Marcus Birkenkrahe, Berlin
This document describes the recent application and some background of a systemic intervention technique known as „organisational constellation“. In the following short case study, the work is not transcripted. Instead, only the main parameters and the most important steps of the process leading to the solution are explained.
Client
Group of ca. 15 members with different nationalities, including: 10 top managers of a large multinational corporation, 3 human resource managers of the firm (incl. the Group HR Director), and 3 consultants, including the constellation leader (CL).
Situation
The group met for their 2nd workshop on driving a firm-wide organisational effectiveness (OE) process. Total duration of workshop: 4 days. Prior to the constellation session in the late afternoon of the 2nd day, the whole group was involved in distilling relevant storylines from an extensive qualitative interview data set gathered over a 2 months period.
Complication
After the storylines exercise, the Group HR Director (and project leader) felt that the group might be in danger to lose track of the big picture and spend their energy on addressing detail questions before getting the main story right. One effect of the constellation work is to help a group refocus on the main story and experience their current process from within. The constellation was positioned as an experiment and as „something completely different“ from the beginning. At the start of the session, most group members seemed both curious and a little suspicious of leaving the „cognitive mode“ of the workshop so far.
Introduction
Constellations were introduced by the CL as a method to open the view of the project to hitherto overlooked or excluded aspects of the whole OE process, based on the perceptions of representatives enacting key process players or issues. This is possible because of existing loyalty bonds between members of any work system.
Exercises
To experience these loyalty bonds, group participants were lead through two simple exercises: first, they were asked to imagine themselves standing within their family system (including their distant ancestors). Second, they were asked to imagine themselves standing within their company system (including peers, employees, and superiors). After a short feedback round and a break, another exercise was proposed to help the group members experience „representative perception“as a key instrument of constellations. To do this, one participant was chosen to represent the entire firm. Every other participant was asked to pick somebody else working in the firm – except themselves – but not to share the information who they had picked with the others. The group members were then asked to place themselves according to their intuition anywhere in the room relative to the representative of the entire firm. The resulting constellation was explored by requesting short statements from the participants on how they felt in their position, including who they had chosen to represent. Once everybody had been asked, the participants could change their position based on the information they received. This first constellation of the firm already exhibited a number of potential issues. The most obvious one, being the relationship with the customers, was hampered by too great a focus of the members of the firm on their own issues. Also, the special role of the (relatively new) CEO became obvious from the resulting image. At this point, the participants seemed intrigued and eager to continue exploring the tool with the CL. During a short break, several participants expressed their astonishment at the accuracy with which the situation of the firm had been captured in only a few minutes.
Round
Typically, a constellation is an intervention that targets a whole system, but starts with the issue of an individual client. To identify a client and an issue, the CL conducted a round during which every participant was asked to briefly explain their current role in the OE process, and an issue related to this role. The round itself is a way of clarifying the process situation both for the CL and for the group. Usually, and also in this case, a small number of issues can be identified, which are strongly coupled – this suggests that it does not matter too much, who specifically serves the group purpose as a client. Since one of the purposes of constellation work is to make underlying issues visible that have not been discussed or identified yet, or that have even been made un-discussable (e.g. by the prevailing company culture), it is usually not advisable to choose hierarchically and select the highest-ranking officer in the group as client. In this case, a regional head offered to serve as a client.
Client constellation
The client's primary issue was „greater personal happiness“in the firm. He identified two linked issues of other participants: „renew pride in the company“ (mentioned by an elderly manager), and „establish a less hierarchical organisation“ (mentioned by a young manager). As primarily relevant for the resolution of his issue, he identified the CEO and three different factions within the company board (which he did not want to name). Representatives for these four and for the client himself were chosen and set up by the client in the room, establishing the initial constellation, in which only on board faction stood near the CEO, capable of interacting with him. The image suggested a disconnected leadership, lacking alignment. The participants reacted to this initial constellation with signs of both recognition and dismay.
