Stuckness.

In a recent Zoom conversation about ‘breakthrough’ we – Gareth Evans and Ty Francis PhD – paused when a theme emerged about the experience of ‘stuckness’. We both related to and felt energised by this concept and decided to explore it together more formally through a written conversation conducted by email, that forms this article.

Ty

I think that we can all identify times in our lives when we have felt ‘stuck’. It’s that experience of being unable to move from a particular situation or state; of being out of touch with our agency and unable to change anything; of feeling confined, trapped or caught somehow in something that we cannot affect or control. ‘Stuckness’ is a state where progress feels impossible despite our best efforts… The sense of being stuck seems so pervasive today.  While I can own some of this in my current private experience, I also see it manifesting throughout our wider organisational, national and international fields.

I’m drawn to three different and interconnected perspectives on stuckness. First, that it is a systemic rather than individual phenomenon. Second, rather than being a ‘dead end’ experience it could be a threshold experience to breakthrough – providing a gateway to a deeper understanding of something vital that is trying to emerge; and third, that constellations theory and practice could be a bridge between stuckness and breakthrough. To begin to unpack this, let’s take the first of these insights…

At its core, systemic stuckness occurs when the elements of a system – people, processes or patterns – are misaligned or when unresolved histories continue to exert influence. For example, an organisation struggling with chronic employee turnover may unknowingly perpetuate a culture of mistrust seeded by past leadership. Similarly, a family grappling with recurring conflicts might carry intergenerational burdens that silently dictate present dynamics. These issues often lie beneath conscious awareness, making them resistant to conventional problem-solving approaches.

Usually, the felt experience is interpreted as a personal deficiency. It’s as though “I am stuck” rather than “Stuckness is a feature of the field right now which is affecting me as much as I am affecting it.” While this latter reading of stuckness is less common, from a systemic perspective stuckness is deeply relational. The pervasive inertia that characterises stuckness is not due to a lack of individual effort or desire but arises from unseen dynamics that shape the systems we inhabit. Whether it’s a family unit, a workplace, or a political, economic or social network, systems carry hidden patterns, silent loyalties, and unresolved tensions that bind their members, sometimes to the detriment of individual and collective growth and harmony.

Stuckness is deeply relational. The pervasive inertia that characterises stuckness is not due to a lack of individual effort or desire but arises from unseen dynamics that shape the systems we inhabit

Gareth

As a build on your starting position, I’d also agree that we can consider stuckness as a way for the system to signal its need for something else to be included, attended to, or met with awareness and a willingness to allow it to unfold something for us and perhaps in us…

Is there something about naming stuckness as being a function of the field – that which can organise and frame, even if this can become an overly narrowing frame if we struggle to be in 'right relationship' to stuckness? Is there something about unsticking our relational connection to stuckness so that we can be soft with it as a precondition to working with it? I'm thinking about how we have to add water to clay in order to soften its form so that it can be re-formed anew... 

I want to ‘set up’ stuckness also as one element within a potential dynamic pairing which I think can itself become a way of remaining stuck – that of seeing stuckness in relation to (a need for) movement. To be stuck is perhaps not to be moving in this regard.  And yet, when we consider the value of pausing as a necessary condition that helps us become ready for what comes next, stuckness can be met differently as a place of potential energy held in useful abeyance. 

Ty

Yes. Your point reminds me of some very early systemic theory from Peter Senge1 in The Fifth Discipline. He talked about ‘creative tension’ – the productive discomfort that propels us to bridge the gap between where we are and where we want to be.

In the creative process, this tension (which can often feel like a frustrating kind of stuckness, in my experience) is an essential driver. It encourages exploration, experimentation, and risk-taking. Artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, and innovators often encounter creative tension when striving to bring something new into existence. For example, a novelist might feel the pull between their vision of a completed manuscript and the scattered notes and unfinished drafts on their desk. This tension drives the iterative process of refining ideas, drafting and revising.

Senge’s illumination of systemic work as creative has perhaps been elided as Constellations (as one form of systemic enquiry) has become popular. The importance of Constellations as a healing modality cannot be under-estimated, but its creative (or more accurately, co-creative) possibilities are rarely discussed. And this perhaps links to my second point which you are also resonating with and expressing differently – that stuckness stands at the threshold of breakthrough, if we can find the right relationship to it. 

