Team Sense-making with Organizational Constellations

GOTO Amsterdam 2017

When a project, a team or a company are facing a complex issue, a systemic perspective can help you understand the underlying organizational and social dynamics. This, in turn, can be a big leap forward towards solutions that would be otherwise hard to envision.

Organizational Constellations are a method that we can use to get insights into some people dynamics, by having participants spatially represent the constituents of the problem under examination and their relationships.

In case you are wondering, the term "constellation" here can be seen as a metaphor for a system of elements (stars and their spatial relationships) to which we attribute some significance when we see them all together.

Organizational Constellations are useful for creating a shared understanding of what's going on about a problem and/or a group of people, and also for tapping into the tacit knowledge of the group — as well as its explicit knowledge — in a way similar to what Daniel Kahneman describes in his best-selling book "Thinking fast and slow".

During this interactive session, you will have a brief explanation of how the method works and why, followed by a simple demonstration with volunteers. Time permitting, we will have a Q&A session at end.