Confidence sells, tentativeness facilitates change

Psychometric assessment, personality tests, Myers-Briggs… They all allow the coach/consultant to occupy an expert position. To proclaim: this is who you are. Who doesn’t want to be an expert? Who doesn’t want to buy a sense of assurance?

The development of systemic thinking demonstrates a movement away from the expert position in service of effective intervention, perhaps mirroring the Kleinian movement from the paranoid-schizoid position: where the world is split into good and bad, toward the depressive position, where uncertainty can be tolerated.

Early systemic thinkers, determined to be taken seriously, portrayed themselves as engineers observing the cybernetics of mechanical systems. This stance was later abandoned, and the practitioner invited to relinquish their one-up position and become a humanised interlocutor.

More recently, the encouragement is to acknowledge, in the here and now, the impact of one’s own position, context, embodied experience. Rather than observing a system, we observe our relationship to that system, as an honorary member.

Strong emotions or resonances are valuable information. Boredom, annoyance, vexation. This isn’t noise, it’s signal, if we have the self-knowledge to make use of it.

A teacher I trust likened a systemic practitioner’s development to ‘building muscles’. What if your guts churn upon sensing powerful unspoken rules? Is there an ability to voice it? Not to overpower, but to see what comes back. This is where the opportunity for change lives in organisations.

Systemic intervention is a dance, and it’s much more fun and productive to be a human among humans than an expert among circuit boards.