isb-handbook E-Book

Bernd Schmid

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 184

Beschreibung

Systemic professionalism

Das E-Book isb-handbook wird angeboten von tredition und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
isb Wiesloch, Bernd Schmid, Creating Shared Realities, isb handbook

Leseprobe

isb GmbH - Systemische Professionalität

Institut für systemische Beratung, Wiesloch, Germany

www.isb-w.eu

isb-handbook

© 2021 Bernd Schmid

Author: Bernd Schmid

Cover, Illustrations: Bettina Gentner, isb-GmbH

Publishing & print: tredition GmbH, Halenreie 40-44,22359 Hamburg, Germany

ISBN:

978-3-347-28426-5 (Paperback)

978-3-347-28427-2 (e-Book)

The work including all its parts is protected by copyright.

The German National Library noted this publication in the German National Bibliography. Detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

isb | handbook -

systemic professionalism

Creating Shared Realities

by Bernd Schmid 2019

Dr. phil. Bernd Schmid (born 1946)

is the founder and leading figure of isb GmbH Wiesloch (since 1984) and the Schmid Foundation (since 2011). He has worked internationally as a speaker, learning and professional culture developer, and as an entrepreneur and founder of initiatives and associations. Today, he provides his expertise in organizational development and coaching as a mentor and concept developer at the intersection of profit and nonprofit entrepreneurship.

Schmid is, among other things, an honorary member of the Systemic Society and honorary chairman of the executive committee of the German Federal Coaching Association. He is a recipient of the 2007 Eric Berne Memorial Award from the International TA Association ITAA, the 1988 Science Award from the European TA Association EATA, and the 2014 Life Achievement Award from the continuing education industry. In 2017 award for his life achievement from the German Society for Transactional Analysis DGTA.

Numerous essays on personal and professional topics can be found at

www.isb-w.eu/campus/de/schrift/Blogarchiv-von-Bernd-Schmid-0000SY0812D

Additional publications for free download, as well as videos, are available at www.isb-w.eu/campus/de and www.youtube.com/user/ISBlearning.

Copying, use and redistribution of all materials accessible via the isb website is permitted and encouraged, provided the source is acknowledged.

