Integration Training have recently delivered embodied training alongside the Nowhere Group who are known for their work with innovation and systems. This article by Terry Ingham and Judith Hemming tells us more about Nowhere’s work.
The starting place for working creatively with a systemic and phenomenological approach is to understand the nature of 
wholes, and how parts and wholes inter-relate. Conventional thinking encourages us to focus on parts, often in the form of individual people or abstract components. At best we are encouraged to see ‘context’ as a collection of those parts – rather like the assembly of parts in a car engine. Indeed the prominence of a machine metaphor in the worldview of western organisational culture is testimony to this.
It is essentially a reductionist view that has many limitations when we are considering human beings and their living systems – such as companies, partnerships, communities and families. It encourages a view of performance, behaviour and creativity as residing more in the individual rather than in the relationships between individuals – in ‘the space between’.
Adopting a systemic perspective is to turn this view through 180 degrees. Using it enables us to see parts as a fractal of the whole rather than as separate elements acting independently of each other. Organisational developer and theorist Peter Senge described this holistic phenomena:
The whole exists through continually manifesting in the parts, and the parts exist as embodiments of the whole.
(Senge et al: 2004)
The effect of a systemic view on how people and their organisations innovate and change is immense. The shift to seeing people as individuals who, in large part, gain identity through their social context – both immediate and historical – is a challenge to traditional psychological views of self. But how do we work with this in practice, in an organisational situation?
We know we are part of family systems, peer groups, communities as well as organisational systems and that these systems are all interconnected with permeable and often overlapping boundaries, each having a crucial impact on others. But for a leader or catalyst to try to hold and work with all of this information can lead to an overwhelming sense of complexity.
Nowhere’s approach provides leaders and catalysts with a range of simple tools and processes, as well as a framework of key underpinning principles about systems, that make the complex simple. By identifying the important aspects of the system under scrutiny, and applying a knowledge of the principles that govern systems, people can see and sense the whole including a person’s place in it and the dynamics that exist in the relationship between the various parts.
The notion that systems have hidden laws of relationship can seem strange if viewed from a purely reductionist perspective. We can experience and understand the natural laws of gravity or centrifugal force acting on a physical system, but find it more difficult to appreciate the invisible dynamics acting in human systems. We experience these laws but do not readily identify them. And yet all human systems are influenced by four specific organising principles or forces that, if understood and respected, can greatly enable the leadership of innovation and transformation.
Nowhere’s systemic and phenomenological approach, as initially developed by Bert Hellinger in Germany, utilises principles relating to time, belonging, place and exchange. Working with them enables catalysts to prepare the ground for innovation in organisations by first removing blocks and resolving issues (many seemingly intractable). Importantly, with practise they are also able to anticipate or prevent them.
By ensuring there is ‘an ease’ within and between systems, the conditions for people to work creatively and productively are improved considerably.
10 features of human systems
Below we have identified ten important aspects of the nature of human systems that influence and govern the behaviour and performance of the people within them.
- All systems, human or otherwise, consist of many and various elements that are connected to one another in continuously changing relationships. Human systems can be seen as a type of living organism where the health of the individual is influenced by, and strongly influences, the health of the system.
- Such is the level of interconnection that any change in one element of a system will bring about change in all the others.
- Altering the system can bring about a change for an individual, and a change in the system can also come about by changing the individual.
- There is always a cost and a consequence with any change made in a system.
- Systems have a natural tendency to move towards balance. Achieving balance is a constant and continual process. Like walking it is a dynamic phenomena. Finding balance in an organisation is more about ‘the art of the nudge’ rather than making bold and dramatic moves – homeopathy rather than surgery!
- All elements of a system, either current or historical, have significance and influence whether they are acknowledged or not. Identifying and acknowledging ‘what is’ is a crucial first step in bringing ease to a system.
- There is a basic order of elements in a system, which if achieved, allows all members to feel at ease. This order involves acknowledging the loyalty or ‘conscience’ that guards our many kinds of belonging, respecting the hierarchy of time, achieving a balance in giving and receiving, and finding our right place in a structure.
- We belong to multiple systems and yet our loyalty to any one system affects our ability to belong to another.
- The capacity to belong and the attendant degree of loyalty gets weaker as a system gets larger.
- Knowledge about systems is held in ‘the field’ and can be accessed through the body more so than through the mind. Presence or embodied knowing is a critical skill in using a systemic approach.
By working with a knowledge of human systems, catalysts can develop a capacity in themselves and in the teams and organisations they work in to create optimal conditions for people to release their own and others creative potential.
Reference
Senge, P., Scharmer C.O., Jaworski J., Flowers B.S., 2004, Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future, SoL: Massachusetts
If you liked this article you may like to look at the following:
- Consciousness, Productivity and Creativity
- The Paradox of having a ‘Vision’ and not ‘Knowing what it looks like’
- Myers Briggs and the Body
If your organisation is interested in how our leadership training can help in your workplace then call us on (+44) (0) 7762 541 855 or (+44) (0) 1273 906828.
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