‘I LIKE A GOOD THEORY, BUT IN MY HEART I'M A PRACTITIONER. In a spiritual and practical sense, the theory needs to work on a Monday morning, a Thursday afternoon, and at the end of the day in the marketplace.’
As part of our ongoing series of profiles as part of the Cohere+ research group, today we’re publishing a wide-ranging interview with Anne Caspari, condensed and edited from several conversations I had with her over the last few months. What struck me was her deep experiential knowledge of the field going back over two decades, and her pathway into this work through environmental science and policy, applying her understanding of complex ecological systems to group transformation processes.
We will be publishing a series of essays by Anne over the coming weeks on the subject of creating containers for change in larger collectives, and how we might shift from a developmental bias to prioritizing ‘micro-shifts’ and complexity theory.
In the meantime, dive into our conversation to learn more about her sense of coherence as a quality of ‘falling into place’ experienced in nature. Towards the end we arrive at a more nuanced exploration of coherence and cohesion; shifting from the more common characterization of these respective states as ‘positive vs negative’, she describes a contextually-dependent, dynamic cycle between ‘inquiry mode’ and ‘business mode’. There’s much more, including around our shared experience of ‘sensor networks’ of social coherence in Italy, how she entered the field of adult development while living in Rome, and what it taught her about how to introduce these concepts in various cultural contexts.
- Leigh Biddlecome
Leigh Biddlecome: What have you been thinking most about today?
Anne Caspari: Many things! Actually, I would say my basic mode is feeling, and my second mode is thinking. So if anybody asks me ‘what do you think about that?’. I need to check in with my feeling modality. And then I have 125 perspectives on a topic within a couple of seconds....I can then hopefully translate that into what I'm thinking about a subject.
But to answer your question, of course there are the upcoming German elections. What's going on in that field is amazing, to put it neutrally. I’m also thinking a lot about what we’re
working on right now with political projects, using complexity methods and sense making.
LB: The first time we spoke, alongside my colleague Ivo J. Mensch, I was really drawn to your descriptions of what it has been like to inhabit these ecosystems from the ‘fringe,’ as you put it. Can you describe any particular experiences in which you’ve felt outside or counter to dominant forces within group settings?
AC: What I learned early on is that I don't feel well in the middle of a group. I sense more through my body than through anything else and if there's stuff going on that is not coherent, not congruent or not ‘clean’ in a moral sense, my body picks that up, and I don't feel good.
When I was very young I thought that there must be something wrong with me, because, you know, everybody wants to be part of a group, and I didn't. This started in kindergarten and then in high school with all the social bonding going on in a context of 36 girls. It's not that I didn't have friends, but I felt there's something deeply not okay with the dynamics of in- and out-groups. I probably couldn't play the game. So early on I had a hunch that what we now would call cohesion can be kind of dangerous. In German it’s called Gruppenzwang, a kind of forced ‘groupiness’.
And that sense perpetuated, So when I started working with groups as a coach and with consciousness training, I learned how to see this not as something wrong with me but rather that I could actually use this quality, as a kind of a transpersonal phenomenon.
Let's call it another word that I don't really like, but it's hypersensitivity. There's the sensitivity in the subtleties that I actually could pick up on to feed it back into the group and say, ‘Look, there's stuff going on here…’ Without even needing to name it, that was already helpful sometimes. So I could feed this impression back to a group and then it started being actually a really cool thing, a generative move to say, look, ‘Can we all be aware of what’s going on here? What is it? Can we overcome it? Can we integrate it?’
LB: How and when did you enter into the field of (broadly speaking) adult development?
AC: This was back in the early 2000s, I was living in Rome at the time working in the environmental sector and got started with a set of practices that – well, back then you didn't have a word for coaching, but I’d say it was a kind of consciousness training.
It was deeply practical, asking questions of you like, ‘How are you getting in your own way and not seeing it? How are you projecting out and not seeing it? How are you inviting people to sabotage you?’
At the time it was so unoriginal to complain about Italian systems – I could hide behind that and say, ‘well this doesn't work here…’ I didn't see it until I caught myself in the act of creating a recurring theme that I had already seen in Germany and in London, where I worked before. These were different planning systems, different cultures, different everything. The only common denominator was me. So it had to be something about myself, and I didn't see it.
And through all this thinking and cognitive intelligence, I didn't get there until I saw the patterns and said to myself, ‘Oh, my God! I'm inviting everybody to treat me like that so I can complain and not take responsibility here, here and here. And I'm not only doing that with the job, I'm doing that with relationships as well.’
