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A metaphor for Systemic Modelling

15th Nov 2023 by Caitlin Walker in

A recent conversation between me and my 24 year old, following an academic lecture we'd both enjoyed, illustrates my approach and my offering.

The lecture was interesting and engaging and 40% of the evening was dedicated to Q and A by this leading academic and community activist. On the drive home, my child said, 'It was interesting to watch her lecturing style and the way she asks for, and answers, questions. It's as though she is a solid lump made up of layers and layers of knowledge. All the questions asked go straight into that solid, layered lump of expertise. Then her solid, considered, expert opinion comes back and tells them the correct response. For example, when you asked a question, she started answering before you'd finished speaking and she answered with expertise you already knew and then a load of data that wasn't relevant. What she said was often brilliant and she'd done her due diligence in the field and knew lots of what was right and wrong. But she learnt nothing from the audience that didn't confirm what she already thought, and the audience learnt only what she thinks.'

I asked what would be different if it had been done using Systemic Modelling and she said, 'When you are facilitating cleanly, even when you're the expert and people want to know what you think, it's like you're a loose ball of tendrils. When someone asks a question, some tendrils go into your own experience and other tendrils are going out to better understand her question and where it comes from and what she already thinks and knows, and other tendrils are considering the audience and who else might know something about this topic that the whole group could learn from. Your style is looser and makes more space for collective intelligence.'

Now there are times I don’t want to know what the crowd thinks. Sometimes I’ve come only to hear someone who’s done their due diligence. But other times, when live people are in one space, the most effective learning tool is a balance between expertise and collective experience. That’s what Clean Language and Systemic Modelling excel in – using clean and clean-ish questions to accept and extend questions and comments, creating adjacent possible and making the best use of the collective intelligence of this system of people gathered together.

About Caitlin Walker

Caitlin is a director of Clean Learning and the developer of Systemic Modelling™. She is the author of From Contempt to Curiosity, which details many of the innovative and transformational projects she’s led across our community from the most dispossessed to leading think tanks.

Caitlin graduated in Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies and completed four years post graduate research in ‘Strategies for Lexical access’ including fieldwork in Ghana. She began modelling teaching and learning while at SOAS, volunteering intermediary classes to translate information presented at lectures into different learning styles for the students. At the same time she was a youth worker in Kings Cross bringing these leading edge tools to groups of young people.

She went on to set up literacy clubs in King’s Cross, where children could come to learn to spell. From 1996 – 1999 Caitlin was an Education tutor with the Dalston Youth Project, a Home Office run experiment to offer accelerated learning to at-risk students, alongside mentoring, to keep them in school. She ran these sessions as NLP modelling workshops and achieved excellent results with the students. The project won a Crime Prevention and Community Safety award for Great Britain. In 1999 she was offered the opportunity to develop her work in a business context and she created the ground breaking metaphors@work process. These techniques are available on the Creative Management section of the Open University MBA program and on a 10 week modular course on Practical Thinking. She has co-designed and she co-delivers a Masters Level module in Coaching and Mentoring at Liverpool John Moores University.

She has since developed her modelling skills from small scale group development to whole scale organisational culture change programmes. She designs and delivers tailor made learning and development programs for addressing diversity, conflict, leadership, managing mergers and creating ‘learning organisations’.

Caitlin practices in a variety of contexts. Clients include: Jeyes Group, Liverpool John Moores University, Pharmacia, Hull City Council, South Yorkshire Police Service, Bexley Care Trust, New Information Paradigms, Work Directions UK, Crime Concern, BT, Police National Search Centre, Celerent Consultancy, Carbon Partners, Ealing LEA, and Working Links. She has trained a number of in-house trainers to carry on and develop the work without creating dependency on her expertise. She has systematically tested and developed her ideas in challenging arenas and her robust products have become sought after learning aids.