In coaching, the Systemic Approach encourages the Coach to enlarge his/her point of view with respect to the client as a person.
In fact, this involves situating the person in his/her environment, which is composed of interacting elements. Reading them will reveal guideposts that bring about the appearance of changes necessary for reaching the objectives of the coaching client.
Whether in the business realm or in the family setting, an individual does not live in isolation. He/she belongs within a system, a network, that includes people but also extends beyond people, to other elements that constitute his/her environment.
What is a System ? System may be defined as a set of interacting elements, so that a modification of any kind to one element produces a change to all the others. What’s more, a System is not reducible to the sum of its elements. It has its own totality.
Of course, defining System as a set of interacting elements also suggests the need to define interaction.
Interaction may be defined as a sequence of messages exchanged by individuals in a reciprocal relationship. In other words, when A speaks or interacts with B, there will be feedback, a subsequent action from B toward A.
This concept of feedback has importance when looking for the origins of a problem. In the Systemic Approach, one abandons traditional approaches that seek a linear relationship between a cause and a problem. To attempt to resolve a problem, it is not enough to identify a cause. In fact, there is circular causality.
To illustrate : In the relationship between a team member and his/her manager, the behavior of one can not be explained by the behavior of the other. There is in fact interaction, that is to say action and subsequent action more complex than a simple cause and effect relation.
One of the properties of a System is “equifinality.” This systemic principle reminds us simply that it is impossible to return to the causes by starting from a consequence. The complexity of the system is such that the same initial cause may engender different consequences according to the states of the system, and that the same consequence may have different causes.
As a result, a Systemic Approach in Coaching will favor the search for solutions in the here and now, rather than try to revisit the past to attempt to find a cause.
Another System property is homeostasis, the fact that a System tends by itself to maintain a state of equilibrium in a changing environment. This prompts the question: how to introduce change in this System?
The Systemic Approach in Coaching will proceed according to these stages:
- First, begin with the request of the client to define his/her issue in concrete and precise terms. This is to identify his/her situation, the context in which the client’s problem occurs, and to define the parameters of the issue.
- The following stage is to specify the concrete objective of the change the client wishes to bring about and to specify the manner in which he/she will note the disappearance of the problem.
- Next, it is necessary to identify solutions that have already been attempted in order to understand resistance to change within the System. The goal is to introduce change without trying to confront system resistance directly.
At that point the process of change begins and will involve learning something new.
In leading the client through the process of change, the coach’s tools are the following :
- “realigning” to propose a new point of view of the situation in which the client operates, a change of perspective on the situation the client experiences, which is considered already to be a partial solution,
- Prescribing a task to bring the person to perceive the context differently, for example by having him/her complete an unexpected task.
- Prescribing a paradoxical task which is specific to the Systemic Approach. The Coach will suggest that the client voluntarily implement the behavior that he/she wants to modify.
Of course, this article simplifies the Systemic Approach. Find out more.