Every community of practice facilitator knows the feeling. A session that should generate genuine learning somehow doesn’t quite get there. People participate — sometimes enthusiastically — and yet something essential is missing. The shared uncertainty never quite ignites. The quiet voice never quite gets heard. The real challenge stays safely unspoken.

Often, the culprit isn’t disengagement. It’s intrusion.

Intrusion is what happens when acts of participation — however well-intentioned — undermine the conditions that make learning possible. When someone’s desire to help closes off the very uncertainty the group needed to sit with. When positional authority, however gently exercised, shapes what others feel safe to say. When a constant stream of contributions crowds out the subtle signals that carry the most important information.

What makes intrusion so difficult to work with is its paradox: it usually comes from people who care deeply. The expert who jumps in with answers, the senior person who redirects the agenda, the anxious contributor who fills every silence — all are trying to contribute. And yet the effect can quietly erode a learning space until it stops functioning as one.

Over years of facilitating social learning across sectors and continents, Etienne and Beverly have come to see intrusion not as a character flaw to be managed but as a relational dynamic to be understood — and, often, transformed. The same behaviour that intrudes in one context may be exactly what a different community needs. People who intrude at one moment can become a community’s most valuable participants once they develop awareness of what they are doing and why.

This summit is an opportunity to develop that awareness, together. We will share new theoretical thinking, practical tools including a new set of intrusion archetype cards currently in development, and — above all — the collective intelligence of a room full of practitioners who have been wrestling with these dynamics in their own work.