This article covers the development of David Grove's Emergent Knowledge (ΣK™) and Carol Wilson's Clean Coaching which includes aspects of ΣK™.  It also looks at the differences between Clean Coaching and conventional coaching and explores some of the principles of Emergent Knowledge including a case study.

This paper presents a model that ‘joins up’ the three main phases of David Grove's work. Rather than trying to integrate the phases into a single process I have maintained the individuality of each domain and language model. I used the metaphor of ‘join up’ because David was inspired by The Horse Whisper, Monty Roberts.

If you search for 'iteration' on the web you will find precious little outside the domain of mathematics and computing. And yet iteration is commonly seen in nature as a way for organisms to grow and develop and as a change process in an increasing number of psychotherapeutic procedures. So what is iteration and how can we make use of it? These are unpublished notes written for The Developing Group.

This simple and quick technique is based on the work of David Grove. This process, known as 'Emergent Knowledge' is even 'cleaner than clean', in that the process relies mainly on repetition of the same kind of question 6 times which has the effect of adding a deeper understanding of the same kind of knowledge, until everything the client understands reaches a kind of critical mass – and a new level of understanding breaks through.

John Farrell and Karen Frederick worked extensively with David Grove and Steve Saunders in the early years of Emergence Knowledge development. Taking David’s lead, they explored minimising interaction with the client’s process using Emergent Knowledge while introducing horses into the environment. The horses roamed freely in the arena. The client incorporated the horse into their process interpreting the horse’s actions as they saw fit and recognising the horse’s reactions in their own metaphor.

The point is not to have another piece of knowledge called 'emergence'; rather it is to learn to think and operate in a new way. A way that is congruent with the subject matter: bottom-up, circular feedback loops, indirect control. While we may talk about emergence, our aim is to create conditions for you to 'think emergently'.