Gareth

I remember with fondness my early resonance with the idea of creative tension too, when I first read Senge as a fledgling OD practitioner.  I think framing stuckness as being a systemic phenomenon is a useful reframe in itself, and perhaps something that might help people to get a little more unstuck in relation to what seemed stuck before.  Senge’s creative tension – where we are pressing the brake down even as we simultaneously ‘rev’ the accelerator – relates to my sense of stuckness as being in a polarity relationship with movement. I see stuckness and movement as being parts of a wider circuit seeking the relational capacity to include, hold and value each for themselves, in relation and within the other (a yin/yang coupling that can reframe stuckness as reception, and movement as conception).

I see stuckness and movement as being parts of a wider circuit seeking the relational capacity to include, hold and value each for themselves, in relation and within the other

And this is where we can circle back to constellations and its ability to expand the ‘small circle’ space that holds stuckness and movement in a tight squeeze together and move out into a ‘larger circle’ space that allows some room to breathe, to embody, to literally and symbolically make movement a part of the inquiry as we spatialise what may be holding stuckness and offering movement both, in a novel relational context. In this we can invite stuckness to find and take its proper space in the context of system and self, and begin to move around it, step into it, find its feeling and come to know something of its offer toward what’s possible. Perhaps this can happen most usefully when we stop trying to make something happen and force a change, and instead take a moment, root down and give stuckness a chance to show us its deeper purpose – what we may understand as an embodied inner movement of meaning.

And then, what if we do what constellating allows us to do so usefully – get creative and bring in some additional elements and increase the scope of relational coordinates in play?  One way we can do this is to use a form of Structural Constellation known as the Tetralemma, which in turn draws on much older principles rooted in Buddhist philosophical inquiry and the notion of the fourfold negation. The Tetralemma invites us to take a point of inquiry or challenge and then frame it in relation to its perceived opposite – as one dynamic pair (the one and the other) and then create a second dynamic pairing by setting up ‘both’ (the one and the other) as a 3rd position and ‘neither’ (the one nor the other) as a 4th position.

Imagine this as four points of a diamond and you can set this up as a situated space within which to explore, embody, feel into sensation and come to know something different and potentially useful.  Already we have moved beyond the strictures of oscillating between one side of a polarity and the other and stepped into the creative tension of sensing into what it means to hold both at the same time, as well as neither at the same time. I think this second pairing invites a step-change movement whilst the pattern of moving from one space to another begins to create a type of iterating process that paradoxically begins to usefully squeeze and constrain whilst at the same time expanding and loosening – is this what being in creative tension feels like?

This set of four coordinates invites a different way of coordinating itself, a way of holding our question differently so as to find new angles and direction in which to explore and expand… but wait, there is a 5th position that is outside the diamond we can now bring into view – the systemic position of ‘none of this and not even that’ which you, Ty, call ‘the wildcard’ and which can be a space for being with as-yet-unimagined possibilities… Such a 5th position is adjacent to the other 4 and yet located in its own space, both connected and uncoupled at the same time…

 So if we were to offer people a Stuckness Tetralemma to play with, perhaps with an issue they are rubbing up against and feeling the friction around, we may invite them to set it up like this and then offer them the chance to step in, sense in, stick with what arises (so that stuckness can find new shape and substance) and then make a move, and another, another and finally another that by that point they may well be unravelling all sense of what seemed stuck and what may have had movement, ready then for it to reweave itself into something other and useful, and systemically right, true and strong…

Ty

I’m excited by your adaptation of the Tetralemma constellation. Constellations work always offers a profound lens to illuminate systemic entanglements, fostering insight and transformation. Through the lens of constellations, we can navigate the complex interplay – what you call the movements – of visible and invisible forces, unlocking the potential for transformation. When applied to what might seem like personal dilemmas your use of the Tetralemma offers a profound reminder: when systems align, movement becomes not only possible but inevitable.

But you’ve leapt (rather elegantly) to solution. I’d like to bring us back for a moment to an under-explored aspect of stuckness that we’ve shared thinking on before… I was struck some time go by Stephan Hausner’s statement2 that “the fundamental precondition for creating connection is the healing of trauma.” I think he means connection to ‘flow’ rather than simply connection to another person or group. Similarly, Philippe Bailleur3 titled his book on organisational trauma, ‘Stuck’. It seems incontestable to me that some aspects of stuckness undoubtedly relate to either or both personal and organisational trauma. Yet trauma cannot be described in the terms we’ve alluded to earlier in this conversation, as ‘creative tension’. It is an entirely different category of ‘stuck’ experience.

