Process learnings from bringing Huddles to the Wasan Network

06/30/2025

About the Author

Daniel Ford is one of the Co-Directors of Huddlecraft, an organisation dedicated to building support infrastructure for peer-led change. Huddlecraft have been organising and supporting peer learning groups for the past 8 years, with a particular focus on process design and hosting practice. Huddlecraft are increasingly supporting Huddles to network behind values-aligned missions. Find out more about Huddlecraft here, or get in touch at hello@huddlecraft.com.

Background

Over the last year, we’ve been experimenting with Huddles as a complementary organising structure within the Wasan Network.

Huddles are designed as a structured process of peer learning for groups of about 8-12 people over four to six months, centred around a shared theme or inquiry. Groups design their own curriculum based on what participants bring, allowing them to pool their resources, learning and action in an emergent and unpredictable way. The potential of running multiple Huddles in parallel behind a shared mission is something we at Huddlecraft are increasingly interested in – testing how impactful they can be when networked, and what kind of support system (or ‘infrastructure’) is needed to make them hum.

Our intention was to bring a peer-to-peer (P2P) learning model to the Wasan network that could:

  • Create deeper connections and relationships throughout the network, particularly between engaged members at the core and those in the wider network.
  • Develop spaces for deeper learning and inquiry – and make progress on themes and questions that are most live or urgent for the network.
  • Build hosting, facilitation and P2P learning capacity within the community.

What we did

Our overarching process is laid out below. I’m aware how this invisibilises a lot of the work underneath these broad headings, but hopefully it serves as a good enough overview… get in touch if you’re a process nerd and want more detail 🙂 

  1. Surfacing themes: we facilitated 2 online sessions to share the project with the whole Wasan network, gauge appetite to participate and surface key themes to Huddle around. Once we synthesised the themes that emerged from these sessions, we opened them back out to the network to invite people to step in to host Huddles on them.
  2. Training hosts: we ran 2 host training sessions with 12 hosts, going into the Huddlecraft methodology, culture and their Huddle design. We went out to the wider Wasan network to seek participation in the Huddles. Thankfully, we had 117 applications to join the Huddles – a sign of the energy in the Wasan network! 
  3. Supporting Huddles: We then supported the hosts to host their Huddles, each unique to their own theme and style of facilitation. The process culminated in a cross-Huddle showcase event in April 2025, where we celebrated the rich learning, beautiful connections and emerging actions that took shape through the process. 

You can find out more about the Huddles on the Wasan network blog and a resource hub curation of their explorations on this Notion resource hub. Sorry not to get into all the amazing content here; this blog is for the process people out there and will stay focused on that!

What worked well

Before I delve into the more process-oriented stuff, I want to celebrate the Huddles that happened and the hosts that made them happen. In our shared showcase, we heard about how the Huddles fostered a strong sense of community, described as soft, powerful, deep and unexpected – there was rich personal exploration and connection that emerged. We heard how trust developed quickly in many groups, even among participants who didn’t know each other beforehand. The experience also fostered surprise, bringing knowledge not easily found in literature and showcasing diverse, fresh perspectives. People also spoke about how the process allowed for more emotions and fun than other spaces – combining lightness and depth.

We heard a number of metaphors for Huddles emerge, which give a flavour of the experience. We heard them described as a “lamp with a flickering flame”– allowing people to engage, warm themselves, and trust that outcomes would emerge without feeling forced to produce them. One was also described as a garden picnic, creating micro-spaces for exchange, and another host described theirs as when a butterfly emerges from the cocoon, allowing a safe and brave space for transformation.

People really appreciated some core components of Huddles, for example:

  • Having a clear end date was seen as powerful, offering explicit entry and exit points, which can be valuable in network participation.
  • The model provides a “deeper container” for learning, enabling participants to explore more freely within a supportive structure. It offers a lightweight “map,” allowing the process to lead to unexpected destinations.
  • The buddy system, where participants met one-on-one between main sessions, was highlighted as the “secret sauce” or “glue” that kept groups together and allowed for deeper discussions and session planning.
  • How when everyone hosts a session and has “skin in the game,” the group dynamic shifts, and participants are eager to contribute as well as receive.
  • Curating a group around a learning question provides just enough constraint for coherence, while allowing freedom for unexpected openness and discovery.

