MORE ON BUSINESS & ORGANISATIONAL CONSTELLATIONS

Constellation workshops for exploring dynamics in business

Practical Uses for Organisational Constellations:

• Defining a strategy for an organization
• Verifying the consistency of a structure within an organization
• Preparing negotiations
• Preparing for restructuring or integration after restructuring
• Integration after merging or acquiring an organization, company or business
• Project management
• Project assessments or creating a new company
• Company operational diagnosis
• Management of conflicts within an organization
• Answer personal questions as “ Should I stay or should I leave? “
• Clarifying the client’s own place in the organization / company
• Supporting decision-making in all the business areas
• As an approaching tool in dysfunctional organisations structure
• Seeing the systemic “interactive” effects in different company departments
• Testing the efficiency of important steps or changes in an organisation
• Trying different possibilities, “a test run”: “Should I do this, or that, or perhaps something else?
• Supplying additional forms of analysing complex entanglements of business, about family issues in family companies and/or to find ways and solutions of handing business to the next generation
• As a supervision tool for coaches or consultants: focusing especially in the consultant, so he can better deal with the request of the client.

Its a holographic exploration of dynamics that are hidden.

When the source of the issue or solution is not clear

When there is a sense of stuckness, business constellations provide insight and clear direction.

By Bert Hellinger

An interview with Bert Hellinger about his methods applied in organizations.
By Humberto del Pozo, in Santiago de Chile, September 1999.

What is your model like when applied to solve relationship problems within organizations?

First I will have to explain what is my model like. The model is derived from the work with Family Constellations. That means that in a group, a person can select representatives for the members of his family and place them in a space in relationship to one another. And as soon as those people have taken up their places they feel like the people they represent without knowing them. So by means of the Family Constellation, we get a real picture of what is going on in the family. If we apply that to organizations, for instance, if we choose representatives for the managers of divisions of a company and a manager places them in relationship to each other, we get a clear picture of the organization and of the feelings that the different members have.

What do you mean by clear picture of the feelings of the managers and why is it important to have such a clear picture?
Lets say the chief of an organization sets up representatives -including one for himself- of his managers and he does it intuitively -without thinking in anything specific. He very quickly gets a picture of how the managers relate to each other and to him. So he may be surprised that some people just look away from him and are oriented outside of the organization, which he might not have noticed before.
That means they are not satisfied with what is going on inside the organization. For instance it may be that the chief executive does not exercise his authority in a way which supports the managers, so they do not feel secure and they don’t feel that they can give their best to the organization. Now, if they are competent people they may be looking somewhere else where they may continue their work.
The question is of course if you see this, what steps can be taken to remedy this situation? A consultant doing this work with Constellations in the organization, will take certain steps to find out what is a good solution for all the people concerned. For instance, he will turn the chief executive to face the other managers, and will turn them to face the chief executive. And it may be that some of them are not at the right position. For instance if one manager has joined the organization at a latter date and if he then tries to take the first place, this might annoy the others. So you can put the managers of the various divisions in a certain order, in which each one of them feels that he has the right place.
In an organization you have different kinds of ‘Orders’ which you have to consider. The first is the one according to function. And the chief executive always takes the first place. The administrator who is his right hand, as we say, stands at his right side. Then the other ones stand according to the importance of their division. But we don’t know beforehand exactly what division is the most important one. So we can try to find out. Just by changing the place of the various representatives we find out what they feel is for them a correct order according to function.
There is a second ‘Order’ operating in families and in organizations, and that is according to signiority. That means that a person who joins an organization at an earlier date takes precedence over those who came latter. Not that he has a right to command over them. It is just a rank, a dignity he has, by having been in the organization for a longer time.
Now, if there are several who are on the same level of function, the one who came first to the organization must take the first place and such place is left from the key executive, then come the rest.

Helps organizational members including founders, directors and team leaders see the big picture