How then do we intervene? I would be extremely circumspect about using a Tetralemma Constellation to explore trauma. In fact, in an organisation I would almost never use any constellations form (neither structural nor phenomenological) although I would draw heavily on Constellations theory and use some constellatory micro-practices as part of a wider arc of interventions when working with organisational ‘stuckness’. In line with our previous thinking4 there is an optimal sequence of activities to work with organisational trauma: from acknowledgment to meaning-making, to capacity-building and finally to co-creation.

There is undoubtedly ‘breakthrough’ involved here, but in a form that is more attenuated to the client’s context and circumstances.

At its core, what a constellation does is to enlarge our frame of reference about a situation. We feel stuck when our understanding of our situation is too narrow and needs to be enlarged

Gareth

I think when we sweep in the notion of stuckness as a function of the system we will often have to attend to issues of trauma – be they personal, interpersonal, organisational and/or belonging to other-than-organisational systems. In this, we do need to bring an additional sensitivity to how we invite people to be with and explore their experience. I think we may also have to ‘know our place’ in relation to what – as organisational practitioners – we can ethically and skilfully work with when it comes to working with trauma. 

My sense with this then, is that we have to bring ‘Time’ as an organising frame into view. Stuckness often has an orientation to time (past trauma may be a ‘frozen’ stuckness at a particular point in one’s timeline). I may be stuck as a function of what was, as much as by what currently is, and equally by an inability to bring imagination and a sensing of what’s possible to what could be (as a consequence of the whirlpool energies of the past and the present). However, if we can respectfully attend to time as well as form as ‘holding frames’ for stuckness and tend to its energetic quality in the here and now while simultaneously holding space to attend to its history (perhaps even beyond us) – its shape, feel and form – we might find how to work with it in such a way as to honour its intention: perhaps that of signalling something that has become uncoupled (even temporarily) from the flow of life’s energy (life as a river – ‘kawa’ in the Japanese sense of this), and work with it to bring things back into flow.

It may not always be appropriate to reach for the constellating toolkit and ‘whip out’ a set of felt shape ‘place holders’ or invite everyone to stand up and find their place in relation to (fill in the appropriate word for whatever will go onto) the piece of paper to be placed in the centre of the room, etc., but I wonder if instead we might shrink our ambitions and do systemic work with the micro-expressions of the stuckness itself… be with it, sense into its current shape and function, invite it to show itself from a place of attention, welcome and honouring? Collaborate with it to show us what needs to move systemically as a precondition for it being willing to allow us to get up and moving again?

I think that when we meet stuckness with a certain sense of warmth and openness to its gifts (albeit initially experienced as ‘terrible gifts’) we can relocate our relationship to its presence and work with it – perhaps then we free up the necessary movements in our relating to its insistence on standing still. Can it become a fixed point from which we can then navigate?  Circle round it and see its value and wonder and shape from all angles, all directions, all possible starting points? A paradoxical ‘true north’ that helps us (re)find our bearings – if only we can bear to be with what feels initially so damned difficult and seemingly unhelpful for just long enough for it to show us something new and unexpected…

Ty

I like what you are saying here, as it reflects my sense of ‘acknowledging’ rather than rejecting our experience. In Constellations terms, ‘stuckness’ could be conceived of as a ‘pole’ – the term structural constellations theory has for non-human ‘givens’ of our existence. For instance, ‘Death’ is a pole and when we set up a representative for Death in a constellation the experience of standing in that place is nothing like the ‘Hammer Horror’ fantasy: usually Death is experienced by representatives as benign and peaceful. So, opening to the experience of stuckness as a ‘given’ of human existence could, by itself, reframe and transform our experience of it and create a shift – what you describe as ‘movement’ and what I might tentatively call a ‘breakthrough’.

Gareth

Indeed. Stuckness forces us to confront the edges and boundaries of our sense of ‘certain knowing’, It literally reveals an experience of no longer knowing enough – as we are unable to move forward with what we already know, value and perhaps covet. When we become stuck, we have reached the limits of the known’s usefulness, hit the edge and come undone. Stuckness in this regard forces us to contend with the impending approach of the unknown; we have to counter (the habit) of the known so as to encounter something unknown (as yet) so as to go beyond the edges of what we can usefully know and do and imagine from the boundedness of our current reality position.  In this sense, maybe it is functional from time to time to become stuck, moored, run aground, beached…

When we become stuck, we have reached the limits of the known’s usefulness, hit the edge and come undone

Ok, perhaps it is time to bring these word-wanderings to a conclusion?  Begin to consolidate what we have set out, stitched and woven together and held up for all to see.  I wonder if an example of my work with stuckness would help ground and anchor this thinking some more? 

