The Dance of Mapping and Facilitation – Field Building at a Global Agricultural Conference

October 30, 2025

Aldo de Moor & Nancy White

When Nancy White and I stepped onto the stage at the KM Triversary Forum 2025, a global online conference on Knowledge Management for Development, this year focused on bridging the research-practice gap, we weren’t just presenting another conference paper. We were sharing a story eight years in the making, one that began in a conference hall in Lusaka, Zambia, and that challenges conventional wisdom about how we navigate complexity.

The Zambia Conference Experiment: Where It All Began

Picture this: January 2017, Lusaka, Zambia. Practitioners and researchers from across the globe gathered for the INGENAES Global Symposium and Learning Exchange—a USAID-funded initiative designed to bridge three seemingly disparate worlds: gender equity, nutrition, and agricultural extension services. These domains still insufficiently spoke to each other, yet addressing food security and farmer wellbeing demand they work in concert. The question wasn’t just how to get people talking across these silos, but how to create lasting connections that would survive beyond the conference walls.

Traditional conferences often fail at this. Presentations happen, business cards are exchanged, good intentions are declared, and then everyone goes home. The knowledge shared mostly evaporates soon after the conference. We needed something different: a way to capture not just what people said, but the patterns of connection between their work, the wisdoms gained from their experience, and the actionable seeds they could plant back home.

This is where our dance began.

Two Partners, One Rhythm

In close collaboration with the INGENAES associate director at the time, Andrea Bohn, we choreographed an intricate interplay between two seemingly different approaches. On one side: CommunitySensor, a methodology for participatory community network mapping that visualizes the invisible web of connections, themes, and collaborations across a field. On the other: Liberating Structures, 23+ simple patterns that unleash collective wisdom through structured yet playful group interactions.

The mapping process made the field visible, turning abstract relationships into concrete nodes and connections on a collaborative network map. The group process made the field come alive, transforming conference attendees from passive recipients into active “hunters and gatherers of wisdoms and actions.” Together, they created what we call persistent sensemaking: knowledge that doesn’t just flow and disappear, but that leaves traces, creates patterns, and enables ongoing discovery.

The Three-Stage Journey

Before the conference, participants mapped their signature projects online. What are you working on? Who do you collaborate with? Which themes drive your work? These became the first layer of the map: the territory we’d explore together.

During the conference, the magic happened. Instead of traditional presentations, participants were guided into discovery and sense-making conversations. From this we harvested “wisdoms”—practical insights that emerged from project stories—and “action seeds”—concrete follow-up proposals participants could implement. These were captured in real-time and added as new layers to the living map. Sessions used Liberating Structures so participants made connections across the field, discovered unexpected synergies, and co-created action proposals.

After the conference, the map remained—not as a static document, but as a living legacy. Though the project’s organizational capacity and political priorities shifted, the networked knowledge persisted, ready to be activated when conditions allow. This isn’t just documentation; it’s infrastructure for future field building.

Why This Matters: The Value of Mapping Complexity

There’s an interesting paradox in contemporary approaches to complexity. As our understanding of complex adaptive systems – with their feedback loops, nonlinear dynamics, and emergent properties – has deepened, some voices have begun to argue that precisely because of these characteristics, we should avoid trying to map such systems. The reasoning goes that since clear relationships cannot be definitively traced in contexts where numerous influences interact dynamically and unpredictably, mapping becomes either misleading or futile.

It’s a seductive argument, rooted in legitimate caution about oversimplification. And yet, with deep conviction born from years of research and practice, we must challenge this conclusion. The argument rests on a fundamental confusion about what mapping actually does.

The Sensemaking Imperative

The critique assumes that mapping claims to predict system behavior through linear causality—to create deterministic models that tell us exactly what will happen when we pull a particular lever. But this fundamentally misunderstands the purpose and practice of participatory mapping in complex contexts. Maps are not prediction engines attempting to model causality. They are sensemaking tools that reveal tentative patterns, relationships, and leverage points that would otherwise remain invisible to individual actors working within the system. Well-designed group processes then help develop, validate, refine, extend, and inter-connect those patterns.

Thus, when we mapped the INGENAES conference, we weren’t trying to model cause-and-effect relationships that would let us forecast outcomes. We were doing something very different: revealing patterns, interrelationships, and leverage points that would otherwise remain invisible. We were creating conceptual common ground for collective understanding in a collaboration ecosystem characterized by nonlinearity, emergence, and unpredictability.

This distinction is crucial. Complex systems are indeed characterized by feedback loops, nonlinear dynamics, and emergent properties. Precisely because of these features, mapping becomes more valuable, not less. When systems are complex, stakeholders need to interpret shared visualizations to:

• Make sense of multiple perspectives and partial views

• Identify unexpected connections and patterns

• Surface gaps and redundancies in the collaboration ecosystem

• Coordinate interventions across multiple scales and domains

• Build collective capacity for addressing wicked problems

Mapping IS the Complexity Practice

The mainstream systems thinking community has long recognized that adaptive mapping approaches, featuring multiple iterations, stakeholder participation, and layered representations, explicitly address nonlinear and emergent behavior. The practice doesn’t claim to eliminate complexity or uncertainty. Instead, it creates frameworks for working with complexity and for leveraging the collective intelligence of diverse stakeholders.

Consider the grand challenges of our time: climate change, biodiversity collapse, social inequality, food security. These are textbook wicked problems: complex, intractable, with no optimal solutions and multiple interconnected dimensions. How do we address them? Not by avoiding mapping because the systems are “too complex,” but by using participatory mapping and collaborative sensemaking as a catalyst for coordinated sensemaking and action.

