Over the last seven years we have worked in about 15 different countries, mainly in the context of organizations, teams and business, but also in the societal reality these countries and companies are facing due to geopolitical and cultural developments. Of course, we also worked with individuals and their issues. (Jan Jacob has worked in 45 different countries over the past 26 years.)
We, as Transitionstudio, always work within the systemic phenomenological approach developed by Bert Hellinger. We simply love this approach, and for us, working without mixing or blending it with other approaches and paradigms works best.
In the work, within the systemic paradigm, new insights and new concepts have developed. Bert once said to me, Jan Jacob: ‘Du musst weiter’, and only now am I starting to grasp what he meant.
New concepts developed, not because we wanted or planned to develop them, but because they had to, due to the changing world. Curiosity has always been our main driver: wanting to understand, from a systemic perspective, what is going on in the world we encountered.
In this article we want to share a couple of these developments. Our strong sense is that systemic work needs a constant flow of new concepts to be with and within this changing world. That is what we find important. As always, you may use these concepts, test them, add to them and pass them on, or you may reject them.
Speaking of rejecting: with every new development, some wonderful earlier concepts may be broken down, left behind or simply forgotten.
Looking at the concept of belonging, we were shocked to realize how high the price of belonging can be. Belonging was considered desirable, precious, even a right (‘Everyone has a right to belong’). But in order to belong, we are prepared, consciously or unconsciously, to sacrifice parts of ourselves. Not only in the process of belonging to our family, but also to a religion, a peer group, the culture of our workplace, our country and so on.
The coin of belonging has two completely opposite faces: the benefits of belonging to a system, and the parts of you that were sacrificed.
Working in many different countries, we are also more and more aware that the concept of belonging is the engine that divides the world into ‘us and them’, ‘good and bad’. There is no absolute good and bad. It is just an interpretation of what we want to belong to our system or reality and what we do not want to belong to it.
Dees and I are sometimes heavily criticized for working with Russian-speaking participants. Twenty years ago that was not an issue. The rules of belonging can shift quickly.
Systemic ownership is a concept we often use in teams and organizations. The question ‘Who is your systemic owner?’ (not the legal owner) refers to: ‘For whom or what do we do what we do, after all?’
When I encountered systemic work in 1997 (then still called constellations), the systemic owner of Bert’s work was the second generation of Germans after WWII.
It would be interesting to wonder whom systemic professionals would now consider to be their systemic owner. For Transitionstudio, at the moment, ‘the unused potential in the developing world’ is our systemic owner. This will most likely shift too in the years to come.
Prompted by an impulse from Dees about co-creation, we realized that the whole concept of order needs to be reviewed. In co-creation you work from the whole and use the differences, which means there is no number one or two anymore.
The original concept of order became too normative for us. As if it should be like that. We are very curious to see which kinds of systemic structures will be helpful in the world to come.
For a few years now, we no longer speak about client and facilitator (or constellation leader). We use explorer and companion. The explorer is the one who wants to explore an issue. The companion is the one next to the explorer, offering systemic questions or other systemic processes. And maybe an hour later the roles have switched. The essence is equality, and stepping into the unknown, which is sometimes a big swamp.
We used to offer trainings, because that is what they were called. We stopped doing that a couple of years ago. A few years ago in Barcelona, the participants of a program we had been invited for came into the ‘classroom’, as they called it. Immediately the whole atmosphere changed. We became teachers and they became students. Us and them. With an invisible barrier between us and an almost tangible hierarchy in the room.
We offered programs. And it’s perfectly okay if participants want to learn from us. But we are not trainers or teachers, just humans sharing some experiences, and some bloopers too.
I translated Bert’s Geist (or spirit-mind) into evolutionary force. (Yes, I was, and somehow still am, a biologist.) The evolutionary force, similar to Geist, has a direction and is beyond the human will.
The concept of potential became popular as something very desirable. Even a hype. But why doesn’t everyone use or reach their full potential? We dove into it and realized that potential is what happens when you, or any system, allow yourself to be taken and moved by the evolutionary force. The evolutionary force is beyond good and bad. So going with it might result in actions that can be considered good, but also bad.
Potential is strong stuff. It is also a coin with two completely different faces. So when working with potential, we always keep the consequences in mind and often bring them into view. Collaboration between a group of hospitals would have unleashed a lot of potential, but the boards found the consequences unacceptable (for example, sacrificing autonomy). Even though they felt the potential.
We noticed that systemic work has developed from problem-oriented, via solution-oriented, into what is now, at least at our work at Transitionstudio, potential-oriented. This means we consider the evolutionary force to be our ‘assignment giver’. This helps us to be closer to the upcoming future. And we never ask: ‘What’s wrong with this team, company, business, society or person?’
We have since stoppend offering programs. We repeated some successful programs, like ‘Systemic interventions in teams’, ‘Movements of transformation’ and ‘Potential’, maybe ten times or more. And although these programs were different and developed every time, it became too much of a repetition. A repetition of the past, creating a gap with the here and now and with what’s needed in the upcoming future.
Besides that, planning programs long in advance increasingly clashed with the upcoming future, in which we were asked to work with teams in crisis (as they called it) and in different countries, in the eastern Europe and far beyond.
So we started to think: what about working on invitation? If we are invited, we explore the question: ‘What does your country, or the business world in your country, need now?’ Of course it’s not easy; otherwise they would have figured out the answer themselves already.
