This is the second in a series of six blog posts excerpted from the introduction to Gina Campbell’s book, Panning for Your Client’s Gold.

Fundamental to the processes David Grove developed is the respect in which he held the client’s wisdom and the confined role he assigned for the coach, therapist, or other helper or healer. In Clean processes, the client, not the professional, is the expert on himself. The professional is there to hold the space and facilitate the client’s exploration. Grove would surely never have assigned so little responsibility to the facilitator and so much to the client unless he truly believed—and had seen demonstrated quite literally thousands of times in his practice—that clients have within what they need to heal.

So if the client is to get accurate information about his inner organizing structure, where does the facilitator direct him to start looking?

Top-down approaches

Helping professionals using top-down approaches start with pre-established generalities, to which a client is compared. This might mean referring to a list of categories to which the client is matched. These categories then suggest appropriate ways to diagnose and work with the client. Examples would be the DSM-V, Enneagrams, and the Meyers-Briggs Inventory.

While some practitioners adhere to their chosen framework without deviance, others use the frameworks to inform, but not dictate, what they do. In either case, a top-down approach inevitably involves applying some assumptions. If your framework has only square boxes, you will probably be looking for and asking about only what is in the square boxes. You risk missing entirely what’s outside the boxes, especially if your client isn’t consciously aware of it.

A bottom-up approach

Grove believed that to help a client learn about and help himself, he is best off working from the bottom up, that is, starting from scratch. No predetermined boxes. The facilitator encourages the client to expand his self-awareness by helping him find fundamental self-definitions: Who am I? What do I know? What do I want? What needs to change for me to get what I want? These are broad, generic questions that provide no implicit answers.

David Grove determined to make as few assumptions as possible in the way he worked. His guiding intention was to work with the client’s own content only, trusting that the client would find for himself what he needs.

Equal information employers

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Grove’s Clean processes is they are designed to work with whatever the client offers up, regardless of the kind or source of information. They are what Grove called “equal information employers.” Information may come from the past or the present or be oriented to the future. It can be a feeling, a thought, a belief, a behavior, or a gesture. It can be an image, a metaphor, or a sound. Its relevance may not be immediately obvious to you or the client. But with patience and trust in the process and in the client, what is needed will emerge.

This is the first in a series of six blogs posts excerpted from the introduction to Gina Campbell’s book, Panning for Your Client’s Gold: 12 Lean Clean Language Processes (2015)

The science of emergence

Emergence attempts to explain how a collection of individual units become complex, self-directing systems. From evolutionary leaps in nature to the growth of cities, from busy ant colonies to sensitive stock markets, self-organizing systems and patterns emerge from innumerable small interactions of the system’s parts in response to simple guiding rules, repetitions, and feedback. 

When a system reaches a level of complexity for which the existing management structure is no longer adequate, a transformation occurs. Something new, something that is more that just a sum of its parts, comes into existence. By definition, emergent features are unpredictable; there will be characteristics of the new whole that do not exist among its component parts. Thus you cannot know in advance what the “new” will be. Nor can you predict precisely if or when a shift will occur.

Shifts in organizational patterns sift down through the system. In a process termed downward causation, the original component parts that made up the system are affected by the new structure. They change because the individual’s system has a feedback loop: it learns from itself. The parts are no longer exactly as they were before.

From the micro-level of quantum physics to the macro-level of the global economy, there are numerous examples of emergence at all levels when conditions give rise to some new structure of organization. Fundamental to this concept is that the reorganizing of the system happens naturally, without needing a structural organizer from outside the system. Over the long term, the system self-regulates.

Guiding concept #1: We are self-organizing, self-correcting systems

David Grove applied emergence theory to the individual, regarding him as a system of interrelating parts with numerous bits of information, experiences, and coping strategies accumulated over the years. At any given time the system has an organizing structure, a modus operandi or way of functioning. 

When the individual has a problem, a contributing factor may be that his system’s organization is not optimized to resolve it. Healthy or helpful functioning is not a result of what the interrelating parts are; it is a matter of organization, of how the parts are interacting, which is why, for example, two soldiers with similar combat experiences may experience very different long-term effects. 

According to the principles of emergence, with enough pieces of information relating to the problem, a system with a less-than-optimal way of organizing that information will eventually find a better way. This new structure of organization leads to the clients’ having a different way of coping or managing, which can in turn, mean new choices and outcomes are possible.

For some clients, the shift filters through the system’s parts rapidly. The old structure may have proved to be so inadequate that it collapses and spontaneously disappears entirely. Other times, the new pattern of organization that emerges may incorporate some or all of the old pattern. 

Still other times, the old pattern gradually fades away. Given our mind/body system’s natural tendency to self-correct to function efficiently and beneficially, as the new structure demonstrates to the mind/body system its more beneficial, stable way of functioning, it becomes the go-to pattern of responding. 

Depending on the pressures on it, the new emergent state exists for awhile (maybe for a very long while) until some new dilemma challenges it. This creates a pressure for change, and at some point, a new order will again emerge. 

It is a dynamic process of self-correction.

So what might happen when a client’s system reorganizes? Of course it is different for each individual, depending on what’s needed. In terms of observable effects, I have had clients finally leave a job or relationship, change careers, decide to have an operation, start exercising regularly, lose weight, start Alcoholics Anonymous, have a difficult conversation, cease debilitating grieving, forgive themselves, and do all sorts of things that they had agonized over for months, if not years. Sometimes the effects are more about a pervasive feeling: a sense of relief or joy or engagement with life. Their systems evolve a new coping strategy that allows them to establish a new modus operandi.

Suggestions that come from the outside, that is, any external source such as a therapist’s or coach’s ideas or solutions, may or may not penetrate to the system level; if they do, they may not override old patterns and beliefs. David Grove maintained that comprehensive and lasting change, change that resonates throughout the individual’s entire system, requires structural reorganizing from within.

How do Grovian processes apply emergence theory?

All Grovian processes rely on the characteristics of emergent systems to naturally self-correct, even those David Grove developed before he began to study the science of emergence specifically. Grove’s intention with Clean interventions was to optimize the conditions whereby the client discovers, accesses, and accumulates information from his mind/body system, including relevant data that may have been inaccessible or unrecognized before. The processes focus the Clean facilitator on structuring the exploratory experience rather than introducing any new content. 

COMING in 2018!  My next book…