Making Space for what comes next

Making Space for what comes next

To celebrate our son’s high school graduation, we took the family to Paris and spent one week in this stunning city. We were beguiled by its many treasures, the visible and the invisible. I had spent a semester in Paris in 1996, lived in Montparnasse, and absolutely loved it. This was the first time I was to bring my family there, and I was a little nervous to be either disappointed after all these years or to overwhelm them with all my stories and places of yesteryear. But the city did not disappoint, and we all discovered our own gems.

‘Head in the Clouds’ - in the best way

Of all the experiences we had, one art installation at la Bourse de Commerce stood out, one that reverberates in me still, weeks later.The art installation is entitled Cloud #07156 by Japanese contemporary artist Fujiko Nakaya. In the wide-open Rotunda of the former commercial hub of Paris , she recreated the natural composition of fog, whereby pumps and nozzles intermittently spray micro-particles of water up into the air. Visitors walk freely around the space, interacting playfully with the cloud, getting lost and rediscovered, observing the changing perspectives of the place and the people in it. Each occurrence is somehow new, never the same. In fact, Nakaya sees her work as a “conversation” with elements that she does not control.

Standing in the middle of the Rotunda, being enveloped by the ever-changing movements of the fog sculptures, the visible was being rendered invisible (my daughter, who had just stood to my left, was no longer visible), and at the same time the fog revealed what usually escapes my perception (the space between people and things). No perspective was ever the same; each moment brought new discoveries. I was grateful for this experience as it provoked my thinking: How can I bring more of this awareness into my life? How can I pay attention to the invisible, to what wants to emerge? How present am I to the current moment, and am I able to give up my own plan and change?

The Trap of saying: “Keep It”

The experience reminded me of my days in the theater. Studying at Columbia University, our professor, artist and director Anne Bogart shared a great lesson with us. In the creative rehearsal process with actors, she warned of two dangerous words a director can say: “keep it.” 

At the time, I can remember wrestling with this idea: why wouldn’t you want to keep something that had just worked, something that was discovered, perhaps a great creative moment? With time, I understood: the moment the actor hears, “keep it,” something subtly changes. What was spontaneous and alive can now feel like a pressure to replicate. The actor starts trying to recreate the moment that had worked, be it the exact gesture, intonation, or emotion. By doing so, we are caught in an idea, we are controlling, we are no longer free and at ease in discovery. It’s the great paradox that actors, and surely many other artists, wrestle with as they create and perform. And important to note, the freedom is something that is earned, it is only available because of the rigour underneath it. Hard work, studies, practice, and preparation will have come before in order to then trust and invite the moment of discovery. 

Similar to the ever-changing clouds of the art installation, theater moments discovered in the moment are ideally ephemeral, never the same, and with that, always fresh. 

Beyond the Agenda

In our work with senior leadership teams, we also aim to enter the space of artistry in facilitation. Of course, we are prepared with the content of what wants to be accomplished, what business topics need to be addressed. We will have furnished an agenda for the two days we will have with the team. The timeline often needs to be very specific, down to the 15-minute increment. 

And then we need to free ourselves to serve the moment best. We need to read the room: What is the best dynamic, the best set-up to surface what needs to be addressed? Do we need to stay with something for another 20 minutes, or is it time to move on? Sometimes the most important intervention is a question. Sometimes it is a moment of silence. Sometimes it requires us to toss out a planned agenda item for day 2 and make room for an ‘elephant’ topic that emerged on day 1. It is about dancing with Chronos and Kairos. There is a constant calibration going on. This is part of what makes facilitation an art.

Like in art and life, there is no reproduction of the same thing. Each team has its particular chemistry and phase of development and will come to a certain topic, conversation, or exercise in a different way. 

There is no “keep it.” We are not attempting to reproduce a perfect workshop. We are trying to create the space in which the right thing can emerge, just like Fujiko Nakaya did when she created the space with her cloud installation at the Bourse de Commerce.

Losening the Grip

What does this ask of leaders? Of course, business requires structure. Leaders need to make decisions, establish direction, create accountability, and bring predictability where that is possible. There are many things worth controlling. But perhaps not everything, as the grip on control can stifle growth, hamper team trust, and hinder one’s own development. 

Over-indexing on control may lead to risk-aversion or to driving outcomes from outdated paradigms. Team relationships may suffer from parent-child patterns, where trust erodes under an unspoken contract of pleasing the leader. For other leaders, it might lead to overworking, with a slippery slope to burnout.

Loosening the grip on control does not mean letting go of leadership. It may mean practicing a different kind of leadership, one in which you are the orchestrator of a space where structure carries the outcomes, and the opening happens inside it.

What struck me about standing in the rotunda in the Paris installation was that the fascination wasn’t with the cloud itself; it was with the awareness that I would never see quite the same cloud again. And perhaps that is true of our teams, our conversations, and the work that leaders are faced with. Instead of asking, “How do I recreate this and make it happen again?” sometimes the question might be, “What can I do to create the space for what wants to happen next?”

For leaders, I offer the following questions:

• What was the last thing you encountered outside of work that changed how you saw a problem inside it?
• What topics bring out your desire to control? And how does it affect your team members?
• How attuned are you to the invisible? To what wants to emerge?
• What is the inner work you have to do to fully trust your team?
• What are three things that have recently surprised you in the most wondrous way? 

For those of you who are in the Paris vicinity, the installation is still going until September 14th, 2026 : https://www.pinaultcollection.com/fr/boursedecommerce/fujiko-nakaya

Cheers,
Oliver