Listening thoughtfully, the General Manager smiled and said to us, “I understand, now, what you provide is rather like psychotherapy for this organization.” My colleague and I had just presented our feedback to the managerial team. We had interviewed employees in a manner originally called, “a bit informal”, by the GM; but had delivered a detailed portrait of the group, upon which strategic outcomes would be based.

Discussing this moment, later, I said to my colleague that the GM had been on the right track; but I recognized that his understanding seemed more poetic than this stage of consultation warranted. That is, to be “psychotherapeutic” for the organization,  a productive, system-wide, qualitative change should be felt.

The GM was sensing that edge of change. What my colleague and I were able to portray both agreed with his unspoken knowledge of operations and articulated the possibilities of forward movement.

“I think your assessment is incomplete, Ian”, my colleague responded. “It is correct enough in its scope, but really does miss what the GM felt: and that is, that there has been change!”

The “therapeutic” change she’d meant was the GM’s newly reflective stance. Where he’d been skeptical about our clinical methodology of inquiry— of following workers’ interests into whatever nook and cranny their mental maps of the organization led us— we’d been able to develop a portrait of unique interpersonal and systemic structures and pressures— centered in the organization yet reciprocally responsive to the external environment— which he not only “got”, but to which he’d resonated.

My colleague’s observation amplified my meaning. Relating to the term “psychotherapeutic”, I’d attended to the large picture. Just like the managers and workers we’d recently talked with, my own viewpoint had reflected a single strand of my own experience, tempered by the question I’d attempted to address. Addressing the same question from her own perspective, my colleague drew my attention to another aspect of the question: one I’d overlooked in my own initial attempt at understanding.

My colleague’s inquiry with me in relation to the GM’s observation, paralleled what we’d just done with the organization.

Her question opened up my thinking about my own viewpoint, gave me opportunity to broaden my perspective, and to clarify my observations. In this experiential sense, she’d help me experience what the GM had meant about the “psychotherapeutic”: his recognition had been experiential and had come from new, personal understanding.

Here was my own “Aha” moment. And yes, she observed, the personal is where the roots of systemic change begin to be felt.

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