And that interested me because it was kind of like a system shock. If you put it in adult development terms, in the language of Susanne Cook-Greuter, I had a construct-aware moment. Once I could see these patterns, I could turn things around and be a source of something else, and take responsibility.
LB: I find this kind of ‘geneology of growth’ tricky to talk about, because of course we’re speaking retrospectively, but once that ‘construct aware moment’ came to you, what did you do in practical terms?
AC: Yes, you can only recognize the growth in hindsight, it’s a byproduct of other processes.
At the time, I said to myself – I need to do the training because I cannot afford not to do it, because I'm sabotaging myself left, right and center with these assumptions and beliefs. Bonnie Roy would call them ‘mapping errors in your meaning-making system.’
In the training the first thing you learn is how to be present to something that you don't want to be present with. Your basic muscle training is just that, and you practice on external things first, and then you come closer to home. You learn how to be in the moment, how to be present, to be with something you don't want to be present with, because it has a story that you don't like or a judgment involved. And there you are in full presence mode, not in cognition.
And then, after a couple of years, I started to read Ken Wilber, which was cool – to find somebody expressing the concepts that we were embodying.
What our little group discovered was that over time, with changes in behavior, our projects would actually work out, we’d actually be paid for our work, even in Italy! So it started really working, and we were enthusiastic and wanted to share it with the Italians we know, but when we invited them for ‘training’ or ‘shadow work’ on a weeknight, they looked at us like we were mad.
And then I got it, so okay, we’re not in Germany, Italians tick differently, so with my friend Bettina [Geiken], we said, ok, let's invite them to our place Thursday night for a spaghettata. We didn’t put the word ‘work’ in the invitation, we just invited everyone over for spaghetti, and then they were all there, and then we looked at each other and said, ‘well, since we're here anyway, we might as well, you know, do stuff’ [laughs]. And that’s how we started hosting trainings for our Italian friends and colleagues as well.
LB: Staying with Italy for a moment, since we both happen to share years of lived experience in that culture, I find it sometimes amusing that we [Northern Europeans/North Americans] make great efforts to name phenomena and then create workshops for qualities that I see happening quite naturally in society around me in Italy, without any adult development jargon. This is not to overly romanticize southern European culture, or pretend it’s the model for all aspects of life, but to note that for certain social phenomena, there are lessons that can go south-to-north. I’m curious how you would describe the lived experience of social coherence in Italy?
AC: Yes, you probably found that Italy has a strong ‘sensor network’ as [Dave] Snowden calls it.
I arrived in Rome 25 years ago and you’d go to parties – and that was before we had cell phones – and you’d be invited to the next party straight away. Even as a stranger, they would say, Oh, you know we have a party next Friday. Why don't you come? And you’d say, oh, yeah, that's nice, and just just dismiss it as them being nice. And then they would run after you and say, ‘Here's the address, bring a bottle of wine, please come.’
Later on, I noticed that I had a real network that I could both relate to and rely on. And Italy has never had a functioning state so the network of friends and family is absolutely vital for survival, and they care about it. There's no talk about ‘human sensor networks’ or ‘social activation’ – they do it without thinking about it! And it's not instrumentalized, it has nothing to do with thinking ‘ah I can get a client this way,’ or other forms of social networking for a particular aim.
So you can rely upon this social coherence network when the official, formal networks don't work anymore. The network rises beautifully to the occasion when you really need it. I left Italy in 2009, and I'm sure if I need somebody now, they're there.
LB: I realize we’ve started to talk about instances of social coherence without pausing on a more basic understanding of coherence. Earlier you described yourself, despite ‘loving a good theory’, as someone who is primarily in ‘feeling’ mode – so I’m wondering how you would describe your own felt sense of coherence.
AC: My home planet is nature and landscape, and I studied nature conservation, so this is my go-to place of coherence. If you're in a forest, even in a jungle, you know it's coherent. I think this is really why people go to nature. Not for ‘self-care’, but because you feel something falling into place and some naturalness, a flow. Flow states are such a hyped concept, but I think at the end of the day it's that.
Sometimes what gets in our way of experiencing this flow in nature is our constant need for labeling things, for judging things, for putting them in a category to try to understand them, photographing them. We can no longer be with things directly. There’s a
video online about “encountering a deer” with full sensory clarity – without the ‘idea’ of the deer, or taking out your phone to photograph it. And I think you can be in nature or just working in the garden – something ordinary or trivial and without having a certain role, opinions, or a judgment, even, and then what comes is a feeling of deeply participating with whatever is around you.
