There’s a particular kind of workplace conversation that’s become almost universal – and it’s a systemic pattern: Someone raises an issue – a team that keeps missing deadlines, a project that stalls at the same stage every time, a conflict that resurfaces no matter who’s involved – and the room reaches for the same explanation. It’s a people problem. Someone needs to communicate better, manage their time better, be more resilient.
Sometimes that’s true. Quite often, it isn’t the whole story.
What tends to be happening is that the system around the people has a hand in producing the behaviour, rather than the people themselves. Change the individuals and, nine times out of ten, the same problem quietly reappears wearing a different name.
This is where systemic thinking earns its keep – and why, in our increasingly complex world, it matters more now than it has in years. It’s also the thread running through our own Diploma and Advanced Diploma in Systemic Coaching. So, if you’ve been curious about the discipline, this is a great place to start.
What is systemic thinking?
In plain English: systemic thinking (sometimes called systems thinking) means looking at behaviour, problems and outcomes in the context of the wider structure producing them, rather than treating them as isolated, individual failings. It’s a shift from treating symptoms to addressing root causes and it’s a core skill in systemic coaching.
Systemic coaching as a practice treats development as inherently relational, according to Peter Hawkins and Eve Turner in their book, Systemic Coaching. It’s not something that happens to an individual in isolation, but something that happens in relation to the systems they’re nested within: their team, their organisation, its stakeholders, the wider community and the environment. Good coaching, they say, creates value across all of those systems, not just for the person in the room.
Why now?
Workplaces have grown genuinely more complex. Hybrid teams span time zones and rarely share a room. Reporting lines blur across matrix structures. One team’s “quick fix” becomes another team’s Monday morning fire. Change arrives faster than anyone can properly digest it, let alone communicate it well.
In this environment, individual-focused coaching – however skilfully done – can only take you so far. You can coach someone to be the most self-aware, articulate, emotionally intelligent leader in the building, and they’ll still come unstuck if the structure around them rewards the wrong behaviours or starves the right ones of oxygen.
Systemic thinking doesn’t replace individual development. It sits alongside it and asks a different, often more useful, question: not just what does this person need to change? but what is this pattern trying to tell us about the system they’re operating in?
That’s a meatier question, and one that more coaches, HR leaders and leaders themselves need in their toolkit – whether the goal is spotting organisational patterns, untangling root causes, or simply making sense of workplace complexity.
Systemic patterns don’t announce themselves
Systemic patterns are rarely obvious. Nobody experiences “a system.” People experience a frustrating meeting, a decision that gets made three times, a colleague who seems to sabotage every initiative without quite realising it. Spotting the pattern underneath the noise is a skill.
Here are some practical starting points.
1. Notice what keeps repeating
Individual incidents are data points; repetition is a signal. When something crops up more than twice – the same kind of miscommunication, the same stalled decision, the same person cast as “the difficult one” – stop asking why did this happen and start asking why does this keep happening here. Repetition is usually the system talking.
2. Ask “what is this behaviour serving?”
Systemic thinking assumes behaviour makes sense within its context, even when it looks unhelpful from the outside. A manager who hoards information might be protecting themselves in a culture that punishes mistakes publicly. A team that avoids raising problems might be responding, quite sensibly, to a history of nothing ever changing when they do. Before labelling behaviour as the problem, be curious about what it’s protecting, avoiding or achieving within the wider system.
3. Zoom out before zooming in
It’s tempting to go straight to the person nearest the problem. Instead, try mapping who else is involved, upstream and downstream, even if they’re not in the room. Who feeds into this process? Who’s affected by its outcome? Who has influence but no visibility, or visibility but no influence? A rough sketch on paper, or mapped out with objects, can often reveal more than an hour of discussion.
Mapping with paper or objects can help us see the big picture
4. Watch for the feedback loops
A leader’s anxiety produces tighter control, which produces less initiative from the team, which confirms the leader’s anxiety that people need tighter control. Feedback loops like this are self-reinforcing and invisible from inside them. Learning to spot where an outcome is quietly feeding back into its own cause is one of the most useful systemic muscles you can build.
5. Hold multiple truths at once
Perhaps the hardest habit, and the most valuable: resisting the pull towards a single villain or a single fix. Systemic situations are rarely about one person doing one thing wrong. They’re about several reasonable responses interacting to produce an unreasonable result. Practising the discipline of holding two, three, four perspectives simultaneously – without collapsing into “so whose fault is it?” – is central to systemic practice.
Building the habit
None of this requires a framework you memorise and apply once a quarter. Like any mental habit, it’s built through repetition in small moments – noticing a pattern in a Tuesday meeting, asking one more “what’s this serving?” question than you normally would, sketching a quick systems map instead of jumping to a solution. Over time, these small moments compound into a genuinely different way of seeing organisational life – one that spots things that others miss entirely.
That shift – from reacting to individual episodes to reading the system producing them – is, we think, one of the most valuable capabilities a coach, leader or HR professional can develop right now. It changes the kind of conversations you’re able to have and the kind of change you’re able to support.
Where this goes next
If you’ve been curious about how systemic coaching training might sharpen your own practice – whether you’re weighing up our Diploma or ready for the Advanced Diploma – this is very much the territory we work in, and we’d love to talk it through with you.
Sign up to our free webinar with MurphyBishop founders Irene and Margaret to find out more and ask any questions you have.
Webinar date: Thursday 3rd Sept
Time: 12:30-13:30
✍️ Register here.
Read our blog post: What it’s really like to do the MurphyBishop Systemic Coaching Diploma
Get in touch with the MurphyBishop team to find out more about our Diploma and Advanced Diploma in Systemic Coaching.
