Read the book Systemic Transition Management!

Peter Senge and Bert Hellinger

Peters Senge's groundbreaking book 'The Fifth Discipline' was published in the late 1990s. He thus introduced systems thinking, which enables us to look beyond individual processes and recognize patterns between processes.
A man from a completely different field of work began to publish his knowledge about systemic work in the late 1990s. This gentleman's name was Bert Hellinger, best known for family constellations. This systemic work has been further developed and introduced in organizations in recent decades.

Systems thinking and systemic work

The two celebrities probably never knew each other, but I have now discovered that systems thinking and systemic work have great similarities, and that both theories reinforce each other. The attitudes, beliefs, and mental models in Senge's theory may be the result of a blockage in one of the three basic tenets of the system in Hellinger's theory: Inclusion, Ordering, Exchange. And if you know which systemic blockages the attitudes, beliefs and mental models cause, you can intervene.

Look, and then you take steps.

If Senge had known Hellinger, he would have included the systemic work in his Fifth Discipline Handbook. But that's not the case, so we'll just have to bring them together ourselves. We will study this in the near future, but in the meantime here's a nice book tip:

Systemic Transition Management

Systemic Transition Management by Maaike Thiecke and Bianca van Leeuwen is based on Hellinger's basic systemic principles of Inclusion, Ordering and Exchange. The authors expose a process in the undercurrent of 'the organization in change'. They look from the system 'organization' at the language that individuals use, and what this in turn says about the phase of change in the undercurrent. Fascinating!

In Systemic Transition Management, the authors describe five phases that an organizational change goes through in the undercurrent:
1. Urgency
2. Let go
3. Not-knowing
4. Creation
5. New Beginnings
And then a new change starts in the undercurrent, because the system is always in motion. So you start all over again with Urgency.

Urgency:
Our human brain always needs a sense of urgency, otherwise we will stay safe where we are.
Letting go:
One door must close before the other opens. You have to say goodbye to the old before you as an organization can make a fresh start in the new.
The not-knowing:
Here is the struggle of the group, there we find the conflict, the sense of chaos, the friction. You are no longer in the old situation, and you do not know what the new situation looks like. Drama! And once you get through that, you come to:
Creation:
Wild experiments, creativity, crazy ideas, trying out and making mistakes.

To finally get to the new beginning where you make work agreements and secure the new normal in systems and processes. 

Representatives of phase undercurrent

The authors indicate that each of this phase has its own language, as it were. And that explains why there is always a fuss between pioneers and laggards, between pushers and former fans and between scaremongers and young dogs.

That is, say the authors of this book, because these people are all representatives of different phases of change in the undercurrent….

Silence….

Again: That's because these people are all representatives of different phases of the change in the undertow….

Goosebumps, really.

A pusher is the representative of the urgency, because ' pushers' foresee that the organization really has to implement the change. They feel the urgency much more than the rest.
Former fans see better than others that something has to be taken from the old, or something has to be released from the old, in order to take it a step further.
Panic sowers are the representatives of the not-knowing. They articulate which issues still need to be addressed, they see which problems still need to be addressed before you can continue.
The young dogs represent the creative phase. Nothing is crazy enough and when it gets too crazy and they go nuts, they dust themselves off and go back to what they've learned.

No hassle, just language... 

And if you learn to look at the system in this way, then there is no hassle, resistance and chaos at all. It is only the language of the system that must be heard. Systemic work and systems thinking merge seamlessly here.

It will not surprise you, but I think that anyone who is even slightly immersed in change management or organizational development should read the book Systemic Transition Management. What you do with it next will concern me. But these insights are a golden addition to systems thinking, really.