LB: That rather easeful sense of ‘falling into place’ within a natural state of coherence is interesting to me, especially as we often idealize states of growth that occur within complex or even chaotic contexts. I should say that from a personal perspective, having gone through a particularly intense several years of moving countries frequently, dealing with complex bureaucracy, etc, sometimes I hear this idealization of ‘complexity’ and think, ok great, but try to live this on a daily basis and let me know how that goes! How do you consider the relationship between energy, coherence, and complexity?
AC: Yes, so there is a false notion that complex is the best, and the rest is boring. Of course we want to have the ordered domain. Dave talks about how cognitive science has shown that the brain needs far less energy for automatic processes. Imagine you have to breathe or blink consciously all day. It eats up energy – and nature is actually optimizing for less energy consumption all the time. This is why I mentioned the state of coherence in nature before. Bonnie [Roy] says if you're in coherence, it doesn't cost you much energy – she calls it ‘energy for free’.
But if you want to input new things, create changes, you need to disturb the coherence, and that disturbance costs energy. Ideally what you want is to get that dynamic from the complex world into something that you can repeat, because you want to harvest sometimes as well, and not just stay in the jungle of chaos.
Also, you have to make sure it's a shallow dive into chaos – you don’t want to hang out there constantly, because chaos is the highest energy toll.
LB: Well now it's very clear to me why I'm so exhausted [laughs] and also why I like going to the same café every day, aside from the personal rapport I have with the staff.
AC: Yeah, we're great fans of rituals, because rituals lower the energy gradient.
LB: I’d love to hear more about your experience facilitating group processes, and how coherence fits into those contexts, and what you’ve learned over the years of doing this work.
AC: I can talk about a couple specific examples of when I learned about coherence as an emergent property of a process, not as something that can just be assumed based on a group’s previous developmental work or knowledge.
One happened after the 2013 Integral Theory Conference in California. A group around Bonnie said, you know there's something going on in the field, a resistance to all the developmental bias…why don't we invite thought leaders from the wider field, because we need a diversity of thinking, do a 3 day retreat at Bonnie's place, and we will find out what what is really going on. So we had 16 people from all over the world, highly skilled field practitioners.
And the experience ended up being excruciating! We all had this projection on each other, that it was going to be so cool, and we would come up with not only new ideas, but new categories of ideas. And for me it was like 3 days in agony, because I felt all this incongruence as physical pain – I could do the weather reports with this sensitivity of mine. Imagine you have 16 people in the room, and they all have black belts in their respective disciplines, and they don't do ‘obvious’ moves, it was all subtle. But the impact was even worse because you didn't see it coming when it hit you.
Afterwards a smaller group of us stuck around another few days trying to figure out why it didn’t work. Ultimately we hit on, wow, so this is a completely different process than we thought we thought it was. So we learned that coherence is an emergent property of a completely different process. You cannot just put people together and say, ok, ‘we're all at this strong developmental level, so we don’t need hosting or facilitation, it will just cohere’. It doesn't work like that. And we learned it the hard way.
LB: What did you do differently in following years?
AC: Well, we talked about these phenomena openly. We don't pretend anymore that there is no facilitation, or that there's an ‘outside’ to the process – so there’s no facilitator who's ‘outside.’ Also you can’t pretend that there’s not a host – she [Bonnie] had a certain role in that sense. So we started just openly naming things and talked more about the phenomena at play. We got more process literate. And with some of the phenomena that came up, we could name them and say, ‘Oh, that's banner raising,’ ‘Oh, that's the ego stuff!’ or ‘this needs to burn itself out.’ We learned, for example, not to try and facilitate stuff away, because all the attempts to do something about the issues prolonged the process.
Scott Peck calls it the ‘authentic chaos phase.’ And you just need to sit through it and endure it. If everybody can actually sit through it, it's minimized. If everybody wants to do something about it, it's maximized.
The more you work with people who don't mind this process or feel the need to lecture and say, ‘let me use my method,’ the smoother it becomes. The more you work with people who don't mind this process, and who don’t have the ego thing going on, or feel the need to lecture or say, ‘let me use my method,’ the smoother it becomes. It's still a process. And in that process of coherence there's a certain crystallization point at which point you say, ‘Oh, wow! Now it feels differently.’ So you need people who feel this.
LB: Can you talk more about your process orientation, and where you have run into challenges with this perspective?
