Hanna Mantila and Liene Kupca
Pluralist approaches in systems design rely on a prior condition: what matters can be expressed, articulated or represented. Through facilitation, participants are supported in naming perspectives, mapping relationships, and co-creating shared artefacts. However, much of what shapes organisational life resists articulation. Informal alliances, loyalty conflicts, knowledge of gatekeeping, unspoken expectations, and power dynamics operate alongside formal structures. These dynamics are often sensed before they are named and experienced rather than explicitly communicated. While pluralist methods emphasise the inclusion of multiple voices, they tend to privilege what can already be expressed.
This paper shifts attention towards conditions under which perspectives emerge, including the role of silence, absence, and affect in structuring interaction. Drawing on organisational and social theory, and particularly Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, we focus on moments where “meaning collapses”, where experience cannot readily be integrated into existing frames. These dynamics are approached not as hidden perspectives to be surfaced, but as pre-symbolic phenomena that resist stable representation while still shaping systemic patterns.
The paper proposes a compositional approach to facilitation that treats what is felt, spoken, and unsaid as co-constitutive elements of systemic experience, and introduces a workshop as a practical vehicle for developing facilitation orientations adequate to this complexity.
Keywords: Facilitation, Shadows, Pluralism, Organisational behaviours, Leadership, Discomforts, Co-creation, Complex responsive processes, Abject, Interorganizational relations, Systems oriented design, Ethics