Contact: are you ON or OFF?

When it comes to team coaching, the difference between being ON or OFF can make or break a connection. In this episode of Teams Transformed, Georgina and Allard explore what it really means to work emergently with teams—an approach that relies on presence, contact, and responsiveness rather than rigid agendas.

You’ll discover:

• Why principles like contact, the here and now, and field theory are game-changers in team coaching.
• How being genuinely present and energetically available opens the door to deeper trust and learning.
• The subtle, often invisible dynamics that shape team behaviour—and how to bring them to light.
• Practical ways to surface real-time experiences that strengthen collaboration and awareness.

Packed with real-world examples, this conversation reveals how emergent coaching can unlock transformation by staying curious, open, and responsive to what’s happening in the moment.

If you’re a leader, coach, or facilitator looking to elevate how your teams connect and grow, this episode will spark fresh ideas for creating lasting impact.

Remember to follow or subscribe so you never miss an episode!

Brought to you by Team Coaching Studio - The world’s leading academy for team coaching. To find out more about us visit https://teamcoachingstudio.com/

Transcript

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Speaker C [00:00:01]:
Welcome to Teams Transformed, the podcast for people who want to see real team transformation.

Allard [00:00:07]:
For courageous coaches, curious leaders, and anyone passionate about unlocking the true power of.

Georgina [00:00:12]:
Teams, we, your hosts, Georgina and Allard. Here's a journey with you. Through transformational insights on how to coach teams with presence, depth and emergence, let's.

Allard [00:00:23]:
Explore not just the tools, but the art of transforming teams.

Georgina [00:00:32]:
In today's episode, we're going to explore working emergently, especially some key propositions, including contact, working in the here and now, and field theory. Hope you enjoy this episode.

Allard [00:00:46]:
Hi there, everyone. Welcome to episode four of Teams Transformed.

Georgina [00:00:51]:
Hi, Al. How are you doing today?

Allard [00:00:54]:
I am, I am well. I invested in headphones. I figured, you know, session four. We're halfway through this series of eight where that means we're semi professional now. And I thought it was about time I invested in some proper equipment.

Georgina [00:01:09]:
Fantastic. So I'd love to talk more about working emergently today. And we touched on it a bit in our conversation last time. The last episode we were talking about structures for emergence. How do you create containers which enable emergence to happen? But in today's conversation, let's dive a bit more into emergence, because it's a bit of an ethereal kind of idea, isn't it? What is emergence? What does it really mean to work emergently? Maybe we think about it through the lens of a series of propositions or a series of principles that inform emergence. And one of those that's really significant is the idea of contact. What does, what does that mean to you? What does contact mean to you, Al?

Allard [00:02:04]:
So the first thing that comes up for me when I hear that word, and I love that word, I love the word contact, especially how it's used in, you know, in the field of gestalt psychology and gestalt therapy and all that. So contact to me is more than connection. Contact to me is really what happens at the boundary between, between, in this case, between me and you. What, what is, what, what is there? And are we, are we making, are we really in contact? Is that, is that on? And right now I feel that the, the contact switch is on. And, and there's other moments where, you know, not specifically with you in this series of podcasts, but I, I, I can, I can surely remember moments in team coaching sessions where, you know, I've been guilty of, well, not guilty, I think it's only human, but that, where the contact was off and, and, and you notice that it's a, it's a really, it's a felt thing for me, whether I'm with you, with the lady at the supermarket or with a team. I feel if we're in contact or not, if we're making contact with each other and with, and. And really making contact with what's happening in the team and making contact with the work. There's an intimacy to the word for me.

Allard [00:03:23]:
What about you?

Georgina [00:03:25]:
It's such a significant word. So I like how you put it about on and off. And it made me think about I was putting my two fingers together so the fingertips touch. If they touch, they're in contact. One becomes one finger becomes aware of the other and the energy can flow between them. I can feel the pressure between the fingers or the lack of pressure between the fingers. The moment that spoke me in my broken, my hands are off doing other things. So when we're not in contact with each other, then no collective work is happening.

Georgina [00:03:59]:
I might have withdrawn into myself and I'm reflecting individually at that point. I'm not energetically available to you. We're not building something together or co constructing. And then the other times when you're working with teams, there's many ways that teams and us human beings block contact, block our capacity to become aware of where our learning needs might be for many reasons. We don't want to be vulnerable, we don't want to be exposed. We want to be perfect. We want to be seen as strong, we want to be right. These are very common human thoughts that drive how we show up.

