Feeling the future through Constellations
At our recent team away day, Curve co-founder John Monks facilitated a team coaching exercise for us called ‘constellations’, a methodology rooted in family therapy and systems theory. The idea is that participants physically arrange themselves in the space to represent different elements or stakeholders. Through their positioning and interactions, a living representation of the system emerges. The facilitator navigates this constellation, observing how the placements and interactions reveal hidden dynamics and influences.
Exploring our stakeholder relationships
Our goal was to explore what our mission – “to be a truly regenerative business with a stake in the future, working to help organisations change for good” – will look like for us and our various stakeholders in 2024. Our obvious stakeholders include our team, our clients and our partners, but beyond people, they include Nature, Climate and Money.
We identified our stakeholder groups and John randomly allocated one to each of us to represent. He invited us to physically embody our role and to place ourselves where we thought we existed in relation to the other roles. I was allocated ‘Government’ and my instinct was to walk far away from everyone else and fold my arms, as we’re not a campaigning organisation and we have no direct relationship. When John invited us to reposition anyone we thought was in the wrong place, everyone was comfortable with where I was. But when we discussed how we felt about the positioning, we realised we’d thought of government at the highest level – not at the local level of clients like Cambridge City Council, and not in terms of its relationship to the environment. Reframed in this way, I immediately moved closer to the group.
Listening to our bodies
We considered the things that are important to us as a business, how they interrelate at the moment, and how we’d like this to look in the future. You can facilitate the same exercise in a workshop by placing and rearranging Post-it notes on a board, but the thinking you do in this format is at an abstract level. By physically moving, we felt how the change affected us, and noticed the levels of comfort or discomfort in others as they moved to different positions. We had five seconds to move each time, so we had to follow gut instincts rather than conscious thoughts, which means embracing a degree of vulnerability. I found it to be an extremely powerful and enlightening exercise, and we would never have got to the same place using just words.
How Constellations can help your team
Constellations is a great tool for facilitating C-suite teams to develop a new strategy. The team gets to explore what they truly feel and believe – something they would never arrive at by processing their thoughts through slide templates they've used a hundred times before. It's also a great empathy-building exercise, putting yourself in someone – or something – else's shoes. Wouldn’t it be great to get a leadership team of six people and, for example, ask the CEO to embody the role of CTO? To see how the others react, where they position themselves in relation to everyone else?
Our team coaches can facilitate Constellations to help you solve all kinds of problems. To identify and understand the people you want to engage with – whether as customers or other stakeholders,, to design your roadmap or improve the relationships between your product and marketing teams – the possibilities are endless. Ultimately, the process facilitates more effective decision-making, improved collaboration and a clearer understanding of the team's functioning. Offsites are the perfect setting, where you can leave the learned behaviours and routines associated with your familiar surroundings behind.
If you’d like to chat about your challenges and how we can help, send us an email, we always love to talk.