Moments of Emergence
The new series from the Teams Transformed Podcast
Episode 9 of the Teams Transformed podcast
Teams Transformed is the podcast for courageous coaches, curious leaders, and anyone passionate about unlocking the true power of teams. Hosted by TCS Founder and Senior Faculty Georgina Woudstra and Allard De Jong, listen to explore transformational insights on how to coach teams with presence, depth, and emergence, diving into not just the tools, but the art of team coaching itself.
About this Episode
This Episode of the Teams Transformed podcast launches our new Moments of Emergence series.
In this episode, Georgina Woudstra and Allard De Jong shift from theory to practice, exploring what it actually takes to work emergently with teams. Moving beyond their earlier explorations of emergence as a concept, they identify the essential conditions that make this transformational approach possible and share the profound impact it's having on their coaching practice.
Key Themes Explored
From Change Agent to Awareness Agent
Georgina reframes the coach's role fundamentally:
"Instead of thinking about myself as a change agent, I think about myself as an awareness agent."
This shift places awareness as the catalyst for choice and change at the heart of emergent work. The work begins with self-awareness, with those mindful moments of feeling your feet on the floor and your presence in the room, before opening up to become aware of what's happening beyond yourself.
Contact: When It's On and When It's Off
Georgina and Allard explore the profound difference between contact being "on" or "off."
Georgina describes how often people in teams seem to be missing each other, caught in their own heads thinking about what they want to say rather than being energetically available to others. Real contact means being prepared to be influenced by what others are saying, being present to them, and creating the conditions for doing work together. Without this depth of contact, transformational work becomes nearly impossible.
The Practice of Relational Empathy
Empathy emerges as more than a nice-to-have quality; it's an active, challenging skill that requires tearing down any walls between self and other. Allard describes allowing yourself to "really receive them 100% without judgment and projection... to really feel what they're feeling." Both hosts acknowledge how difficult this becomes when someone speaks about something we don't like or that triggers us and how it requires constant practice.
Attuning to the Ever-Changing Process
The hosts emphasise attention to process over content, moving beyond tracking everything that's said to noticing what's happening interactionally between people. Allard introduces the concept of "attuning to emergence" - recognising the impermanent, ever-changing nature of group process. This reframes high performance not as a destination where teams arrive and stay, but as a living, vibrant experience continually shifting in response to changes in membership, climate, and external pressures.
Presence as Atmosphere and Intervention
Allard offers a striking metaphor for presence: it's like an atmosphere that each person brings with them, beyond their name, title, or occupation. This atmosphere - how you feel in someone's company and what that makes possible in the relational field - becomes a powerful intervention tool.
Georgina describes building range between evocative presence (creating safety, opening things up) and provocative presence (inspiring change, disturbing in a way that can be received, naming what hasn't been named).
The Art of Deepening and Elevating
Rather than moving on to the next item or task, emergent work requires the skill of either deepening or elevating conversations. The hosts introduce the mantra "the slower we go, the more we know"
This challenges the common team resistance to slowing down, the pull toward speeding up and crunching through more tasks, when actually learning and transformation require teams to slow down and get into greater contact with each other.
Speaking from the Here and Now
Drawing from relational mindfulness work, Allard introduces the guideline "speak the truth" - not absolute truth, but your truth in the moment.
What's true for you here and now becomes an invaluable way to deepen conversation. Georgina notes the complexity here: speaking your truth at a philosophical level may be easier than speaking your truth about how you're experiencing relationship, how someone's communicating with you in this moment, or how you're feeling where there's conflict. These are practices not just for coaches but for teams.
The Cost of Missing Emergence
Through a powerful client story, Georgina illustrates the impact of this work.
A team leader facilitated her own two-hour away day with no predetermined output, just the intention to get back into contact, get aligned and connected.
In those two hours, they discovered tensions, dynamics, assumptions, frustrations, and judgments that had been playing out for a long time in power dynamics and tribal arguments. They cleared away the noise and disruption, emerging much more aligned and clear. The leader's courage to hold her team in a different way, creating a different space, came from her own one-on-one coaching experience
Key takeaways
🎯 Essential Conditions Framework: Awareness, contact, relational empathy, attention to process, presence, and the ability to deepen/elevate conversations all work together to make emergence possible.
🔄 Process Over Content: The power lies not in tracking everything said but in what's happening interactionally between people: the dynamics, the field, the here and now.
⏱️ The Slower We Go, The More We Know: Transformation requires resisting the pull to speed up and instead creating space for teams to slow down and make genuine contact.
💫 Presence as Intervention: Your atmosphere, how people feel in your company, and the range you can offer between evocative and provocative presence becomes a powerful tool for influence.
🎤 Speaking Your Truth: Moving from pre-thought and pre-known content to what's true here and now deepens conversation and enables real work.
📊 The Richness of Here and Now Data: Teams don't need more data than what's present in the aliveness of the current moment - there's extraordinary richness available when we attune to it.
🌊 Opening to What Wants to Find You: Rather than only looking for what we think we need to find, emergent work means opening up to whatever wants to find us and trusting there's something seeking us in every moment.
Why listen?
This episode offers practical guidance for coaches wanting to move from conceptual understanding of emergence to actual practice. Georgina and Allard ground abstract principles in real coaching moments, sharing the profound impact this work is having on their practice and their clients' teams.
They make a compelling case that we miss so much in pre-planned conversations with heavy agendas - we only see what we're looking for rather than opening to what's present. The episode reveals emergence not as ethereal theory but as practical, transformative work that creates lasting, sustainable impact.
The conversation concludes with an exciting announcement: future episodes will feature other team coaching practitioners sharing their own moments of emergence, broadening the conversation beyond just Georgina and Allard to create a movement of doing deeper, more transformative work.
About your hosts
Georgina Woudstra is the Founder and Senior Faculty of Team Coaching Studio, an ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC) with over 20 years of experience. Georgina is recognised globally as one of the leading lights in team coaching and was among the first coaches to receive ICF's Advanced Certificate in Team Coaching.
Allard De Jong is a seasoned leadership development expert with two decades of experience solving organisational 'people problems' and accelerating leadership development. He brings a unique perspective on transformative inquiry and divergent thinking to team coaching practice.
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