Georgina [00:04:47]:
So it's contact's also about our openness to new awarenesses, openness to new experiences. Whether that boundary between me and something new to be discovered is open is on. So information can flow or whether it's closed and there is no, no contact. There's a. There's a gate up that that's, that can't travel through. And that can take some, some learning and some awareness. And it's not a something that can be learned conceptually. It's something that's happening in the here and now.

Allard [00:05:21]:
I love the words that you used just earlier. Energetically available. That speaks volumes. Am I energetically available to you and to whatever may arise? Because we're talking about contact here in the context of doing emergent work. And how, how can I notice what's emerging if. If I'm not making contact with the field and with the other others? Yeah.

Georgina [00:05:51]:
And if I'm in my head thinking about time, thinking about the agenda, thinking about how I'm going to structure something, trying to remember a quote that I loved or a book that speaks to Me, then I'm gone. My energy's off there chasing that thought or idea and I'm no longer present to what's happening in the room or to other. The relational awareness is broken. And this is a new, you know, it's not necessarily a new idea in coaching because we're so aware in coaching, one to one coaching, how important it is to have our fullest presence available to our clients. But teams and team members may have never thought about this. The thought might be much more about the ideas we need to talk about and the tasks we need to get through. But if we're not in contact with each other, then the ideas we need to talk about, the tasks we need to work on together, are not really likely to flow. In fact, we're likely to get in each other's way perhaps and hinder that progress.

Georgina [00:06:58]:
So contact is a here and now thing and there's even, you know, contact with myself. How am I, how aware am I of what's happening inside of me right now? My thoughts, my feelings, my sensations, any tensions I'm holding, am I blocking that? Because we're doing a podcast, so I need to focus on what I'm talking about. And it's, it's available to us all the time, degrees of contact. So it's an important principle really behind team coaching is how to get team members into much greater contact with each other, not just with the coach, but with each other.

Allard [00:07:39]:
Yeah, and we're, and we're, we're, we're linking into this notion of here and now. But, but, but I think really here and now is another proposition really that informs this work. Right. It's to, it's what's happening, what's unfolding here and now and being, and being completely present to that and, and not going off into, not going to what, what, you know, what had, what happened over there, as a lot of conversations tend to do. And so, yeah, so keeping, keeping an eye on that and making sure that we're working in the here and in the here and now.

Georgina [00:08:17]:
Absolutely. And as we sit here looking at each other across the Internet, because we're in different places, we're aware we're recording a podcast. I'm very much in contact with you and staying present to you. And then I feel I'm in the connections on and I'm in the here and now, I can feel energy flowing through my body. The moment my attention goes to a Google Doc where we wrote some thoughts down for this podcast, I go, where are we in this? In the session we're five minutes in. Where should we be now? Then. Then that contact's broken.

Allard [00:08:55]:
Yeah.

Georgina [00:08:55]:
And that fluidity, fluidity of exchange between us gets interrupted.

Allard [00:09:00]:
Yeah.

Georgina [00:09:01]:
So contact really supports the flow of our exchange and our work together.

Allard [00:09:08]:
Yeah. And. And I can only be present really to one thing at a time. Right. So I'm either, I'm either present or I'm making contact with what's happening here and now, or I'm making contact or I'm being present to the agenda that I had designed for this conversation. Or in our case, the bullet points on the bullet points for episode four of this podcast.

Georgina [00:09:31]:
Yeah. What this might look like when working with a team is great practice to begin with a check in, which is an invitation for team members to get into greater contact with themselves individually. Over time, it can become an experience of getting into contact more with each other. How they do that is by being there for each other, being met as we talk about. So oftentimes, if you see a team talk, you see one person say something and they're met with poker faces with no response, other team members are in their heads thinking about what they're going to share when it's their turn to speak. Similarly, when not just in check ins, but in general team meeting conversations. So supporting team members in really tuning in, not just to listening so they can summarize back, but really be much more fully aware of being there to meet the other. And you know, a wonderful question to ask a team member who's just shared something is how met do you feel On a scale of naught to 10, where 10 is high, what number would you give it? How met do you feel? What would make you feel more met? What would increase that? This way we start to bring their attention into the here and now and into working in the present moment.

Georgina [00:11:13]:
The learning's happening in the present moment.