Field building – the work we demonstrated in Zambia – is itself a form of systems change. By generating insights by the participants and for the participants, and making visible the collaboration ecosystem across gender, nutrition, and agricultural extension, we weren’t simplifying complexity. We were creating infrastructure for navigating it. The map became a boundary object that allowed practitioners from different domains to find common ground, discover synergies, and coordinate their efforts toward collective impact.

The Power of Participatory Approaches

What makes well facilitated mapping truly powerful in complex contexts is when it’s participatory. When stakeholders themselves contribute to creating and interpreting the map, several transformative things happen:

First, ownership emerges. The map isn’t an expert’s model imposed from above—it’s a collective representation co-created by those who live the complexity daily. This ownership is prerequisite for the map to be used, maintained, and evolved.

Second, multiple perspectives are integrated. No single actor has a complete view of a complex system. Participatory mapping weaves together partial perspectives into a richer, more nuanced understanding.

Third, the process itself builds capacity. By engaging in mapping and sensemaking together, stakeholders develop shared language, deepen relationships, and build collaborative capabilities that persist long after the mapping exercise ends.

Fourth, action pathways become visible. Participatory mapping doesn’t just describe the current state—it helps stakeholders identify gaps, opportunities, and intervention points. It moves from analysis to action.

This is why the dance of mapping and facilitation is so powerful. Facilitation ensures authentic participation. Mapping provides persistent structure. Together, they create what we need most when facing complexity: collective sensemaking capacity.

The Presentation

At the KM Triversary Forum, we shared the story of how this methodology played out in practice. We walked through the three-stage approach, demonstrated the interplay of mapping and facilitation techniques, and showed how the resulting collaboration map served as both a conference knowledge artifact and infrastructure for field building.

You can explore our full presentation slides to see the visual story of the Zambia case, the specific methods we used, and the outcomes achieved. The slides show the actual maps created, examples of the “wisdoms and actions” harvested, and reflections on how this approach moves knowledge management beyond repository thinking toward active field building.

de-Moor-and-White-Slides_final

Untangling the Complexity That Strangles Us

Let’s be crystal clear: we are caught in ever more messy webs of complexity that threaten our collective future. Global climate systems are destabilizing. Inequality is deepening. Natural ecosystems are collapsing. These are not simple problems to be addressed by simple solutions: they are wicked, interconnected challenges that demand fundamentally different approaches.

The temptation when facing such overwhelming complexity is to throw up our hands and declare: “It’s too complex to map. The relationships are too dynamic. The feedback loops too tangled. We’ll just have dialogue and hope for emergence.”

Yes, dialogue is essential. Yes, we must embrace emergence. Yes, we must remain humble about what we can know and control. But without structured approaches to collaborative sensemaking, we remain trapped in our individual perspectives, unable to coordinate action at the collective impact scale needed.

From Field Building to Systems Change

The Zambia case demonstrates this middle path at work. Agriculture, gender equity, and nutrition form a complex adaptive system. You can’t address farmer wellbeing without understanding gender dynamics. You can’t improve nutrition without transforming agricultural practices. You can’t shift agricultural extension without engaging the power structures that shape who gets heard.

Field building across these domains isn’t a side project, but a prerequisite for systems change. By making the field visible, by revealing hidden connections, by harvesting collective wisdom, by seeding collaborative action, we create the conditions for transformation.

This same logic applies to climate change, to public health, to social innovation, to any domain where wicked problems demand coordinated responses across disciplines, organizations, and scales. Participatory mapping combined with skillful facilitation is not a luxury—it’s a necessary condition for addressing the all-encompassing complexity that confronts us.

Dancing Forward

Eight years after the Zambia conference, the lessons remain urgent. We need approaches that can:

• Make complexity visible without oversimplifying

• Enable collective sensemaking across diverse stakeholders

• Bridge the gap between knowledge and action

• Create persistent infrastructure for ongoing collaboration

• Build capacity for coordinated intervention in complex systems

The dance of mapping and facilitation offers this. It’s not a panacea—no single methodology could be. But it’s a powerful practice that bridges conceptual rigor with practical action, that honors complexity while enabling coordination, that transforms passive knowledge sharing into active field building and systems change.

The conference in Zambia was more than a gathering. It was an experiment in collective intelligence, a prototype for how we might work together differently, from fragmented engagements towards collective impact. The maps we created were more than visualizations. They were invitations—invitations to see patterns we’d missed, to forge connections we’d overlooked, to imagine collaborations we’d thought impossible.

As we face the tangled webs of complexity that threaten to strangle our collective future—climate chaos, social fragmentation, ecological collapse—we need more than hope and dialogue. We need structured approaches to collaborative sensemaking. We need methods that help diverse stakeholders find common ground and coordinate action more effectively. We need to dance.

The dance of mapping and facilitation is not a luxury, but a necessity. The music started playing long ago. Will you join in? 🎶

About the Authors

Aldo de Moor is founder of CommunitySense and creator of the CommunitySensor methodology for participatory community network mapping. His work focuses on collaborative sensemaking in complex systems and field building across disciplines.

Nancy White is founder of Full Circle Associates and a globally recognized facilitator and expert in online and offline collaboration, retired consultant and author. She still believes that human connection is a keystone to development efforts. She is also a chocoholic.

Learn More

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to the wonderful INGENAES conference leader, Andrea Bohn, who made our dance possible.

Posted by Aldo de Moor

Leave a Reply