Building empathy and seeing the big picture are key learning activities that can help you communicate more effectively with your team. Organisational Constellations is an exercise packed with opportunities to do both these things, and better understand how your organisation works.
From stuck to insight: how to use Organisational Constellations to unlock patterns and build empathy in your team
Photo by Matt Briney on Unsplash
Photo by Matt Briney on Unsplash
What are Organisational Constellations and why they matter
Organisational Constellations help you discover and explore entrenched patterns inside your organisation. Negative patterns such as gender inequality, destructive conflict, bullying, communication breakdown, and lack of engagement; and positive patterns such as co-operation, collective decision making, empathy, and self-management.
Why uncovering patterns is key to successful change
When a third of all change projects – including strategic realignment, customer service reorganisation, improving sales, and implementing new business systems – fail [1], how do you work out where the blocks to success are so that you can move past them?
Organisational Constellations is one way to work on this.
Constellations are a powerful and far-reaching method for exploring burning issues and entrenched patterns like these inside organisations.
Based on the work of Bert Hellinger, an Organisational Constellation is a tool you can run with your team or any other group of people.
The Constellation draws on the intelligence embedded within the people experiencing a situation to reveal the hidden dynamics at work in that situation. It can shed light on leadership dynamics, conflict resolution, and relationships between different stakeholders or team members.
Use it to explore a specific issue such as culture change or innovation, or just use it as a fun tool to help a group build empathy and understanding by pooling their shared experience.
You will always learn something from doing it.
How to run an Organisational Constellation with your team
What you’ll need to get started
- A reasonable number of people: a min of 8 up to a max of 20.
- A room with enough space to stand in a big circle
- All tables and chairs moved out of the way
- Someone to act as facilitator
Step-by-step guide to building your Constellation
1. Pick a person, a role or an issue in your organisation to focus the constellation on.
(NB don’t pick something or someone that’s too removed from the group, otherwise, it’s too hard to empathise eg don’t try to be the big boss if they are several tiers away. Better to start closer to home.)
2. Somebody becomes the issue-holder
The issue-holder or core steps into the circle to represent the person or role you are focussing the constellation on.
Our suggestion is: if it’s your role, don’t play yourself, let someone else play you.
3. Ask questions to build empathy and insight
As the facilitator, you ask them: Who are you? What do you do? What is your experience? What do you imagine is going on for you? What’s important to you?
The issue-holder answers. Others may disagree with them, or chip in. And together you start to build a picture.
4. Add more roles to complete the picture
The next question is: who do they work with?
It could be colleagues, supporters, external suppliers, volunteers, managers, directors, clients, customers, or any other stakeholder.
Someone else from the circle steps forward to represent one of these people they work with, and you ask them the same questions: Who are you? What do you do? What is going on for you? What’s important to you?
Keep following this process – invite more people to step in. Each new person says what they think about the person and role they’re representing, the rest of the group modify that, chip in, or add to it.
As the connections expand, new people step forward to represent the new roles – they stand in different positions in the room in such a way as to give a picture of how the elements relate to each other: how close, how far away, how connected they are.
In this way, you systematically build the ‘constellation’.
5. Include abstract elements like systems and goals
You can also include more conceptual elements like resources, limitations, systems, goals or the future.
Keep going until everyone in the circle has been assigned a role, or until the situation has been fully mapped out.
What you’re doing is trying to build an empathy-led model of what’s going on.
6. Step back to see what’s revealed
Then you can stand back and look at the dynamics of what’s going on.
Why Organisational Constellations work so well
Constellations help you see what’s really going on beneath the surface in teams. As the representatives step into their role, they are encouraged to feel the experience of those they are representing and accurately describe it. This can be really surprising.
Here’s why they’re so powerful:
- They take conversations out of peoples’ heads and into the space between people
- They allow everyone to see what they feel, not just what they think
- They shift the conversation from blame to understanding
- They create the conditions for insight and change
- They help people realise they’re part of a system — and not the only one with a problem
When you do this interesting things emerge.
The Constellation starts to reveal dynamics of a situation that may not have been visible before, or perhaps known only to some.
Why constellations are a powerful tool for managers
As hidden dynamics surface, everyone present can see and feel them – creating the conditions to explore the issues more creatively, access deeper perspectives beyond everyday awareness, and uncover surprising, even profound, resolutions.
This shared experience builds emotional literacy, strengthens empathy, and fosters a sense of shared responsibility. For managers, that means you can stop guessing what’s really going on and instead see it – clearly and collectively – so you can respond with confidence and clarity.
Real-world examples of organisational constellations
1. Looking inward — and forgetting the customer
We ran a Constellation where the assembled group only looked upwards in the organisation towards the executive team and talked about everything internal. Nobody talked about the customer. The question it raised was, did that truly reflect how they viewed things? If we re-did it and started with the customer, what would happen?
2. Disconnected voices across the organisation
In another example, the Constellation showed there was a big gap between different parts of the organisation – between people at the coalface, and people making the decisions. That is how it felt for the staff, which was news to managers. The Constellation was able to bring this to light.
Why constellations work: insight through embodied experience
Constellations are brilliantly simple and full of subtlety and complexity. They are enjoyable while helping people understand how others experience the organisation. They can reveal the patterns that shape an organisation and provide clues for alternative ways of behaving.
They are really really useful.
Want to try it? Download a free worksheet
If you’d like to run a Constellation in your organisation, here’s a free Organisational Constellations – worksheet
How ThenSomehow can help
If you need some help with working on this – get in touch, at Then Somehow we help you build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help your leadership team perform better, get in touch here.
Source
[1] Mckinsey & Co survey of 3,199 executives in 2008 found a third of executives believed that their change initiatives were total successes, and another third believed that their change initiatives were more successful than unsuccessful.