Tending

A guide to staying grounded in complexity

Tenderness is when you know what someone needs and you give it to them. You know because you pay attention. You allow yourself to be moved by their need.

You need empathy to be tender. Tending starts with paying attention, with understanding need. You cannot tend without that.

They are both beautiful gifts. To receive and to give. Tenderly, gently, with care.

The world feels more complex by the minute. We are all having to live within that, and navigating complexity is exhausting. Dismantling it, working through it together, honestly and with presence, is a different and valuable kind of work.

It is also work that costs. Empathy fatigue and moral injury are real. The weight of holding other people’s pain, conflict, and complexity alongside our own can take something from us. This guide is partly an invitation to protect against that, to stay embodied, to stay connected to our own aliveness, even in the hardest spaces.

I felt called to write about what it means to bring your whole self to this work. To see the humanity in others even when you will never agree. To recognise agency, in the people you work with and in yourself. To resist the pull toward numbness or detachment that complex, contested work can produce.

You cannot tend to something properly if you don’t know it well, if you don’t know what it needs. That is as true of yourself as it is of the people and processes you work with.

Inspired by thinkers like adrienne maree brown, who reminds us that how we do the work is as important as what we do, I’ve started with what embodied presence looks like in workshops and small groups, drawn from my own experience in some of the most sensitive spaces I’ve been privileged to work in.

This is the first in a series. I hope some of it is useful.

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Introduction

This guide is for anyone working with complexity. It is quite simply what I wish I had when I first started to do this work. It might resonate with anyone who finds themselves holding difficult conversations, convening others, or facilitating work where the stakes are real and the outcomes uncertain. It assumes a physical, in person/IRL setting, but many of the principles apply to online spaces too.

In complex spaces you will encounter a vast range of skills, capacity and capability among the people you are working with. You will meet an equally vast range of opinion, feeling and emotion. It would be a mistake to try to work around those things, or pretend (or hope!) they are not part of the picture.

Complexity rarely has a single owner. It sits across systems, institutions, communities and individuals, each carrying their own experience, their own expertise, and their own stake in the outcome. The temptation is to manage that complexity from the outside, to impose a process, to move quickly toward resolution. This guide invites you to resist that temptation.

What follows is not a toolkit or a step-by-step methodology. It is an honest account of what it takes to work through complexity with integrity, written from nearly twenty years of practice in sensitive and contested spaces.

The central argument is simple: complexity has to be shared. Working through it together, genuinely together, means everyone feels heard, listened to, and supported both within the process and within what comes after. Not despite the difficulty of that, but because of how you choose to move through it.

This guide will not do the work for you, but it can accompany you as you learn to do it yourself.

A note on position and power

This guide assumes a degree of permission: to slow things down, to name what you are noticing, to deviate from an agenda when something important surfaces. Not everyone will have that freedom.

If you are facilitating from a junior role, without formal authority, or in a context where expectations are tightly managed, some of what follows may feel risky or out of reach. That does not mean the principles don’t apply. It means they may need to be practised more quietly, more subtly, or in ways that are less visible.

Working through complexity is about how you show up, how you listen, what you choose to notice, and what you decide to legitimise. Those things remain within your influence even if your power is limited.

This guide is an invitation, not a prescription. Use what is useful and possible where you are. Leave the rest for another room, another time, or a moment when your position allows you to do more.