If there is no clear openness or commitment to step into this together, we most likely can’t accept the invitation, because we would find ourselves repeating our own patterns instead of doing what’s needed there.
More and more we are aware that the main thing you can do with dysfunctional patterns is to outgrow them. Not get rid of them, nor try to break them. They are stronger than you are anyway. Outgrowing is not easy and requires a lot of work and discipline. It requires that you not only accept, but fully integrate all the aspects and expressions of the pattern. If, for example, the pattern is polarity, you have to consent both to the strongest victim energy in you and to the strongest perpetrator energy. Discipline is required because a pattern will keep showing up again and again. Not blaming yourself is important. And re-setting, over and over again.
Working with teams, we have experienced and learned that one intervention or one constellation is not enough to outgrow a limiting pattern. It requires the commitment of the whole team and of every individual member to outgrow a certain pattern, to create space for a more appropriate one.
This is ‘homework’ for the team leader: to check the commitment of each member individually, in order to get true commitment instead of forced commitment under the pressure of belonging. And it is homework for the whole team for the next seven months or so. We call these uppercurrent actions to outgrow undercurrent patterns.
For us, systemic work means offering new perspectives to the explorer system. Additional perspectives to what was already there. We offer insights, not solutions. Solutions are the domain of the decision-making unit, often the leader(s). Not our domain.
The familiar present situation might be more desirable than a new perspective. Which direction the explorer system will take is not our decision. For that reason, we leave explorer systems at a clear crossroads. And we are very clear and transparent about that.
Change is a container concept. What exactly do we mean by ‘change’? And more importantly: which type of change is needed?
With the three systemic ingredients, parts (the employees, but also products, concepts, processes), patterns and identity (an aspect of the whole), we can bake at least seven different cakes, which would all do well in the ‘change’ store.
We distinguish: Monitoring, Development, Change (in the narrower sense), Re-set, Transition, Transformation and Stopping.
Explaining these concepts to a team or organization takes about twenty minutes. Asking ‘Which process does the company as a whole need, facing the challenges to come?’ usually produces a remarkably unanimous answer, which makes it an extremely powerful systemic tool. And a starting point for the team.
We distinguish between type 1, 2 and 3 interventions:
Our main work consists of type 2 and type 3 interventions.
A system can be in different states:
These distinctions are helpful, both for making a systemic diagnosis and for designing systemic interventions.
In which state is systemic work?
In many countries, ‘Let’s do a constellation with the team’ evokes either big question marks on faces or frowns, because some people have had doubtful experiences with family constellations. ‘Let’s make a map’ is usually received as something familiar, understandable and doable. So yes, unless we are explicitly invited to do a constellation with a team, we prefer to use the term ‘mapping’.
We work with the team members themselves, not with outside representatives (only when explicitly asked, and even then maybe). For us, representatives are not necessary, and working without them is less confusing. And yes, working directly with the members of the explorer system requires some extra skills and perception from the companion.
When we work with a team, with several members of the system present, we offer to interpret the mapping. It’s like an X-ray. I can look at the X-ray and see a lot, but I need the help of a professional to interpret the picture. If someone else sees something different in all those shades and colors than we do, we might arrive at completely different ideas about the diagnosis and what’s needed.
We don’t want a team to become fragmented because a mapping process was interpreted with poor skill or without responsibility.
A mapping process is always hypothetical. It offers a team a ‘what if’ perspective. It doesn’t offer a perspective of what’s best or what should be. We don’t want to take away the freedom of choice or the responsibility to choose a direction. That is up to the team.
I grew up in the systemic tradition of (healing) sentences. They have their value, and they can be experienced as intrusive. Well-formulated systemic questions are often more opening than offered sentences and leave more responsibility with the explorer. From a potential-oriented perspective we find more value, more dignity and more co-creation in questions than in offering sentences.
We don’t think it makes sense to try and change the past. For our taste, it happens too much in the systemic world. Changing the past, for instance by giving back a burden, or by having a representative of a parent say ‘Now I can see you’, or even ‘Now I give you permission to do it your own way’. These sentences keep you in a child position. Growing up might mean dealing with the fact that your parents weren’t available for you.
Bert Hellinger, for example, had to deal with the fact that when he came home after having been a prisoner of war in Belgium, his mother said: ‘The wrong son has come back.’
Late in his career Bert made what looked like a jump to ‘new constellations’, but was in fact a quantum leap in the source he used.
For a long time, his source was the question: ‘What is possible between where someone is now and her or his death?’ He used as a source ‘Ba’, a Japanese term you could translate as ‘the origin of this all’.
It took me a long time to figure out what Bert’s source was in his ‘new constellations’. We’ll skip the whole story, but essentially he jumped to ‘Ya’ (my terminology), freely translated as ‘that, where it might be leading to after all’.
Ba is a wonderful source for understanding how patterns, dynamics, behavior and traits came into existence. Ya is a wonderful source for operating from the evolutionary force or, in Bert’s words, from Geist. And all the places between Ba and Ya can serve as sources for our systemic work and interventions.
In Transitionstudio we increasingly sense that Ya is a helpful source to stay connected with, given what the present world will require from the systemic movement Bert picked up and accelerated: shifting powers, AI, biotechnology, climate change and its consequences, pandemics, the collapse of democracy and other structures, humans taking the place of nature or God, Buddha or Mohammed, and more of this.
