Systemic Counseling

Benefits of Systemic Counseling for the individual

Foremost, Systemic Counseling helps develop strategies for personal growth and development. It can help you clarify professional and personal goals; and design a plan of action to achieve them and then assess your ability to follow through and help you sustain motivation. But it can do much more than that. Systemic Counseling can help you with:

1. Increased Self-Awareness: Systemic Counseling encourages individuals to reflect on their own thinking and behavior, which can increase self-awareness and insight. This approach can help individuals better understand their own strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots, and develop strategies for personal growth and development.
2. Improved Decision Making: Systemic Counseling can help individuals become more strategic and intentional in their decision making. This approach encourages individuals to consider multiple perspectives and potential outcomes, and to make decisions based on a more comprehensive understanding of the situation.
3. Enhanced Leadership Skills: Through Systemic Counseling, individuals can develop their leadership skills and become more effective at inspiring and motivating others. This approach promotes a more collaborative and empowering leadership style, which can help individuals build stronger, more resilient teams.
4. Greater Resilience: Systemic Counseling can help individuals become more resilient and adaptable in facing challenges and setbacks. This approach encourages individuals to view obstacles as opportunities for learning and growth, and to develop strategies for coping with stress and uncertainty.
5. Increased Career Satisfaction: By promoting self-awareness, strategic thinking, and leadership skills, Systemic Counseling can help individuals achieve greater career satisfaction and fulfillment. This approach can help individuals identify their professional goals and aspirations, and develop strategies for achieving them over time.

Benefits of Systemic Counseling for the organization

Organizations can be described as several concurrent subsystems in complex dynamic interaction. Systemic Counseling helps with conflict resolution, team development, team re-structuring, team compliance, team goals and decision-making, and team transitioning. Systemic Counseling can help your organization achieve this by promoting:

1. Enhanced Creativity: Systemic Counseling encourages open-ended thinking and exploration, which can lead to more innovative ideas and solutions. By allowing individuals to challenge assumptions and generate new perspectives, companies can better harness the creative potential of their workforce.
2. Improved Communication: By emphasizing collaboration and conversation, Systemic Counseling can improve communication among team members. This approach promotes active listening, empathy, and understanding, which can help resolve conflicts and improve overall team dynamics.
3. Increased Adaptability: Systemic Counseling encourages individuals to be more adaptable and flexible in the face of change. This mindset can help companies navigate uncertain or rapidly changing environments and respond more effectively to new opportunities or challenges.
4. Greater Resilience: Through Systemic Counseling, individuals learn to become more self-aware and reflective, which can increase their resilience and capacity for growth. This approach encourages individuals to view setbacks and failures as opportunities for learning and development, rather than as sources of discouragement or defeat.
5. Enhanced Decision Making: Systemic Counseling promotes critical thinking and helps individuals consider multiple perspectives when making decisions. This approach can lead to better-informed decisions that are based on a more comprehensive understanding of the situation.
6. Improved Employee Engagement: By valuing and empowering individuals to contribute their own perspectives and ideas, Systemic Counseling can increase employee engagement and motivation. This approach creates a culture of collaboration and continuous learning, which can help individuals feel more fulfilled and invested in their work.
7. Increased Organizational Learning: Systemic Counseling promotes a culture of continuous learning and improvement, which can help companies develop more efficient and effective systems and processes. This approach encourages individuals to share knowledge and experience, which can lead to more robust and resilient organizations over time.

How does Systemic Counseling work?

Systemic thinking sees the world in terms of interconnected systems that form complex structures and focuses on the interactions of its parts to define problems and find solutions.

In the world of Systemic Counseling, language does not describe reality but creates reality in the act of description (Constructivism) and problems are an interpretation of events that break down procedure, not the event itself. By critically questioning implicit assumptions in the way we describe our circumstances and by challenging the meaning we confer to problematic events we find new, effective ways to solve problems and achieve goals.

Systemic Counseling evaluates professional practice based on sociological systems theory and therefore can be applied to individuals, groups, teams and organizations. In systemic thinking, complexity is not dealt with in linear causality contexts, but in recursive processes of communication, emotion and cognition. Knowledge is gained on the basis of hypothesis formation with a focus on utility and viability for goal acquisition and problem-solving.

Where does Systemic Counseling come from?

Coaching is a managerial technique that has seen a great boom as a competitive weapon in recent decades. Modern market environments are notorious for their complexity, vulnerability and constant evolution. To deal with this, companies need to make their systems and processes more flexible, efficient, and sensitive and adaptive to changes. Companies noted parallels to competitive sports, where teams are striving for continuous overcoming and improvement to achieve the highest performance, in a competitive environment full of risks. Coaching emerged then as a simile to sports coaches with the mission to teach, improve and develop techniques, processes, skills and even values in the workforce to better adapt to those market forces.

Very quickly, academics noted that organizations could be seen as systems and therefore could be understood according to General Systems Theory. The interaction of the different units inside the organization could be evaluated by Cybernetics, the study of feedback processes.

In the field of cybernetics, there are two different approaches to coaching: first-order and second-order cybernetics.

First order-cybernetics coaching is based on the assumption that the coach is an objective observer and can provide feedback to the client based on their observations. This approach assumes that the coach has a privileged understanding of what needs to be changed and can provide guidance to the client on how to make those changes. In other words, the coach is seen as an expert who knows what needs to be done and can provide the necessary guidance. Unfortunately, this approach tended to clash with corporate culture, where the perspective of front-line employees was deemed less knowledgeable than that of the coach.

Second-order cybernetics coaching, on the other hand, takes a more collaborative approach. It assumes that the coach and the client are both experts on their fields, and that the coaching relationship is an ongoing conversation between them. In this approach, the coach and the client work together to co-create solutions to the client's challenges. The coach needs not to be an expert on any particular industry but needs to be an expert facilitator, who helps the organization explore its thinking and find its own solutions.

Systemic Counseling, sometimes referred to as Ontological Coaching and known in Germany as Systemic Supervision belongs to Second Order Cybernetics.

At a personal level, engaging a coach who offers second-order cybernetics coaching can provide you with a unique and valuable perspective on your leadership style, decision-making, and team dynamics. Through this approach, you can gain a deeper understanding of your thinking and behavior, develop strategies for personal growth and development, and enhance your leadership skills. By investing in yourself through coaching, you can increase your resilience and adaptability, become more effective in your role, and achieve greater career satisfaction and fulfillment.

At the corporate level, second-order cybernetics coaching can help develop enhanced creativity, improved communication and collaboration, increased adaptability, greater resilience, and improved decision-making. Through this approach, your team can become more self-aware and reflective, which can lead to a more engaged and motivated workforce. Additionally, this coaching can create a culture of continuous learning and improvement, which can result in more efficient and effective systems and processes, and a more robust and resilient organization over time. Overall, investing in second-order cybernetics coaching can help your company achieve greater success in achieving its goals.