Contents

1. Sharing reality

1.1. What is Reality?

1.2. Creating reality by communication

1.3. Communication as cultural encounter

1.4. Four levels of shared reality

1.5. Communication as dialogue

1.6. Supporting Dialogue Culture

2. Sharing systems of roles

2.1. Why roles?

2.2. Roles connect individuals and organization

2.3. What are roles?

2.4. Roles and three worlds

2.5. Discussing personality

2.6. Discussing communication and relationships

3. Sharing responsibility

3.1. What is responsibility?

3.2. Four Dimensions of responsibility

3.3. Responsible for the whole?

3.4. Dialoguing on Responsibility

3.5. Avoiding responsibility

3.6. Inviting Responsibility

4. Sharing Leadership

4.1. What is leadership?

4.2. Leadership communication

4.3. Leadership network

4.4. Leadership versus Management

4.5. Operational versus strategic leadership

4.6. Power and authority in leadership

4.7. Leadership styles

4.8. Improving leadership relationships

4.9. Leadership development

5. Sharing understanding on team and organization

5.1. What is an Organization?

5.2. Team – a question of specification

5.3. Team – those who share responsibility

5.4. Creating team events

5.5. The team-event triangle

5.6. Vertical teams

5.7. Task and relationship orientation

5.8. From group dynamics to team culture

6. Sharing professional competence

6.1. What is competence?

6.2. Individual and organization

6.3. Competence of individuals

6.4. Competence of systems

6.5. Matching

6.6. Optimal role model distance

6.7. Maturity

6.8. Maturity of Protagonists

6.9. Maturity of Organizations

7. Sharing Learning

7.1. Learning and working

7.2. The Dual System

7.3. Change in paradigm

7.4. Individual and organizational learning

7.5. Qualifying individuals

7.6. Qualifying systems

7.7. Systems learning

7.8. OD-Learning

7.9. HR learning

7.10. External providers

8. Mindsets of Organizational Development and Coaching

8.1. Dialogic OD

8.2. isb-perspectives of OD

8.2.1. Focusing on people

8.2.2. Link to cultural development

8.2.3. Principles, attitudes and perspectives

8.2.4. Methods for co-operating and learning

8.3. Hologram and spotlight metaphor

8.4. Sharp contours and plausible cores

8.5. Perspectives and events

8.6. System solutions and five perspectives

8.7. Organizational Coaching

8.7.1. What is Organizational Coaching (OC)?

8.7.2. Extended OC-Services

8.7.3. Quality of OC Services

8.7.4. Expertise and professional perspective

9. Sharing the crisis of coherence

9.1. What is coherence?

9.1. What is a crisis?

9.2. Phases of coherence crisis

9.2.1. Hidden disintegration

9.2.2. Open disintegration

9.2.3. Hidden integration

9.2.4. Open integration

9.3. Dilemma

9.3.1. What is a dilemma?

9.3.2. Logics of dilemma

9.3.3. The dilemma circle

9.3.4. Helpful attitudes and approaches

9.3.5. Complexity and Dilemma

10. Sharing intuition and imagery

10.1. The three swans

10.2. What is intuition?

10.3. What is imagery?

10.4. Mental images and professional situations

10.5. Sharing intuition

10.6. Guided imagery

10.7. Stories and rituals

10.8. Dreams

10.9. The theatre metaphor

10.10. Personality represented by theatre metaphor

10.11. Organization and theatre metaphor

11. Sharing reality styles

11.1. Why styles?

11.2. Dialoging on styles

11.3. Self-discovery on styles

11.4. Feedback and Mirroring

11.5. Milieus and Styles

11.6. Identity beliefs

11.7. Personality and isb approved style concepts

11.8. I-IT and I-YOU-Style

11.9. Exercise I-YOU / I - IT Style

11.10. Excitement intensifier and reducer

11.11. Extraversion versus Introversion

11.11.1. Attention

11.11.2. Social flexibility

11.11.3. Energy balance

11.11.4. Being oneself

11.12. Approach and avoidance styles

11.13. Detail and the big picture

11.14. Evaluation of contributions

11.15. Typology by C. G. Jung

12. Sharing culture

12.1. Why culture?

12.2. What is culture?

12.3. Organizational Culture

12.4. Mentality of culturing

12.5. Change of culture

13. Instructions for further work on the isb campus

Foreword

This book is for quite advanced professionals who are experienced in the field of organizations, having had some education in dealing with roles, structures, projects, markets, as well as taking responsibility and delivering services. It offers an overview over almost 40 years of development at the isb and introduces into the isb way of understanding and dealing with professionalism, organizational processes and development as well as questions of consulting and entrepreneurship.

Nevertheless, beginners may still be fascinated by the isb systemic approaches and get inspiring perspectives for further learning. However, they might miss step-by-step explanations of how things can be done and more examples illustrating isb-ideas. Browsing is facilitated by the gray background of key phrases.

Advanced professionals using these framing descriptions will discover a wealth of descriptions bringing their own experience and reasoning to a point. They may also gain surprising insights, which they can immediately relate to situations they experience within their field. Thus, they may feel reassured and eventually re-evaluate their way of developing ideas and start doing things differently. In brief, this book can help professionals reexamine their point of view, their services and their cultural mission.

You are invited to use one or the other isb-approaches for dialogues and studying with colleagues and customers. Due to the isb policy all further material is free for use. More than 5,000 professionals are actually sharing the isb alumninetwork, including representatives of many major corporations in Germany. These networkers, internal corporate employees (2/3) and self-employed, external professionals (1/3) have usually participated in extra-occupational courses at isb for two years and are now working together in peer groups and on projects in many regions and internationally. They exchange insights, practical proceedings, hints and job opportunities. Many of them call the isb their professional home.

Further material to this handbook and each Chapter is provided free on the isb-campus. An instruction in using this material for your own work can be found at the end of this book.

