SOP is a practical way of viewing and working with organisations and communities, based on ideas of relating, belonging and becoming.
Systemic practice appreciates each person as a wonderful system of psychical, physical and spiritual entities that are ceaselessly interacting consciously and (much more) unconsciously. Each of those people is also part of the organisational community system and each organisation is part of a wider system, etc. What appear at first glance to be separate, individual people seem on closer appreciation to be invisibly and profoundly interconnected and separately distinguishable through dynamic forces, memories and communicating.
A system is people or things connected by processes. Those things are themselves usually ceaseless processes. Processes are interwoven successions of events that change things, feelings or thoughts.
When I hear that something is ‘systemic’, I infer that it pervades the whole system. When I read that something is ‘systematic’, I infer that it is consciously organised.
SOP shows that people are responsible for their performance, but only to a certain extent and that the system of which they are part is another, even greater influence.
Systemic practice draws on dynamic systems thinking, with its notions of positive and negative, amplifying and damping feedback loops. That brings in thinking from complexity theory. It also draws extensively from family psychotherapeutic approaches.
SOP consultants try to be non-judgemental, seeking to raise people’s self-awareness. SOP consultants are often irreverent and playful and hopefully always kind, always wondering how things may be and how they may be otherwise.
The essence of SOP is the value of relating, of relationships and of belonging together.