Allard [00:11:16]:
Yeah, yeah. And that's important. I think. I really like this notion of check ins. And it's important that we're all very clear that what we're not talking about is like your typical icebreaker kind of thing. And the, the check in really is an opportunity for everybody involved to re. To make contact with what is, what is real for them here and now. How, how, how are you coming to this? How are you coming to this session?

Georgina [00:11:43]:
Yeah. What's here for you now?

Allard [00:11:46]:
Yeah. What's here for you? Yeah. And then, and then, like, I love that intervention that you described and Billy helping, helping team members see each other because there's nothing more beautiful, I think in some of these team coaching conversations than when somebody says, oh, I really feel seen now. I feel heard. Maybe for the first time I feel seen or I feel heard.

Georgina [00:12:09]:
Yeah, I like your language around it. Nothing more beautiful. Because I do think there's a beauty in that because of its rarity, how it touches beyond task into some deep human need that we have to be seen to be heard. And a process of just, let's say everybody do around. Being a slave to a process like that won't necessarily achieve that quality of contact, whereas we can tune into quality of contact in any moment. You know, if we expand on that a bit and think about what we mean by here and now, perhaps comparing it with more traditional forms of team development. When I first started out working with teams, I do lots of things that I'm sure so many others have done before. We'd talk about stuff, the team would talk about stuff and I'd post it up on the flip chart.

Georgina [00:13:10]:
So let's say we're talking about our ground rules and I ask you what ground walls would support you in being the best you can be as a team. And I capture all that on the flip chart. I might then at the end of the session go and type them all up, send them to the team so they can use them in their everyday team meetings. And I expect if we were with a large group of people here, we'd see a lot of people nodding, go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do that. Great. Got a tick there. What we're doing in that is we're doing a bit of thinking, work together in the here and now. But we're expecting the being work of it, the activation of it to happen in the future.

Georgina [00:13:57]:
So really the art of really transformational team coaching is to bring the work into the here and now. So if we were, if we use the Groundwaters example, let's pick one of those and really work it now. Let's experiment with it. Go beyond talking about it, talk about something else. But whilst you're talking about something else, bring that ground rule to life. Yeah, and then.

Allard [00:14:26]:
And. Yeah, bring it to life. And then. And then what? What. What do you become aware of as you're bringing it to life? What are you becoming aware of now as you're bringing it to life now? And there's. Yeah, and there's such value in that. In that. What are you aware of now? What are you aware of when you hear me say this? Or what are you aware of as you experiment with this? Because that's where the.

Allard [00:14:54]:
Well, I guess that's back to the paradoxical theory of change. And say, back to the paradoxical theory of change, but we've never talked about it. But the paradoxical theory of change, which would. Which, amongst other things, really illustrates that change or transformation happens with awareness and the quality of the awareness that we can bring to a specific behavior or an occurrence or. Yeah.

Georgina [00:15:20]:
Awareness of what actually exists. And from making greater contact with that, awareness of what's here now, change flows more naturally from that. That can seem, again, paradoxical. Yes. And a bit of an ethereal. Ethereal idea, I think describing it is. Can be. Can be hard to understand.

Georgina [00:15:46]:
But let's say you were working with me and I was talking about, I want to move, but I don't know where I want to move to. And you might say, well, go to the Internet and research some areas, come up with a list of top three and let's talk about it. And of course, that might inspire change. I might discover enough through that. But a different route, a paradoxical theory of change route would be to deepen the inquiry of my experience in the here and now. You might ask me, how do you feel about where you live? Where are you most alive? Where you live? Where in the world touches you? What moves you? What do you like about that? What don't you like about that? So we're really, really exploring deeply into my lived experience. And through that exploration, at some point in time, greater clarity comes up or ideas come up. Energy rises around potential.

Georgina [00:16:52]:
So it's similar with the team. Let's stay with what's in the here and now. Are we noticing about each other? What awarenesses do we need to surface?

Allard [00:17:03]:
Yeah. And then, and then, and, and through, I think through that process back to making the invisible visible, you know, the, the, the field, the field in which we're doing the work becomes enriched. Right. We're now more aware of each other and more aware of what we're holding. And you know so much more about field theory than I do. But one thing I understand about field theory is that our behaviors are largely a consequence of the quality of the field. The field configures possibility and behavior to a large extent.

Georgina [00:17:40]:
Yeah. To make that accessible for people, you could say for you, Al, are there environments you go into where you feel and act differently, or are you always the same?