Solutions
From this point onward, the constellation developed its own, complex dynamic, matching the real, complex situation of the system under investigation. Important steps towards he final solution image, which involved active participation by all remaining group members, included:
- The CEO established rapport with all board factions so that alignment became possible.
- Additional representatives of company employees chose an object to represent the desired result of the OE process – in this case a transparent, light cooler.
- The CEO and the board received the OE process result from the employees and explored its properties and quality (by jointly touching and turning the cooler over).
- The employees expressed impatience and exerted pressure on the board to get the OE process result after the board had inspected it.
- The board and the CEO returned the inspected OE process result to the employees.
- Using all remaining group participants, the OE process result was passed around and inspected by the representatives of different (anonymous) employees of the company. In this process, the object was almost dropped, and caught by the Group HR Director.
In the final constellation, the employees formed a half-circle, which was completed by the board and the CEO. Especially the passing around of the object representing the OE process result was accompanied by much laughter accountable both to slight embarrassment, and to a sense of relief.
In the course of ca. 1 ½ hours, the initial issue had touched upon many issues, many of them relevant to the OE process, and evolved to a clear solution image: at its heart a meeting of employees and leadership, and an exchange of the OE process results.
Closing round
After a longer break, the principal consultant mentioned that he felt a great deal of impatience in the course of the work. A number of participants who said they had been very critical before the work, said that they were impressed and touched by the process and by the end result. The CL said that the process itself looked very encouraging for the company. That in his experience, not few constellations did not yield a solution, only initial steps towards a solution, and that a number of them had to be ended with no more than a greater clarity of the difficulty of the organisational task. Another question was about the independence of the result on the specific representatives in a constellation – which has been confirmed by investigations (more below).
Caveat
The CL closed the session with a suggestion regarding further work with the constellation itself. He said it was often best to leave it at the image level and not directly use scenes from the constellation process in cognitive work. The group participants agreed to that.
Purpose
A constellation is a real-time change management simulation tool. The purpose of setting up a constellation is to gain insights in the relationship and behaviour patterns of complex human systems, and make effective interventions based on these insights on the fly. In organisations, this can help to unblock processes, uncover invisible issues, and include aspects or people that ought to be included in the process. The overall effect is to create a more balanced system. The method has been applied successfully to a number of OD processes, such as: M&A, BPO, management succession, organisational transformation and effectiveness [Birkenkrahe 2004]. Constellations are one of the most effective tools for leadership transformation processes.
Background
The constellation concept is rooted in a number of other 20th century therapeutic approaches such as: Psychodrama (Jakob Moreno), Gestalt (Fritz Perls), Transactional Analysis (Eric Berne), and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP, Grindler & Bander). In the mid 1980s, the German therapist Bert Hellinger amalgamated these methods and first applied them in a unique way to family systems. Constellations have been used with work systems in organisations only since the late 1990's. In comparison with other methods of intervention, constellations have been shown to succeed faster and often lead to more sustainable results [Gminder 2005].
Method
In the first step, the client identifies an issue suitable for a constellation, and specifies which actors (e.g. the CEO, a team, a peer, a customer or customer group) and entities (e.g. a product, a goal, a project or process) are relevant to resolving the issue. The client then chooses representatives for these actors and entities among the other group participants, and places them in the room. This is the initial constellation, a spatial representation of the problem situation. From here, the constellation leader (CL) takes over and develops the picture towards a solution to the original issue. To do his, he may bring in other actors or entities that were not considered before. The time to complete a constellation depends on the complexity of the issue, on the wishes of the client, and on the size of the group.** The solution presents itself again in the form of a constellation. Along the way, the process yields plenty of clues for continued work (outside the constellation) on the cognitive level – though it must be emphasized that the constellation itself is primarily an intervention through movements and images, rather than verbal articulation. The final result is often a solution to the issue, and sometimes only a clue on how to achieve a solution. In rare cases, the constellation needs to be aborted without a satisfying result – perhaps because some important information is missing, or because no solution is possible at present.