A key component of the success of these Huddles, though, was the fertile enabling conditions already inherent in the Wasan network: there was implicit trust, openness and a huge amount of commitment to – and experience in – relational approaches, which meant Huddles were a welcome structure that could serve to tease out and channel what was waiting under the surface to be released. 

Process learnings

There have been SO many learnings from this process. Below, I’ve highlighted three areas where there were particularly useful learnings about the process of doing Huddles in networks like Wasan: the infrastructure; the nervous system and hosting capacity

1/ The infrastructure: what’s a healthy balance of support and openness?

What is it? When I use the term ‘infrastructure’, I mean the structures that sit underneath the Huddles that support them to happen. We learnt a huge amount about how we would adapt the infrastructure we provide to support Huddles in this context. First to say, there was a lot of appreciation about the structures that were in place: the onboarding, the training, the Huddle design canvas, the host pod, the WhatsApp channel, the spotlights on learning and the support guides. However, we learnt a lot about balancing clarity with openness to adapt, and how that doesn’t have to be in tension. 

Simpler tools with clear space for adaptation: At Huddlecraft we often talk about this tension as ‘set vs let’ – what do we set centrally and what do we let people adapt?  In this case, we could have simplified the support structures for hosts. Some of the feedback we had was that some of the documents were overwhelming, and that’s partly because we didn’t adapt them enough from a trad Huddle format, or make it clear enough which parts are ripe for hosts to adapt. This meant that my lack of clarity (with my bias towards sharing too much and letting people take and adapt what they want) was passed through the hosts and into the Huddles too. If I was to do it again, I would provide simpler and clearer tools for the hosts to gain clarity on all the elements of a Huddle and the specific places where they can adapt it for different themes and purposes. This might look like offering three ‘archetypal’ Huddle processes, and allowing the hosts to work with a blueprint of each. The hosts also had some great practical feedback about simpler structures that would have been supportive, from simple MVP templates for potential outputs, to simplified guides for online journeys, and practical tools for weekly planning. 

More than minimum viable host training: We also learnt about what minimum viable host training looks like in this process, with 2x 2hr sessions being the shortest we’ve ever tried. I would add another session to this if doing it again. One activity we usually do is ‘play your way through the Huddle’, which we didn’t have time for in this training, and so the hosts left the training with less of a felt sense of what a Huddle is – and how they might respond to scenarios they might encounter at different stages. 

You never step into the same Huddle twice: Ultimately, we learnt how hard it is to set expectations for Huddles given how different every group is. For some, the buddy system and learning questions worked extremely well, and for others not so much. We could have been better at setting expectations, including an openness to the diversity of experiences ahead, like how sometimes it doesn’t work out (as with one Huddle on navigating transitions which never really got going) and how that can also be part of the process. 

2/ The nervous system: how to design functioning communication channels in low capacity settings? 

What is it? The next key learning for me is the critical role of a functioning nervous system across the network of Huddles. By ‘nervous system’ I mean the system of communication that sends messages across the network so we can stay aware of what’s happening in the different Huddles, and allows us to respond to emerging challenges and needs effectively. In a traditional Huddle structure, each host would have a host mentor, who can support them with live challenges, but also feed back to the other mentors and core support team about what’s happening, crowdsource support to live challenges and gauge when different interventions are needed. 

How co-hosting impacts the nervous system: In this project, there was a lot of co-hosting, which offered an extra layer of support within the Huddle, but it meant that often challenges were met within the Huddle and there wasn’t as much communication between Huddles or with us in the core support team. Given the level of facilitation practice within the host group, this wasn’t such a big issue – as each Huddle tended to resolve its own issues. However, there was a much higher degree of letting go that I needed to get comfortable with in this project than I’m used to, often not having much visibility about what was happening across the network. We had a Whatsapp group and held monthly host pods where the hosts could come together with Huddlecraft to chat about live questions and challenges, but monthly touchpoints felt too little at times. 

Work with the weavers: One irreplaceable role was the role of Fabian Pfortmüller from the Together Institute. He has been co-stewarding the Wasan community for years – and had a depth of relationship with many of the hosts and healthy channels of communication across the network. He was incredible at sensing what was happening where, where tensions were emerging and he often had an intuitive sense of what was needed. Our regular check-ins were where the nervous system would get its health check! 