Allard [00:17:57]:
Yeah, no, clearly. Clearly I'm not always the same. Yeah.

Georgina [00:18:01]:
So what environments do you go into? Maybe an example of one where you feel and you act differently than. Than I might see you on an everyday basis.

Allard [00:18:11]:
Yeah. So that's so what comes to my mind when I hear that it's not a physical, a physical particular environment. Although I know that you, you and I have both spent a lot of time in Spain and, and, and we. There's a different Georgina and a different Allard in Spain, I guess, than in the UK or in Brussels, Belgium. But it's, to me, it's a lot about the quality and the depth of the conversation that I'm having with a group of people. So there's that conversational field.

Georgina [00:18:44]:
So if there's a shift in the conversational field, what do you notice happens to you?

Allard [00:18:50]:
I either, well, I get. I either become, I become more clearer about what it is that I want to express or less clear, or I become more willing to share, more open to share or more closed. So it has a huge, huge impact.

Georgina [00:19:10]:
That's a brilliant example. I love that example about being more open or more closed. You know, we were running a retreat recently, weren't we? And there were 25 of us in the retreat, which is quite a large group. When you're in a room sitting in a circle together and you know, how many times did people report how it was easier to share and to be open in the small groups when we broke out into small groups than it was in the large group? And that's a beautiful example of the field, the field of the larger group impacting the behavior of the system of people in the system. So we're not fixed in one way of being. We have different ways of responding to the environments we're in. If I'm in a very creative culture with a lot of creative people, I tend to become more animated and more playful. If I'm in, in a serious, tightly suited formal culture, I noticed myself getting more constrained.

Georgina [00:20:18]:
So field theory says we don't really know what's in the field until we get into it. We need to allow the field to impact us. So when somebody contacts us about team coaching and they're describing the needs, oh, there's a lack of trust in this team. They don't really have the conversations they need to be having. Let's say that's that one person's idea or some stories they've been told, but we don't really know the depth of that. We don't know whether that's just a surface level thing, that they haven't spent enough time together. They just need some getting to know you each other time or whether it's. It's deeply ingrained patterns coming from fear, from tribalism, One team being set up against another, we've got no sense of that.

Georgina [00:21:12]:
So this is what we mean by getting into the field. Get into the field and allow it to speak to you, allow the system to impact you and notice how you feel when you walk into a building or when you have a conversation with individuals and with the team. Not just what the thoughts are and what the content is of what you're being told. What's the quality of it? Like? I was, I've been working with a team where team members are very brilliant, very, very high intellect, very high intellect, extremely impressive team members and a huge privilege to work with them. And first I was thinking, well, what, what are we going to bring forward with this team? I wonder what the opportunities are, because they are so brilliant. And when I encountered the team, I found their conversations rather stilted and awkward. They weren't flowing off each other, they were almost stumbling over each other. A lot of feeling of one foot a tiny bit on the gas and the other foot heavily on the brake.

Georgina [00:22:26]:
That kind of feeling. Now, I wouldn't have known that without getting in there and experiencing it. So this is the power of emergent work. And the meaning of emergent work is using all of our senses to inform us once we're in the team system.

Allard [00:22:50]:
I really like how you phrase the question of what are the opportunities for this team? And I think that's such a great question to hold in, in the here and now as we're doing, as we're doing the work, because like you said, it can't always be answered up front in a, in a grow kind of, you know, coaching kind of model way. So I think the emergent way of working has to do with what's, what are the opportunities for this team here and now and, and what's most significant for this team here and now. And, and so it's back to that language of what is figural, what is and, and, and. And possibly remember from. I think it was episode one or two, but figural, you know, what, what stands out from, from, from the background of infinite possibility. What's, what are, what are the one or two things that seem to hold more, more energy. And it's quite possible that there's a lot of different figures happening at the same time. And so the emergent, I think the emergent approach is, is about, is about identifying a collective figure that holds enough to, that holds enough energy to work with.

Allard [00:23:52]:
And we'll unpack that more in, in episode five, of course, but I think that's another Big proposition of this emergent work is this notion of what is, what is figural and then staying with that. Staying with that figure.