If you are interested in further studying the isb approaches, you are welcome to visit isb-website www.isb-w.eu/en

Join seminars or organize something like a workshop or sharing session locally yourself. There is a lot of material in English and isb runs international platforms for dialogue and co-developing.

My thanks go to

Anandan Geethan and Anuradha Kannan for co-operating in seminars in India and for writing an initial book (Schmid, Geethan 2015) together based on parts of this material.

Rosemary Napper who organized seminars in Oxford, UK and

Renato Morandi who organized a seminar and Coachingconference in Porto Alegre, Brazil, offering the opportunity to produce videos in English.

Markus Schwemmle and his task force, who took over organizing the international INOC-meetings.

Albrecht Schürhoff and Hildegard Werland who worked through the text from the perspective of a native speaker.

To the colleagues at isb, who have been engaged in this project, in particular to Lisa Meggendorfer, Almuth Pühra, Judith Schmid, Laura Sobez, Ingeborg Weidner, Heidi Wetzel and Bettina Gentner.

To all colleagues and customers who gave us the opportunity to learn and develop for almost 40 years.

Introduction

Culture comes from culture and examples teach the lesson. (isb-slogan)

An organization is not a defined thing. An organization appears as something different depending on different chosen perspectives. The owner of a company may think of it in terms of legal construction and which shareholders hold which kind of share. The technical director may understand it as buildings and technical equipment, the HR director may understand it as a marketplace for qualification and performances, the training director may see an assembly of competences and needs for more qualification etc.

isb discusses organizations from a variety of perspectives, important for developing both professional and organizational culture, always related to people and performance. From a systemic perspective, a company may be seen as a network of leadership relationships, as a system of responsibilities or a system where learning takes place.

This illustrates that “systemic” is rather about a way of looking at things than about defining a company as a system, even though this can also be seen as a valid definition. It is based on the principle of taking ideas about reality as real even if they convey only a vague connection to factual reality. From a systemic perspective reality is always the reality of the observer. Isb observes companies from the perspective of relationships between human beings acting in their organizational roles. Culture of performance and satisfaction in working lives is our main perspective, because this is the core of our expertise. Our goal is to engage responsible executives and service providers who are ready to take a look at their work and their businesses from this perspective.

Our major focus on organizations is development through culture. Culture? Do we really have time and resources for cultural development? We should definitely invest it!

If you think culture is expensive, try ignorance!

Almost everybody has experienced that in a project after a quick start and achieving quick results, after some time problems start to pile up. Achieving good results becomes increasingly difficult and expensive, if you have neglected taking care of essential basics in the first place. If you go for quick wins by neglecting culture, this will backfire through problems in the longer run. However, if you take good care of culture from the beginning, your potential in gaining further results will grow steadily. The more complex the tasks of a team become and the faster conditions change, the more important the cultural foundation of the team tends to be.

If you want quick results, start with culturing.

Fig. 1: Relation of result and culture orientation in organizations (Schmid 1996)

There are no limits to the complexity in which an organization can be looked at. We elaborate here on our perspectives and approaches, as this is exactly our expertise. By doing that, we feel responsible for serving the overall responsibility of entrepreneurship. This is crucial at the end of the day.

1. Sharing reality

Why sharing reality?

An organization is a mix of multiple realities functioning together to achieve results. These realities can either be cohesive or fragmented. If realities are not in sync, energy in an organization will be drained and there will be a waste of time, money, productivity and human energy. This is why sharing realities as a perspective matters for all areas in organizations. Looking at structures, processes, approaches, models and methods, there is always the one urgent question: is it contributing to a shared reality? Shared reality does not mean that everybody agrees on a certain point of view, nor do we want to reduce enriching variety. It simply means that we mutually understand as much of our realities as we possibly can. It means that we are able to effectively relate to each other and to join each other’s realities in a way that makes organizational life and performance possible, effective and satisfying.