Role of the leader
The general task of the CL as a consultant is to support the actors (including the client) in finding a constellation, which is more balanced than the initial one. The imbalance is signified by uneasiness on the part of the representatives. To do this, the CL must work alongside the representatives, guided by their body language, their statements, and his intuition. He uses intuition and experience to propose possible moves and statements, which must be tested in the room by the representatives. I.e. the CL must not form an image of the solution in his mind, nor are the representatives „role-playing“. This is the greatest obvious difference between this method and Moreno's Psychodrama, where role-playing and improvising is encouraged and used to great effect. While the client of a Psychodrama is like the director of his own personal play, in a constellation the client rather acts like an antenna, tuning into an experience that he shares with the rest of the organisation.
**) A constellation can also be realised in an individual coaching session. In this case, objects like playmobil figures, chairs or coloured pieces of paper serve as anchors to represent actors or entities, and the client has to assume the different positions himself. Generally, group constellations carry a lot more energy. They can also be done in a completely confidential fashion, i.e. for the success of the constellation it is irrelevant whether the representatives know whom they represent.Scientific results
Though constellations have been used for almost a decade in organisations now, they remained scientifically untested for a long time. This situation has changed over the past few years with a number of extensive studies targeting several of the often puzzling properties of organisational constellations:
- Accurate representative perception: it is generally not necessary for the representatives to know anything about the client or the client issue. In any constellation work, one observes a high degree of accuracy regarding the real situation outside of the work – often without any verbal exchange of information beforehand.
- Independence from representative's identity: group participants regularly question whether the constellation result is dependent on who exactly represented an actor or entity in the original issue. Scientific studies with a large number of different representatives have shown that this is not the case.
- Sustainability of the result: perhaps the most important aspect for the client – what can he hope to change in the real world by simulating a process using a constellation? Each qualitative study on the effects of constellation work show a high degree of satisfaction with the results: i.e. a large number of participants (>85%) experience lasting changes that they attribute to the constellation work. This compares favourably with other ethods used in leadership transformation processes [Assländer 2005].
Most recently, the effectiveness of constellations have been linked to so-called mirror neurons: „The mirror activity of certain brain cells generates an intuitive, direct understanding of the internal state of a perceived person.“ [Bauer 2005]. Earlier attempts at explanations include the theory of morphogenetic fields by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake of Cambridge University [Sheldrake 2003].
Partly as the result of these investigations, but mostly because of the large body of successful experiments with constellations, this method has now reached maturity to be used as a mainstream standard intervention technique. As such, it has been welcomed in business magazines and newspapers across Europe as a new method to achieve sustainable leadership and process transformation results [FT 2004] .
[Assländer 2005] Assländer, Friedrich, und Kohlhauser, Martin: Organisationsaufstellungen Evaluiert, Carl-Auer-Verlag, 2005.
[Birkenkrahe, 2004] Birkenkrahe, Marcus: No Wings Without Roots – What To Do When A Great Deal Fails – Managing Transactions With System Constellations; in: CxO magazine, 06/2004.
[Bauer 2005] Bauer, Joachim: Warum ich fühle, was du fühlst. Intuitive Kommunikation und das Geheimnis der Spiegelneurone, Hoffmann und Campe, 2005.
[FT 2004] Gillies, Judith-Maria, Well Set Up – How Companies Use „Organisational Constellations“ to achieve astonishing results in human resource development, in: Financial Times Deutschland, September 03, 2004.
[Gminder 2005] Gminder, Carl Ulrich: Implementing Corporate Sustainability Strategies – An Exploration of the systemic management tool of Organisational Constellation, Dissertation Universität St. Gallen, 2005.
[Sheldrake 2003] Sheldrake, Rupert: The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Aspects Of the Extended Mind, Arrow 2004.
© 2006 Marcus Birkenkrahe
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