Emergence: The Key to Real Transformation - HIGHLIGHTS

In this final episode of 2025, we recap Georgina and Allard's most powerful insights on emergent work, spotlighting the core capacities — self-awareness, presence, empathy, and attunement — that help coaches read the room, surface what truly matters, and create the conditions for real trust, connection and transformation.

We also look ahead to 2026 and share what’s coming next, including an invitation for team coaches to get involved in future episodes and bring their own experiences of emergence to help grow a bold, evolving community of practice.

If that's you and you want to be involved, email hello@teamcoachingstudio.com for more details.

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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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Welcome to Teams Transformed, the podcast for people who want to see real team transformation. For courageous coaches, curious leaders and anyone passionate about unlocking the true power of 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 explore not just the tools, but the art of transforming teams. Hello, Georgina. Hello everyone. I'm really looking forward to getting into this new series of our podcast. So. So yeah, we're going to keep going with this and talk about you, get more into emergence and also start talking with some other coaches who will come on to future episodes talking about their moments of emergence. Yes. But before we do that, I was wondering, how do we make emergence work? I think the first really crucial condition for emergent working is awareness. Because ultimately I see that instead of thinking about myself as a change agent, I think about myself as an awareness agent. Yeah. And awareness really is the catalyst for choice and change. To work emergently, I believe that I need to be able to increase my own self awareness and bring that forth in others. Yeah. Self awareness, there's a real mindful quality to that, isn't there? So on for me is when I'm prepared to be influenced by what you're saying and receiving what you're saying and when I know that you're here, present to me and being influenced by what I'm saying. Yeah. And it's only then that we're really doing any work together or where we're making the invisible visible, then we need a much more significant depth of contact. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That supports the container, creates trust, enables us to take risks in what, what we might bring forward. Yeah. But without contact that's really, it's really hard and it's beyond eye contact. It's. It's an open heartedness that contact the receivers are on. Yeah. And I think that makes a real difference. When you're saying empathy. What, what does that mean for you? What's. How do you know when empathy is there? For me, empathy appears when I. When I really allow myself to tear down any wall that might exist, no matter how thin, any veil or wall that exists between the so called other and myself and really receive them 100% with as little judgment and with as little projection as possible. And that can be hard to do when somebody is speaking about something that we don't like or don't agree with. Yeah. Or in a way that triggers us. Yeah. So it's quite an active and quite a challenging skill in a way. The skill of empathy. Often the power is in the process. It's what's happening interactionally between people and what's in the dynamics, what's in the field, what's in the here and now that's affecting everything that we say and shaping everything that we say. So being more conscious of that is really important in emergence. I would add one layer to that which is the, if we are aware enough, we become aware of the ever changing, impermanent nature of group process. And yet we talk about being a high performing team or highly effective team. Makes it sound like a team arrives at a point and stays there, but actually teams are continually, and that a team process is continually shifting and changing, responding to changes in membership, changes in the climate, changes in the pressures coming out the team. So it's a living, vibrant experience which is very energizing, exciting when we think about it that way. There's an aliveness to it attuning to. Emergence, attuning to the energy, attuning to the level of connection, attuning to the patterns that we may, that may become figural. As you're talking about what we can attune to, it's making me aware of just how much data there is at any moment in time. In a room, with a team, in a space when there's a group, we don't actually need a lot more data than what's there in the aliveness of the here and now moment. There's something about presence that I think we need to touch upon too. I know we've talked about it in the first series, but if we're trying to compile a list of things that are necessary to make, to make emergence work, then we, we need to address this notion of presence. And it's like an atmosphere. You know how each person, every, every human being, when you're in contact with them, brings with them a certain atmosphere. Yes. So they bring with them their, their name and they bring with them their title, they bring with them their occupation, but they bring with them an atmosphere. And I think that's for me that's, it's become a useful way of thinking about what we mean by presence. Yeah. How you feel in their company and what that makes possible in the relational field, in the space and being aware of the impact we have and building some range in the impact that we have. And why. Because ultimately our presence is a being intervention. It's about being. Be able to influence the situation. And of course every intervention is seeking to, to influence in some way the here and now moment. Yeah. And so offering our own facilitative influence happens through our own presence. And being able to shift between a more evocative presence, to open something up, to create safety, to. To. To invite greater contact between team members and between team and ourselves. And being able to also bring forth a provocative presence, to inspire and invite change, to disturb in a way that can be received. Yeah. To give feedback where or. Or name something that hasn't been named in the team. So presence is so key. Absolutely. You know, I think there's one more, which is a skill of being able to either elevate or deepen the conversation rather than moving away or moving on to the next item, next task. Yeah. Which sometimes means that the real conversation that's needed is left hanging. And to be aware of whether a conversation really needs that. That space to be deepened or. Or elevated. More inspiration needed, more of a sense of purpose and more upliftment or the risk of going deeper. And I think it's the start of deepening a conversation is to just slow down. And we could say the slower we go, the more we know and bring it into a relational space. Because sometimes in teams, there's a real resistance to slowing down. There's a pull to speeding up, to crunching through, to getting more done, because that's the norm, the vibe in a team. And actually for learning and transformation to happen, often the team needs to be able to slow down, to get into greater contact with each other. So I love that idea. If we need to find the next step in the conversation, we need to go inside. And that means that we need to speak from the here and now and invite anybody else that we're working with to speak from the here and now. When you say that, that sounds in a way, remarkably simple, but there's a lot of complexity to that. So trying to tap into what's here in this moment. Yeah. Is important. Yeah. But it's about speak your truth in the moment. What is true, what's true for you here and now. That's an infallible way to deepen the conversation. It strikes me again that there's so much richness in that, because speaking my truth, say, at a general level or a philosophical level, that may be easier than speaking my truth about how I'm experiencing relationship or how somebody's communicating with me in the here and now, how I'm feeling in this moment where there's conflict or a high heat situation. So these are practices not only for us as coaches, but they're real practices for a team. So we want to get into conversations with some colleagues who are team coaching practitioners. When I say practitioners, they are forever practicing like we are, forever sharpening the saw and mastering the art of their work, discovering new aspects to themselves, new aspects to contact to creating meaningful spaces where the work can be done. And we want to hear these real life stories and bring them to life. How did they hold the space? What happened? What did they do differently? And what's their learning journey been to get to this? Because they're all people we know who have undergone transformation themselves in terms of how they show up and work with teams. So I'm very excited about that. So stay tuned, everyone. We've got, we've got some great guests lined up willing and ready to share their magical moments of emergence. And, and if you're listening to this and you are a team coach and you go, yeah, this resonates and I'd love to be on the, on the show to share my moment of emergence, then by all means, let us know. I think the easiest way would be to write to admineamcoachingstudio.com get in touch. Yeah. Thanks for. Thanks for joining today's journey of teams transformed. 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. For resources, community and reflection prompts, visit teamcoachingstudio.com until the next time, stay present. Stay curious, and keep leaning into the art of emergence. It.