1.1. What is Reality?

From a systemic point of view, reality can only be grasped, if we understand whose reality is meant. Individuals and groups live in their own cosmos, with their own mix of habits of perceiving, varying experience in biography, interests, competences, responsibilities and roles in society. Although reality may include “hard facts”, it is still a narrative. And many “hard facts” derive from ideas about reality having created their own reality in return. This is why in principle such realties should be open to change, provided that new ideas are created and realized in a shared process.

1.2. Creating reality by communication

A reality, which is not shared, can cause a lot of malfunctioning and dissatisfaction. Therefore, we must obviously be heading for better sharing wherever improving co-operation is intended. Simply stating individual reality as a valid and obligatory frame for everybody is usually not enough. It takes more to achieve active and creative co-operation. It requires communication on reality with those who have to be reached as cocreators of reality. This is exactly why a culture of communication and competence in dialogue on sharing reality is an art and a responsibility of its own importance. This goes far beyond simply improving one’s ability of listening and selfexpression. In the organizational field, we need models and approaches allowing specifications and combinations of sharing in many dimensions of role requirements and personal issues. The systemic communication approaches for the organizational field, which have been developed, practiced and taught at isb for decades exactly fit that challenge. They picture the isb cosmos of understanding professions and organizations as a systemic artwork of communication and culture.

1.3. Communication as cultural encounter

Let us start with a communication model focusing specifically on the encounter of different realities, serving us as an alternative to the traditional Shannon Weaver “sender-channel-receiver model” of communication (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: traditional sender-channel-receiver communication model

The sender-channel-receiver model represents the traditional technical idea of a “controlled” perspective on communication. It is to be expected that the reality of sender A when sent through the communication channel turns identically to the reality of receiver B. If transferred, it suggests that also human communication functions in a controllable way. If the receiver's reality doesn’t respond in the expected way, someone has a problem. From this perspective, those creative aspects arising out of the communicators’ cultural background that change the effect intended are not accepted. The communication partners are expected to keep such creative extensions as misfunction out of communication.

By contrast, the cultural encounter model of communication (Fig. 3) assumes that each communication partner has their own reality and uses the encounter to promote personal realities and developments. This model considers it as normal that these realities differ, and need to be connected if something like a shared reality is supposed to ensue. The creation of shared reality requires a necessary effort in communication and a specific competence. The cultural encounter model of communication gives up the idea of controlled communication, as the realities of living organisms are complex leaving them unable to even control it themselves. Everybody has to acknowledge that there will be surprises. Starting from this perspective alters both the way we deal with unexpected results of communication and how we go about connecting with each other.

Fig. 3: Cultural encounter model of communication (Schmid 1991)

1.4. Four levels of shared reality

Here a brief introduction of the systemic term “information” as it is an important basis for the following cultural encounter model of communication.

Information:

From a systemic perspective, data and information are two different things. Data refers to facts of any kind. However, only those facts that make a difference to someone result in information. Look at this example: “It is raining” is a statement.

Let us put this into the context of hiking. If we do not go hiking on a rainy day, the difference between “raining” and “not raining” becomes relevant information with regard to hiking. If we do go hiking on a rainy day as well, “raining” has no information value for the decision of whether we go hiking or not, but it might have for the question of whether to “bring an umbrella” or “not bring an umbrella”.

Thus, for communication to be successful, a shared frame of reference, i.e. a shared framework for the confrontation of realities needs to be established. For this purpose, we distinguish between four levels of a shared reality.

Fig. 4:4 Levels in creating a shared reality (Schmid/Hipp 1998)

Let us continue the example above. Although hiking was previously agreed, B doesn’t show up. When confronted, B replies: “I was assuming we could not possibly go hiking together while it is raining!”

Level 1: Perspectives and Data

Are A and B referring to the same data? Do they both know the factual situation to which the other is referring by the sentence “It is raining”? Or would B say so when it is cloudy, whereas A would only do so if it’s raining cats and dogs? Let’s assume both would agree on using the sentence whenever there is some rain.