AC: Another time I was in a retreat context in which all kinds of escape mechanisms were going on that didn't actually let the whole group into the process. By that point I had a whole list of these escape mechanisms mapped out so I could actually see them. It took a lot of courage for me then to say, ‘Look, guys, there's something going on that's not right.’ It's not that you suddenly become the facilitator, but rather the constellated voice from the system. That's why I say ‘transpersonal.’ It's not me, but something that wants to be said, the ‘It’ that wants to say something.
So I let it, because I knew it was coming anyway, and I knew that the whole group could benefit from it. And it was needed to prevent the kind of group cohesion in which we’re all polite with each other, but in reality we’re hindering our intentions of going deeper. And this intervention was not appreciated by those hosting, to put it mildly, even if many members of the group came up to me personally afterward to thank me for speaking up.
LB: You mentioned group cohesion just now – can you go deeper into cohesion vs. coherence territory, and pull out some nuances of those two states?
AC: Yes, and to be clear, coherence is a property of complex adaptive systems, and there’s a flow state in it which you can actually recognize and tap into. However, you cannot turn around and design an ecosystem from scratch, or create ‘instant coherence’, especially if you're working with people you don't know. That takes time. I mean the jungle had a couple of million years to evolve and get into that coherence! With a group of people, you might not have that time to hang around to wait for it to happen… but it does need certain design principles as a starting position (Dave Snowden would call it the substrate), from which something can actually happen.
Cohesion is the stickiness, it's the bonding and belonging. The ‘do you belong to us’, the us versus them thing. And then you have ritualized and codified language. That’s fine if the intention is to create a group of belonging where we hang out.
However, cohesion isn't doing you much good if your intention is action inquiry – if you want to come up with something new.
To be more specific, there’s a process I call the endothermic process. This is where our cultural differences, all of the thinking, all of the emotions, and even some of the ‘central input’ has to burn out until you get to the stage of seeing clearly. I say seeing clearly, because you have no longer any of these filters in. If that's all burned out and not facilitated away, you know you're really there.
Then a new form of language starts, and it's like there's something in the room: coherence. And that's beautiful, because it's so clear. And together with Bonnie, we coined that ‘sensory clarity.’ So we have conceptual clarity, emotional clarity, and sensory clarity. And it's such an ordinary state!
But it's also very unusual: we hardly ever go there because we're running around all the time with our filters on. I think the [Zen] Buddhists call it ‘body and mind drop’ where things are just so ordinary as they are. But then you see clearly, without any filters, and that's the space of major inquiry. You could put anything in the middle. And you know if you're in a group of let's say 12-16 people in this state you see stuff you haven't seen before when you were just in your own little box.
And there is where stuff is really happening, and prototyping is possible.
So now let's say you have this group of people, and you burn through a process that took you a couple days. Let's say you're sitting in that, and you're coming out with ideas, and you go, Oh, my God! You know we can do this new thing, we can figure out new finance systems or new sensor networks or new projects here. You can leave it at that and say, what a wonderful 3 days, or you can run with it and say, let’s try out these new prototypes. And then we maybe start a business, and we meet again with this group of 12 people, and all of a sudden you're in cohesion. And this is fine! If you want to put a business label on it and say ‘we’re the founders of this new business!’ ok – we can run this prototype and be in business mode.
However, if you want to stay in inquiry mode you have to add diversity in again, which rattles the stage, and you have to go through the whole process of getting into coherence again. You need to disturb the cohesion.
You might decide, ok, we don't want to settle in now, we don't want to become a group; instead we want to stay in this inquiry mode because we want to see new kinds of ideas. So in that case you need to add different people – but not another 12 people because that would mean a whole other long process! But add in 4-5 new people and make sure they have a different kind of thinking. That will rattle the stage again, and then you go through another process until you are in coherence with this group.
And you can just repeat and then repeat, and you stay in the loop between new chaos and new coherence by adding diversity each time. Again, it's absolutely legitimate to choose cohesion within a group, but then you have to deal with the dynamics that come with that.
LB: It’s so helpful to have this contextually-dependent perspective on cohesion and coherence, rather than the perhaps less nuanced, more common connotation of coherence as positive, and cohesion as negative.
AC: Right, it’s better to think of them as two different flavors. Cohesion can be fantastic with your group of friends – you don’t want this ‘rattling’ all the time. And staying in an inquiry mode costs energy. If you're in coherence, you can really harvest that field for new ideas. But then you might feel satiated and go into a cohesion mode. And both can be absolutely fine, depending on your intentions.
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Anne Caspari (MSc) works in complexity coaching, transformation and sensemaking – exploring what works (or doesn’t) in relational systems. She tracks underlying patterns to see what can be shifted, relieved, released or rewilded.
