You dread showing up for work in the morning. The people you are coaching or leading probably did not choose each other. And it is crunchy, stressful and emotionally draining to get anything done.

If you are responsible for bringing a group of people together to collaborate and be productive – and you want it to be in a way that everybody enjoys and is engaged – you are in the right place. Your role might come with a job title like Agile Coach, Scrum Master, team lead, release train engineer, portfolio manager, or product owner.

• The team has polarized into factions around a key decision 
• Teams find themselves in competition with each other and are as uncooperative as they can get away with before getting called out 
• People are busy accumulating evidence why they can’t trust each other
• Meetings get loud, lack in respect and devolve into blame games. Or they are overstuffed with administrivia and nobody dares to speak about the real difficulties.

We often focus on a few key relationships to bring about a shift. When that works, we count our blessings and move on to the next thing. When it does not work, we have a few go-to places:

• We break the gnarly problem into smaller issues that are easier to talk about and align others around. We often identify a specific person or issue as the culprit. And the result usually is the formation of factions that duke it out in heated email threads and contentious meetings. It’s a lot like where you started. And many people just want to stay out of the melee and are silent.
• Sometimes we are able to stop somebody in the hallway and talk them into making an agreement – only to find out that these agreements are not acted upon or don’t stick for long. Turns out they are just as willing to change their minds back, conveniently forget or just get “too busy.”
• Maybe we can find a sympathetic ear from a higher up and they are willing to institute a new policy or convention. Yet, they are often not willing to follow through and insist on them over time. They have other priorities to burn their good will on.

All along we focus on having the better arguments and evidence to make our case only to find out that they rarely change minds when there is tension in the air. It’s easy to get jaded.

When reasoning does not work it usually means that the nature of the problem is not logical. It’s not going to be solved with rational, tactical solutions. Any solution that does not take emotions and the wider social context into consideration is doomed to fail. The social fabric erodes and develops holes when the tactical problem-solving approach drags on. That becomes a new and bigger problem.

Hello! I’m Volker Frank. My interest in group dynamics was jump-started when I was bullied as an 11-year-old. Understanding how one or two people could enroll enough of my classmates to gang up on me and silence the majority became a matter of emotional survival. I continued my learning journey by leading youth groups, later teams and then designing software systems that could bring an entire company together and balance disparate concerns. Along the way, I discovered Systemic Constellations. They are the most effective way I know how to surface the self-organizing dynamics within groups and discover paths towards balance, fairness and harmony. I want to work with people who strive for flow and healthy social interactions at work.

As social creatures we are very willing to make sacrifices when all boats rise. We are very willing to make sacrifices when our sense of fairness gets trampled on. We readily choose things that are not in our self interest. So, when your great idea is not getting traction, it is time to look at the ways it impacts the social context of the people you are trying to enroll, and speak to that impact directly and honestly, such as

• Recognizing contributions that usually happen behind the scenes 
• Acknowledging past events that left people in a lurch 
• Naming implicit norms and rules that have unintended consequences

Systemic Coaching allows us to experience what or who people are paying attention to and making sacrifices for. We can test our ideas in a safe space.