Case Study: Coaching Systemic Stuckness from an Embodied ‘Sensing Into…’

I worked with a senior clinical leader to explore a situation of stuckness that lived at all three levels of a system (personal, interpersonal and organisational). The issue he attended with was around how to contend with targeted attacks and intentional undermining from colleagues in a busy, demanding clinical service. The issue seemed to reside squarely in the personal and interpersonal spaces – at least, this was what was ‘live’ and causing distress when we first met together. However, as I explored the context during our first conversation, I began to wonder about what else might be in play…

At first, we attended to the experience of ‘what was and is’. We took time to be with the experience of stuckness he was feeling – which was something we edged toward over a couple of sessions. We then moved from the personal sense of stuckness and frustration to include a sensing into what felt most stuck in the relational space with colleagues (which itself was a move of opening up to the truth of the place he had held and been holding on to in the conflictual relational exchanges). From this we went on to explore what seemed most stuck organisationally (we came to understand issues about place, authority and unattended-to past experiences were alive in the wider system around this service area).

These wider issues were entangling people in the relational space and creating personal stuckness, experienced as a felt-sense of paralysis and hopelessness alternating with anger and attack – stuff that was ‘left over’ in the system and unable to be ‘metabolised’ in the wider system at that time. Working with this understanding allowed us to attend to and honour the value in the stuck experience and what it signalled as being in play contextually. As we came to a felt-sense knowing of this, it released something for this senior leader – an awareness that he was in fact holding something for the system (he was the one who could most ‘stick with’ the difficulty as he had the requisite emotional and relational awareness to think, feel and in time, move with the energy of what was stuck and needed attending to and acknowledging).

Ty

I like your ‘throw-away’ phrase of ‘sticking with’ (which usually has a positive connotation of strength and resilience and demonstrates agency) as opposed to ‘feeling stuck’ (which usually has a negative valence of being a victim of a situation). I’m also interested in what you don’t describe here – how unsticking the senior leader might have relaxed and moved something in the wider organisation. Perhaps it didn’t in a causal way, but my experience is that when senior leaders at the top of a hierarchy gain insight and energy, things move elsewhere in their purview. In this sense, a transformational insight for the senior leader might have precipitated a transformation in the organisation?

You describe this as a coaching conversation but for me it is also a great example of what I call ‘constellating without the constellation’. At its core, what a constellation does is to enlarge our frame of reference about a situation. We feel stuck when our understanding of our situation is too narrow; we feel a greater sense of spaciousness and possibility when our understanding is enlarged. A constellation is a beautiful way of supporting an enlarged frame of reference for our clients, but there is a particular way in which a constellation is unnecessary. It seems to me that you worked in a constellatory way – you could relate to and include the wider elements of the system, which enabled him to understand that his objective role and position as a senior leader involved the capacity to ‘stick with’ even though, at the subjective level of him as a man, he felt stuck.

As I articulate this, I am beginning to see that the polarity may not be as you initially described it – as ‘stuckness/movement’ but as stuckness/sticking-withness’? Perhaps this recasting of the polarity carries more possibility for transformation as it restores a sense of dignity and agency to the client, and gets us as intervenors around the trap of intentionally trying to create movement? I think when coaches try to ‘nudge their clients towards movement, it can be a trap because if we ‘rescue’ our stuck clients (client as victim) by trying to move them on from a situation (situation as persecutor) we enter the dynamic with them and are in danger of creating dependency; whereas holding intentionlessness while seeing systemically keeps us away from what might be potentially entangling dynamics.

I have really enjoyed this conversation! It feels like time to pause here – not that we have exhausted the topic, but rather that I sense we have opened some new avenues for enquiry. Let’s let things sink in for a while?

by Ty Francis PhD and Gareth Evans

NOTES 

1.      Senge, P., (1997) The Fifth Discipline, the Art & Practice of the Learning Organisation. Century Business. Chatham, Kent.  

2.      Hausner, S., (2023) Personal notes taken during an international Constellations Learning Circle, 2023, Siegsdorf, Germany.

3.      Bailleur, P., (2018) Stuck. Dealing with Organizational Trauma. Het Noorderlicht, Amsterdam.

4.      Francis, T., Moir, E., Evans, G. and Roques, A., (2022) A Framework for Working with Organisational Trauma. Meus WhitePaper. Cardiff/Bristol UK. Available at www.meus.co.uk