Sensemaking across the network: The other role of the nervous system is the weaving between – and sensemaking across – Huddles. We experimented with different platforms to support this. We used Sutra, an online learning platform specialising in relational learning, offered to us by Lorenz Sell, Co-Founder and Wasan network member. Through this platform we captured AI session summaries, and have used these to sensemake patterns in learning across the Huddles (resulting in an experimental AI podcast episode, for one!). Alongside the shared showcase, we also captured evaluation forms, conducted depth interviews across the Huddles (‘spotlights on learnings’), and encouraged groups to co-produce a ‘gift’ or output to share with the wider network. As a result, we have seen an abundance of incredible outputs being produced, all available to peruse here. However, some people found the structures to capture learning and feedback onerous, and, on reflection, we asked a lot of the groups. We tested things in this project in the spirit of experimentation, but we would simplify the capture tools and process next time.

Building bridges takes capacity: There is also more we could have done to weave relationships and learnings between groups during the process. This happened a bit, but with more budget and capacity we could have done lots more to connect and bridge across Huddles. Our hope is that the end of the Huddles marks the beginning of more informal cross-pollination and connection – and, from past experience, the ripples of Huddles are felt over the years that follow, often in unexpected ways. 

3/ Hosting capacity: how to properly support and value the host nodes? 

The last category of learning for us – which is more of an affirmation really –  is the value of amazing hosting. Building the capacity in networks to design and hold process is so undervalued and so perennially needed.

Hosts learn the most: Feedback from the Huddle hosts show that they loved having prototyping space as facilitators, they built incredible relationships with their co-hosts, and they appreciated learning how to rethink the role of facilitator in peer learning – in balancing both letting go while still caring for the whole. 

Landing the structures that build co-responsibility: One of the challenges for hosts in the process is building a genuine culture of co-responsibility in the Huddles. There is often a lot that is projected onto the host from the participants (e.g. leader, teacher, sole facilitator…), and so having clear practices and tools to shift that dynamic are needed sooner rather than later. Some of the structures inherent in Huddles are designed to do this (e.g. co-designed curriculum, buddy system and rotating facilitation)- but different groups and hosts reacted to those structures differently, and we could have been clearer about the value and method for landing these early on. 

Hosts are the most vital nodes: None of this would be possible without committed hosts who initiate and hold the underlying group process. You can find our Huddle hosts here. It was a joy to see these hosts weave their magic through the Huddles they hosted – and that work to hold process in networks is so often unseen. So I want to celebrate and appreciate all the hosts who stepped in. The capacity it takes for hosts is often much more than we anticipate – given the attention, care, and logistical and psychological load they carry throughout the process. At times I felt like we were asking for too much, especially given how most of these hosts had full-time jobs on top of this role. So capacity was stretched, and in abundant projects we’d offer stipends to host, or find other ways to better account for the value they bring to this whole process.

Where next?

This was a rich experiment — and we’ve learned so much about how we’d adapt and iterate the model for future clusters.

There’s potential to:

  • Iterate clearer and simplified host support and training;
  • Design a more ergonomic system of communication across the Huddles, tailored to the network; 
  • Experiment with different resourcing models for hosts;
  • Create more spacious, simplified ways to surface and share learning.

And one thing that really came out in the showcase – was to continue practising being with difference, discomfort, and emergence, together. I’m keen to integrate more practices that explicitly tease out and work with tensions in any future iteration. 

However, with the Wasan network in particular, I wouldn’t want to do the same thing again. The big question for me after an experiment like this is: what would it take for this to become part of Wasan’s way of operating? How can this become an inherent capacity to organise in this way, without the need for external support? I’m interested in the transition process to get to that point, and what the next step in that process would be. What’s the next level of support that’s needed for this to be owned and lived as a practice within the network? There’s lots of work to build from now, and I’d be excited to see how to intentionally transition into a network that is self-hosting Huddles, with the right balance of openness and integrity to the model. 

We’re so grateful to the Wasan Network for the spirit of trust, curiosity and care that made this possible.

Thanks for reading, process people. Got reflections? We’d love to hear from you.