Georgina [00:24:06]:
Yes. In an earlier episode, Al, you said one of the challenges of doing lots of discovery work, especially diagnostic tool work, because you end up with so much data and the coach is holding so much data, what do you do with it? There's like an overload of figures. There's so many things and they're often all given equal importance or the coach is doing the diagnosis of themes and what do I think is important? And of course, none of us, let alone a team, collective entity of a team, can work on countless things in one time. So one way of identifying figures is to be with the team and help them to become more aware in the moment. Because that way it's real, live data. It's here, they can feel it, they can touch it. So I was with a team recently and. And I and another coach, what we call off the pitch, the team are facilitating themselves, they're doing their own work.

Georgina [00:25:20]:
And my anticipation was that their conversation would go really well. It'd been something they'd been chomping at the bit to talk about. It was a piece of work that they had identified. They wanted to talk about what's the purpose of our team. That wasn't something that, diagnostically, I'd identified a gap and said, this is what you should talk about. It came out of the conversation. So that figure was really energized. What's the purpose of our team? And so my fellow coach and I pulled back to give them space to explore it.

Georgina [00:25:55]:
So they're working on this meaningful figure of what. What's our purpose? And we're now able to. To pull back and we're observing and we're sensing and it felt lacking in energy. It felt like a lot of words, you know, a lot of words being put out there, not really connecting into something with each other. Almost like what happens during wordsmithing, like it had become disconnected from something that really had any meaning to them. And I. I sensed that several team members had checked out. So we're still working on that figure of team purpose, the content, as it were, whilst my colleague and I are noticing what's happening at the process and the dynamics level.

Georgina [00:26:46]:
Now, that is such important data, because if they ran on and they crafted a purpose statement, it would probably be something crafted by two or three team members to get the task done that there's another 18 members are not really bought into. In fact, they haven't even been Part of the process, they may not even know what some of the words mean. And if you ask them, they say, I don't want to interrupt the process by asking, you know, and that's why.

Allard [00:27:20]:
Tracking that and naming that, possibly making that part of the conversation, making some of that implicit data explicit, is such a big part of the image emergent work. And that again, sounds easier said than done because sometimes what needs to be named is very uncomfortable.

Georgina [00:27:39]:
Yeah. And as coaches, our work is to develop our capacity, as we've said before, to have the courage and to find words and say it in a way that it can be heard and to create experiments.

Allard [00:27:53]:
Yeah.

Georgina [00:27:54]:
Which we'll talk more about in future episodes.

Allard [00:27:57]:
But I really like this where this conversation went today because to me, where it, where, where we're landing is this difference between team output and team learning. Because there's a choice here. You just go on with, go on with crafting the, the team, the compelling team purpose, just, you know, the two of you while 18 people stand there watching because you. That would check the output box, wouldn't it? Yes, but they would, they would not have learned much in the process. So by, by, by, by us being there and, and observing and sharing these observations in a way again, that, that, that, that makes them more, makes them likely to be received by the team.

Georgina [00:28:38]:
Yes. Yeah.

Allard [00:28:40]:
Yeah. It's the learning. It's about.

Georgina [00:28:41]:
The learning will go to a different. What the team learned was that team members checked out. They lost contact during the session with good intention. They didn't want to stop the outcome from happening. But in checking out, the team was no longer collaborating together. So they learned instead of checking out, they needed to check in. And that became a new figure for the coaching. How do we stay in contact whilst we're going about doing our task? How do we notice? How do we make more of the invisible visible? How do we name what's going on for us?

Allard [00:29:24]:
Yeah. So I, I can't, I can't help but think of ourselves and doing this work as awareness agents. Awareness agents. And, and maybe much more in service of team effectiveness than, than in terms of then in service of team performance or team output.

Georgina [00:29:41]:
Yeah. So instead of the, the goal of the coaching being the team's turnover wants to double in size, we're looking at what supports or hinders the way the teams are working together that, that will ultimately impact those more tangible results. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Well, I've really enjoyed this episode today.

Allard [00:30:07]:
Yeah. Another one, Another one that I've enjoyed as well. So looking forward to continuing the conversation about this emergent way of working in the next episode.

Georgina [00:30:17]:
The next episode. Okay, bye for now.

Allard [00:30:27]:
Thanks for joining today's journey of teams transformed.

Georgina [00:30:30]:
If this sparked a new insight or a deeper question, we invite you to sit with it. Not to solve it, but to let it unfold.

Allard [00:30:39]:
For resources, community and reflection prompts, visit teamcoachingstudio.com until the next time, stay present.

Georgina [00:30:47]:
Stay curious, and keep leaning into the art of emergence. SA.