Level 2: Meanings and relevance

Do participants attribute the same meanings to existing data? Do A and B share the same dimensions and directions of relevance? Or do they draw different conclusions? “Rain can lead to sickness and not acceptable risks for individual and the enterprise” vs. “Rain doesn’t create risks, only acceptable individual discomfort”.

Level 3: Interdependencies and interaction

What conclusions can be derived from the frame of reference and the interrelations between different elements? Do A and B share imaginations of the means by which the desired realities can be created or changed? Or do they differ like “coping with rain is a question of equipment” vs. “…a question of personal fitness”?

Level 4: Responsibilities and achievements

“The group leader is in charge of precautions for possible dangers, checking everybody’s fitness and providing equipment. If he considers these not sufficient, he has to refuse participation.”

In many cases where fairly reliable agreements on the level of achievements and responsibilities are reached, shared reality on the other levels is easily assumed. But hidden disagreements on levels 1-3 can lead to non-complementary actions at any time. If shared reality is to be ensured and hidden dissent is detected, all levels of reality encounter need to be checked. Conflicts often escalate on level 4, simply because the checking of all other levels of constructing reality has been neglected. A step-by-step clarification may help to improve mutual understanding to de-escalate conflicts.

Do participants share ideas of what might be acceptable solutions to open questions? Do A and B share ideas about their responsibility for these solutions? “Everybody is responsible for their own fitness as well as bringing equipment and for bearing the consequences in case of getting in trouble” vs.

Confrontation

We mostly associate the term ‘confrontation’ with conflict and quarrel. However, from a more neutral perspective, the term simply refers to the encounter of different realities. Confrontation, based on mutual respect, can be of great advantage for the systems involved, enabling them to constructively deal with differences, and thus contributing to sharing realities and community building. But even “positive” attempts frequently fail, especially if the respective communicative task is underestimated and if the culture of positive confrontation is underdeveloped. The purpose of confrontation is not necessarily to achieve the same realities, but rather to strengthen the selfreflection, the dynamics and identity of the systems involved: “The encounter with the otherness can strengthen your uniqueness.” (Rupert Lay).

Cultural encounters can certainly be satisfying without this model. Wherever this is not the case, it might be helpful to reflect on the process of sharing reality described above. If some difficult situations are resolved in a positive confrontation climate, there are generally positive effects on other areas. As people involved learn a lot in the process, they can help spreading this kind of awareness and clarifying communication for others.

1.5. Communication as dialogue

Reality shared by human beings involves a lot more than usually intended. This multitude of influences is not only a source of misunderstandings; it also contributes to creative and meaningful reality. To be able to benefit from that richness, it is helpful to define communication as “dialogue”. Dialogue means “through the word” or more generally “through the surface”. In communication below surfaces many more aspects of reality are connected than we are aware of.

The following dialogue model of communication (Fig. 5) focuses on partners understanding and mutually influencing each other on both a conscious and an unconscious level. It is based on the assumption that partners first ‘psyche out’ each other intuitively. Then they decide on how to continue further dealings with each other.

Fig. 5: Dialogue model of communication (Schmid 1998)

By conscious methodical surface we understand the part of communication we can control. Meaningful and creative cooperation only takes place whenever this surface is created in accordance with and serving the reality behind it. The conscious methodical mode has the function of controlling in the sense of setting frameworks for the communication process. But sharing reality in a deeper sense depends on encounters on many surfaces and backgrounds. These more complex aspects of reality have to be recognized, respected and shaped. For this purpose, a communication culture should be provided which is sensitive and is able to deal with whatever appears from unconscious intuitive spheres. Meaning is mostly created on intuitive levels and shows up as feelings (felt sense). This is why educated intuitive judgments are particularly important in professional relationships. After all, both the methodical and the intuitive level inspire and control each other.

1.6. Supporting Dialogue Culture

Complex processes cannot just be controlled from the surface, as this would leave essential parts in the unknown. Therefore, the conscious part of a controlling person needs to adopt the attitude of an ethnologist. Conversation should become a stage, on which the forces of the unconscious levels can be lived, observed and shaped. This is why a meta goal of all developmental communication should be the improvement of dialogue communication culture.