Organizations Connected: A Handbook of Systemic Consultation

In this book, each contributor describes the way they use the systemic model in their consultancy practice. Their key ideas are illustrated via a case example (or examples), where possible including detailed accounts of the exercises and techniques they use inspired by systemic thinking. They conclude with a evaluation of the work, pinpointing its strengths and weaknesses and what the contributor learned from it as well as how it might be developed or applied in other situations.

'Describing and charting the way in which a consultant working from the systemic paradigm brings a unique lens to the understanding of organizational complexity has been, and remains, a challenging task in a global corporate world where the demand is always for products, new interventions, and approaches that "work" and can be measured.

'The structure of the chapters in this book offers readers the opportunity to connect to each contributor's account of his or her work, showing how systemic ideas and practices shape a piece of consultation, while simultaneously respecting the need for the generic stages of consultation identified by the editors, in their Introduction to remain visible and recognizable to the readers, whatever familiarity and fluency with systemic thinking practices they may bring to the text.

'The interventions described by the contributors, all established and respected consultants, elegantly reflect a number of facets of the value of systemic work in organizations - namely, the distinctive ways systemic practitioners pay attention to and use feedback, examine and seek to understand beliefs that sustain repetitive patterns of behaviour, explore the development over time of cultural values in an organization, seek to increase possible explanations for the above, and clarify roles and tasks in relation to specific contexts, to mention only a few.

- David Campbell and Ros Draper, from the Series Editors' Foreword