🎣 GoFish! Collective Reflections on Control and Emergence

✍️ This article is a co-created dialogue by the GoFish! Collective, featuring reflections from Brett Sadler, François Knuchel, Katrin Shaw, Joanna Staniszewska, and others exploring the intersection of control, emergence, and conscious leadership.

Brett Sadler:
What I’d be interested in exploring is our need for control and how it affects emergence. Much of my work centers on letting go and allowing things to unfold naturally. But there’s often resistance to this, especially from people who score high on the control scale. So I’d love to unpack where that need comes from, and whether there are ways to soften its grip. I’m open to ideas about where we might take this.

François Knuchel:
I’m not convinced control itself is the problem. We probably need to define it more carefully. There are everyday forms of control, like choosing what to eat or when to brush your teeth, that feel normal and even necessary. So maybe it’s not control we need to mitigate, but a particular kind: the kind that becomes toxic or overly rigid, particularly in social or organizational settings. What kind of control are we actually talking about?

Katrin Shaw:
That depends. Even the ‘normal’ types of control—like food or daily routines—can spin out into something harmful. I say that from experience. I grew up surrounded by control, and it gave me a sense of safety. It became the way I coped with uncertainty. The idea that things might just emerge without my input—that terrified me. I think that’s what you meant, François, when you mentioned the kind of control that needs mitigating.

Letting go of control isn’t easy. I used to constantly try to control the future. Now, I’m learning to sit with uncertainty. For example, I don’t know what’s going to happen when I move back to London—and I’m learning to be okay with that. It’s still scary. I still have nights where anxiety creeps in. But I’ve gotten better at calming myself.

I think in society, control gives us an illusion of security. At least, that’s how it’s worked for me—and for a lot of people I know.

Joanna Staniszewska:
I think “control” carries many meanings, as we’ve already said. At its core, it seems to be about wanting power over something, often, the future. But that’s tricky, because we can’t fully shape the future. Some of it is ours to influence; much of it is not.

I recently did an exercise with a group: “How much of life is up to you? How much is up to fate, God, or the universe?” People answered 100%, 70/30. My answer was, “It’s not the right question.” And that in itself was revealing. Sometimes, we don’t have to accept the framing we’re given.

So, where does the need for control come from? Possibly from a lack of trust, especially in ourselves. It’s interesting, isn’t it? We often try to control ourselves, as if that will fix things. But maybe the root is fear. Like Kat said, fear of chaos, fear of loss. And if we look at systems—governments, organizations, institutions—isn’t control often a way to guard against losing power?

So for me, the heart of the issue is fear. But I’m very curious to hear more of what you all have to say.

François Knuchel
You mentioned “control over things”—or “power over”—and I find that interesting. In sociocracy, for instance, there’s a distinction made between power over and power with. Many people seek power over others rather than power with them, and those are fundamentally different dynamics. I wonder if there’s a parallel in the language of control: could we speak of control with instead of control over? I’m not sure how that would be defined, but it’s a question worth exploring.

Another key point is that the idea that we can control things, especially nature, is largely an illusion. Yes, we can try to control our response to nature. Take surfing, for example: you don’t control the wave, but you do control how you respond to it. That distinction is crucial. Problems arise when we try to control the external source of a challenge rather than how we engage with it.

Brett Sadler
That’s a powerful metaphor, François. I think what’s important is asking: control with whom or what? We exist within systems that are larger than us—social, ecological, and organizational systems—and any action we take exists within those contexts. Trying to impose control in ways that clash with those systems inevitably causes friction.

Take our relationship with nature, for example. Much of our environmental crisis stems from humanity trying to control nature for its own benefit without acknowledging the consequences. So we now face a future that is emerging unpredictably—one that we can’t control directly, even though we helped shape it. And our default reaction is to control even more, often through mechanistic, short-sighted solutions.

Instead, we could take a systems view—stepping back and asking what the environment is teaching us. If we listened more, we might allow more appropriate, sustainable ways of living to emerge. The same logic applies within organizations. When we try to control outcomes too rigidly, we miss the opportunity to engage with complexity creatively.

That’s why I think it’s crucial to be conscious of our own need for control—how it impacts others, how it interacts with competing needs for control, and whether it’s actually helpful. If we can collectively let go of this urge and engage from a place of curiosity and inquiry, we can allow more inclusive and effective solutions to emerge.

François Knuchel
Exactly—and often control is exercised by those with power, whether it’s political, economic, or organizational. And when that control is for personal or group advantage, it comes at the cost of the collective.

Brett Sadler
That’s the root of my original question. How does our need for control affect emergence and our ability to create the best possible outcomes?

Katrin Shaw
And to build on that, I still think it’s important to ask: why do we feel the need to control at all? Even though we’ve talked about fear and the illusion of safety, I still wonder where it really comes from.

For me, I’ve had the awareness for a while that control is exhausting and limiting, and that emergence offers a richer alternative. But I don’t know if I fully understand, on a deep level, why I developed that need for control in the first place. I suspect that’s true for others too.

When I think of larger systems—economic or governmental—there’s so much control exerted, often justified as necessary. But how did it become so normal for people to exploit the planet’s resources and dismiss those trying to protect it? I struggle to understand how something like climate activism can be seen as negative. It seems many people have internalized control and extraction as normal. Why? Is it all rooted in fear and the need to feel safe? If so, where did that fear come from?

Brett Sadler
That resonates deeply, Kat. Otto Scharmer’s work touches on this—he talks about the transition from ego to eco. The ego’s job is to protect us, so the need for control and the illusion of security often originate there. But if we shift from ego-centric thinking to eco-centric thinking, we become more open to letting go of control and acting from collective awareness.

Even our economic system is an invention—man-made and malleable. We treat it like a force of nature, but we can redesign it if we choose. So part of the work, especially in organizations, is helping leaders move beyond the need to control, to let everyone contribute. That collective input can lead to far better outcomes than top-down control.

In practice, for example, I often facilitate strategy meetings where we begin with no fixed proposal. Instead, we invite a range of perspectives and allow ideas to emerge. Only after that do we narrow the focus and decide on actions. The result is often a solution that no one person could have imagined alone, and certainly not something you could have imposed from the start.

So it’s not that control is always bad. It’s about discerning when it’s appropriate and noticing when our need to control is really about fear or habit.

François Knuchel
Yes—and those unintended consequences you mentioned stem from this exact issue. When we control from an individual perspective without seeing the larger system, we act blindly. Control that lacks systemic awareness inevitably creates distortion.

That’s why including diverse perspectives is so important—not just for fairness, but because it gives us a fuller picture of the whole. And there’s a subtle distinction between control and agency. Agency is about the ability to act, to make things happen—not to control others, but to engage meaningfully in shaping outcomes.

Joanna Staniszewska
That’s an important point. For me, control was once an outcome of fear, but not only that. As a business owner, I didn’t lack trust in my team. I “permitted” them to make mistakes. But I didn’t give myself or “my” organization that same permission. I held on tightly because I felt I couldn’t afford for anything to go wrong.

What I learned was that my control, however well-intentioned, invaded other people’s space. It led to disengagement. And when I finally let go, something amazing happened: people stepped up. They had always been capable. But my control had been obscuring that.It wasn’t until that space to be reclaimed that we could really see our competence, our commitment.  It’s always been there. But now it was not “my” company anymore. In letting go, I  experienced my own transformation.