To some degree, everyone is called to care for what we’ve been naming the underlayer or the relational web in this series of essays. But, some people dedicate themselves more specifically to it. We like to use the term process stewardship for this function.
A function across many forms
Practically, it can be exerted through different formal positions: a leadership or support role for a specific project, coordinating a multi-stakeholder process, or more loosely holding the field while offering personal and collective support in the form of coaching, training, facilitation, consulting, etc. The roles and structures are different, but the function itself remains very similar across those roles.
Process stewardship is not a new field of practice. Facilitation traditions, community organising, and, of course, many contemplative and indigenous practices all have versions of it. There is also growing interest in this area today, under one name or another, particularly among all the people who ‘work with systems’: facilitation methods that liberate collective intelligence, grounding practices, mindfulness, or somatic awareness. In short, something is getting refined, valued, and validated.
A field without a shared understanding
Relational skills, personal grounding and systemic awareness tend to be cultivated in separate communities, through different methods and practices, through separate pathways. This diversity can be an abundant resource. When worked with intentionally, it can even become a great source of strength, where we see ourselves as a thriving ecosystem, made of unique parts all complementing each other. The field, however, is far from being coherently organised. Without a shared understanding of how the parts belong together, what animates them, and how they complement each other, process stewardship as a practice and a discipline remains poorly understood and articulated. Meanwhile, the work itself remains undervalued and under-resourced as a ‘job to do’.
It is important to notice this because, in a time of compounding crises, the need for people who can do this relational work, tending to the underlayer, is likely to grow. Simply put, we’re in desperate need of good process stewards, many of them. It is also important to notice that process stewardship is a craft that needs time to mature. Meaning, if we do want process stewards who are able to do the work needed, we cannot train them overnight: we will need to figure out who already has adjacent skills and aptitudes, and how to help them ripen. If the function is not well understood, how will we train and support the many people needed to perform it? How will we nurture those who have already developed their skills to make sure they can flourish and pass them on? And how will we distinguish the best people to appoint in those roles?
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Two dimensions of the work
The first step to addressing those questions is to look at what the work actually requires. For now, we might distinguish two dimensions, not unrelated but very different.
The first is a relatively defined set of skills, centring around facilitation and hosting, systems literacy, and relational competence, as well as a solid baseline of self-awareness and personal mastery. All of this can be relatively well taught, learned and certified through training programs.
The other dimension goes deeper. It is to do with what we called extended attentional capacity in essay 1 of this series: holding awareness of what is unsaid, what is emerging, what is being avoided, or what power dynamics are operating beneath the visible surface, all of this at the same time, while managing various logistical or program details, and without knowing with any certainty whether you are doing it right. This type of attention is total, continuous, and operating across multiple registers at once. The closest analogy to what this demands might be simultaneous interpretation in high-stakes contexts. The interpreter has to negotiate layers of meaning across different linguistic and cultural worlds in real time, something with much at stake, on matters they may not fully understand, and they cannot pause the speaker to catch up. This capacity can be trained and refined, but it is closer to some sort of deep mental fitness than a defined skillset; it often comes from experience, and as such, it cannot be readily stamped in the form of a certificate after a short training course.
Beyond methods and credentials
If the process stewardship skillset has those two dimensions, we face a problem of discernment. We're at risk of mistaking fluency in the language of systems transformation, the frameworks, the methods, or the aesthetic of deep work, for the inner capacity to do the work, to embody and act from a place of visceral knowing. Worse, we might favour credentials from established institutions of learning or experience recognised in the legacy system over on-the-ground experience that appears marginal or elusive, but is far closer to the deep skills required of the work.
This is all the more likely as the people who have most genuinely developed the attentional skills needed for process stewardship tend to carry significant uncertainty about their own competence. This is not false modesty: it is an accurate response to work that offers almost no direct external confirmation, and where you keep being brought to your learning edges, meaning: if you’re serious about the work, you’re almost always operating at the limit of what you can do or understand. Meanwhile, people who have developed the visible markers of systems work – vocabulary, methods, certificates, job titles, social positioning – without the underlying attentional capacity may carry and project considerably more confidence.
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A cost to missed recognition
If we’re not careful about those two dimensions then – let’s call them facilitation methods and attentional skills – and the critical role of the second, we may well appoint and elevate people who are technically accomplished but not yet properly seasoned, or missing something essential. In turn, this carries consequences.
It might be that the person appointed ends up underperforming for a period, at the expense of the system, while they build up the needed attentional capacity, but eventually rise to the function: this is the best-case scenario. But the person appointed may not even be aware of their own gaps. With no reliable feedback from the system around them, they might leave a system stuck at a surface level of transformation, crowding out the possibility of deeper work, sometimes for years.
Additionally, whoever in the system had built more of the needed attentional capacity, guided by a calling to care for the relational web, might have missed out on a position of responsibility. They may continue to care for the whole, but unrecognised, and from a weak position. Or they may burn out and give up, weakening the whole, and failing to transmit their knowledge and experience to the next generation. In short, every time we appoint someone based on formal credentials rather than deep lived experience and embodied competence, we push back the moment when attentional skills are fully recognised, across the system, and therefore we delay the deeper changes we say we wish for.
Learning to discern what matters
This essay is a call for discernment in the way we recognise and entrust process stewards. It suggests that the way we assess process stewardship should attend less to what people know and more to how they hold uncertainty. Less to the frameworks they can deploy and more to the quality of attention they bring to a room. Less to their track record of visible success and more to what they have been willing to not-know, strip away, let go and surrender to. Less to the list of their achievements, more to the coherence they have cultivated through the deliberate way they speak, hold themselves, show up, and intentionally intervene, step back or move through situations over long arcs of time – in short, how they ‘dance with’.
Building shared ways of recognising the work
We need better models to recognise these capacities and track them across the many layers where they manifest: sense-making frameworks that are open, collaboratively developed, and available across the field rather than owned by any single organisation or certification body.
Do you know these people, or recognise them in your field? Do you see the gap in how they are acknowledged, celebrated or appointed to positions of responsibility? From your experience and observations, what works, and what doesn’t?
This essay is part of a six-part series by Luea Ritter, Dr Julien Leyre, Claudian Dobos, exploring the underlayer of systems transformation work. See the previous essays below:
Introduction What Does The World Require of Us?
Essay 2 Building the Connective Tissue
