Systemic Patterns: Supporting Process Design and Facilitation

Facilitation is a creative process of bringing awareness to the world. It is about sensing and working with people, interactions, relationships and other dimensions. A lot of this is about following the emerging process and helping to find the potential and the unfolding direction. This all sounds very well but for those who are seeking to learn about facilitation or to deepen their practice are there any guides to how you might do this, be it if we are facilitating a conversation, a one off session or a whole learning journey or complex multi-stakeholder process? What patterns of process might we pay attention to as we are designing processes and facilitating groups within them?

At the School of System Change we bring together different contributors and their frameworks and approaches with learners to help navigate and build capacity towards a field of systems change practice.

Frameworks are ways to visualise the relational dynamics between the different elements in a system and as such help us navigate complexity as part of our systems change practice. Humans are visual beings, and we like structure. However many of our structures do not reflect the systemic nature of reality, that we are dynamically relating, moving and changing. So by applying systemic frameworks it helps us work with greater levels of complexity, patterns and interconnectedness.

“All models are wrong some are just more useful than others.” George Box

The patterning of systems frameworks, that is the way they dynamically relate and flow together, can help you with designing and facilitating processes and thus help us navigate our change work.

A word on structure. A structure in a system is what you see when you look at a system and is something that is more rigid, whilst when we look at patterns we seek to look at the movement and flow. The common structure of systems is that of nested levels or wholes (see image). What this means is that before we start with any process we might seek to understand at what levels or boundaries we are working with — from the self, group, wider system or a different formulation of these.

If we look at the different systemic and systems change frameworks we can see a number of archetypes of how movement, relationships and therefore how change is happening in the world

These include:

This article outlines some of the frameworks (it is not an exhaustive list!) that follow these archetypes and how they may be used for the practice of facilitation. Inevitably many of the frameworks overlap each other and might not sit within just one category.

That there are different states of being and learning that happen in any pattern, so that we need to consider how we are also taking people through these different stages of the cycle balancing and flowing between the conceptual and the experience, the action and the reflection.

That change happens over time, at multiple levels. Where some things grow, something die. When we work with groups how are we noticing both what is emerging but also what we need to let go of, how we are paying attention both to the past, present but also the future.

That there are different depths that we operate at. That most of what we see in the world is above the surface, the events or our consensus reality, whilst there is also much that is under the surface, our patterns of behaviour, our polarities and conflicts and our deeper shared essences, wisdom and potential. A process that works with depth will look at how you can access all levels to both process what is there and inform what comes next.

That in order for change to occur we need to both tap into what we want to happen together and converge on what the problem is or the question. However for change we also need to access and work with what is different, brings in divergent thinking, ideas and experiences that support creativity and movement.

Many of these frameworks help to give a way to both design and to follow the dynamics of a process you are facilitating. However critical to any systems work is to also pay deep attention to the emerging process, what is trying to unfold and bring forth in the process that might follow its own pattern. There are also some approaches that help to work with the emergence and seeing what is there and what needs to unfold to help the pattern find itself.

We know this is not an exhaustive list and would love to hear what other patterns of process do you use?