The following micropractices are quoted from Greg Walkerden 'Felt knowing: a foundation for local government practice' in Keen et al (eds) 2005 Social Learning in Environmental Management: Building a Sustainable Future (Earthscan, London).

Heeding uneases, inklings, ...

Uneases, inklings, intimations are important resources for us as practitioners. If we take time with them, slow down, and gently let them unfold and become clear, we allow something that we felt was important but at first didn’t know how to articulate fully, clearly, to become explicit. In meetings, for example, I often sit with something that doesn’t feel comfortable – companioning my unease in a gentle, patient, curious way – until it becomes clear to me what I am unresolved about, and then I raise it for discussion. Taking time to get clear is a better use of everyone’s time, and far better practice than shying away from a difficulty.

Allowing space and stillness to arise …

It is easy to grow impatient with anxieties and uneases, and rush to address them in a way that doesn’t keep faith with what we implicitly know. Personally I create space for stillness, letting things come in, allowing things in, and taking them in. Sometimes this occurs in response to some difficulty … at other times it is a kind of pausing and taking stock. One of my own processes for reviewing how my team and I are progressing in our ecosystem management work is to sit, with a notebook to hand, and allow issues to come in their own time, writing them down in a pattern which reflects how the issues have given rise to each other: placing a central issue (concern, potential, context, …) in the middle of the page, then around it, linked by threads that grow longer and longer, the issues that come out of it. My way of writing is an adaptation of Gabriel Lusser Rico’s ‘clustering’ (Lusser Rico 1983).

Feeling for fresh edges

When I am in situations where I know we need to do more … to innovate, to find a creative way forward … I quite self-consciously feel for the fresh edge of something. For example, when I was considering the long-term conservation needs of a threatened tree species (which has a lifetime of at least 250 years) I sat with how action now could help it. From this came an explicit emphasis on increasing the ‘ecological permeability’ of our urban and agricultural landscapes: providing more rather than less support for gene flow through these landscapes. This has led to an increased emphasis on backyard planting of native plants, ecological restoration of drainage lines, and enhancing the conservation values of urban bushland.

Asking our felt knowing questions

Sometimes I explicitly ask my felt knowing questions. This is like asking: ‘What have I forgotten?, my wallet?, some papers?’, when one has something on the tip of one’s tongue. When trying to remember we often rush our felt knowing and try to push it to reveal its answers. If we are spacious and allowing, we give what we know, but can’t yet say, a better chance of crystalising, explicating.

In ecosystem management I often find it helpful to ask myself the following questions about a possible course of action:

• Does this make political sense? (That is, will it work when we include our community and our politicians in the picture?)
• How will this sit with our professional colleagues and our managers? (Does my sense of what we should do shift in some way when I include them in the picture?)
• Is there anything technical that I am vague about, or uneasy about, that I should check out?

Political, managerial, technical. In each case I put my question to my felt sense of the situation and I listen. I allow my felt knowing lots of time to respond with what it knows.

I find this set of questions particularly helpful because when talking to a professional colleague, thinking together in a technical frame, I find we sometimes neglect the political or institutional contexts. Similarly when talking with our local politicians, we sometimes miss technical intricacies that shift a ‘decision space’ profoundly. And so on.