount my experience facilitating a Clean Space session for artists who wanted to explore how to write their Artist Statements in a small gallery space in downtown Reno. This is what I remember when participants identified their fourth space in the six-space process:
The gallery space is completely silent by now. I’ve invited participants to move to four spaces, and only one muralist has complied with the invitation by pushing his metal chair back, breaking the deathly silence with the ear-wrenching screech of metal on concrete that echoes across the gallery walls. This is what I knew would happen and what I feared all at once: participants wear expressions that say in no uncertain terms that they are being unwillingly taken to places they did not want to go.
No more, make it stop, their silent faces tell me. And how much I want to cave, to give in, so sigh like a parent who no longer wants to or can administer discipline. To comfort, to do what I think will make the participants like me more.
Yet, I know all of the reasons why I need to keep going–chief among them is I am here to teach them something they did not know they knew. I am not here to make friends. I am here to help artists see their work with new eyes, and to invite others into their inner worlds through authentic descriptions that only come to light with hard work like this–of seeing it from every possible angle. And seeing themselves in this way, too.
I feel their unease and distress in my body. It’s a hard apple core, right around my heart. Every shred of me wants to give up, to call it quits, to end the workshop early. I don’t, though. Instead, I hold the space I came here to hold, and proceed with the next step of facilitating a Clean Space session.
Despite all the eyes, the silence, the stillness, the pain–I say it again: And find another space.
*
Six spaces. Six questions. In Soul-Based Coaching, I have yet to use Meta-Drivers—another series of six that Grove proposed—that almost force a client to examine their beliefs in a way that can’t help but invite a new perspective. My hesitation comes, ironically enough, from not wanting to touch outcome too much (or at all) but to let the organic unfolding occur.
Yet, there is something to this notion of six. I’ve used Meta-Drivers in workshops with clients. I’ve facilitated Clean Space. The pattern of client reactions—that I have even witnessed in myself—is eerily the same.
This is not a book for the beach. Unless you want to know more about emergent knowledge and how to facilitate another person through this modality, you might want to skip this one in favor of others that are more research (and less practitioner) oriented. As a practitioner, I found it utterly enjoyable. David Grove passed long before I began coaching, and Harland’s prose offered a friendly introduction that makes me think I would have liked David Grove very much.
On a selfish note, the following passage reinforced my passion for this modality and what I do as a Soul-Based Coach:
“As facilitators, we have to have our wits about us. Our phrasing, timing, and tonality have to orient the client to the location of their information and not to us. For that reason, we will have to have less eye contact with the client than in most other therapies. At the same time, we have to be responsive to every shift in the wind and the waves. We are like those wayfinders who learned to read the natural signs—the movement of stars across the night sky, the trade winds from the south, the steady swells of the ocean—without losing a moment’s concentration. When the water was unpredictable, timing was all. An abrupt change or fack and the vessel could capsize. Too slow and it would be blown off course…. When purpose disappears, there is true transformation” (114).
There’s a snow moon tonight.
Look to the stars the way our ancestors did, and seek the knowledge there. They say there is nothing new on earth. The more I investigate and research into ancient knowledge and insight, the more I feel comforted by that very simple fact. I’m continuing a long legacy of shamans, widwives and wisdom-carriers.
I see constellations in the night sky. I count the stars. I hear the silence, and something within that is deep and dark and wonderful. Perhaps constellations, too, are some ancient network we need only learn to read.
A system of six.
Points that guided us to cross wide oceans, when those distances seemed impossible.