Family Business Constellations Retreat

This two day retreat is for individuals who are part of a family and a family business. The retreat will provide you with a space to step back and reflect on key issues and challenges that often come up for individuals within families with family businesses such as:

• What is my personal purpose within and also beyond this family and this business?
• How can we value everyone in a system where our family and our business intersect, when family is all about love, inclusion and belonging, but business requires selection and hierarchy?
• How can we balance tensions between our sense of responsibility for the collective and our desire for individual freedom and flourishing?
• How can we avoid the unresolved tensions of one generation being passed on to the next?
• What do we need to face, acknowledge, grieve for, and let go of to move forward with freedom and lightness?
• What is our purpose as a business now? Who does the business exist for and serve? How do we balance serving family, employees,      customers and the wider world?
• What are the possibilities for positive societal impact that are offered by the long term thinking intrinsic to family businesses?

We will be working with methodologies from Systemic Constellations, a simple but powerful process that can help us see reveal the dynamics of systems, show us things we've been missing (blind spots) and or avoiding (hard truths). We can experience extraordinary 'aha' moments and shifts in our perception. It can help us get unstuck and discover what real change is possible for us as individuals, within our families, our organisations and in the wider economic and social systems we are a part of.

About Systemic Constellations

Constellations was originally developed as a way of working with personal issues. It is particularly known for its ability to help people identify and release patterns that repeat through the generations within families. Over the past three decades, it has been adapted for working with organisational change issues and is increasingly also being used for working with wider systemic, societal challenges. It is a particularly powerful methodology, therefore, for working with issues where individual, family, organisational and wider societal issues all intersect.

A core practice in Systemic Constellations is the creation of "living systems maps" where workshop participants stand in to represent key parts of a system we want to explore. This is a remarkably powerful diagnostic tool that helps us see relationships in a system in a new light. We can work with this living map to explore different possible interventions and see the likely impact on the system.

Representatives in a Constellation typically receive an embodied sense of how different parts of a system might respond to different interventions. This is a somewhat mysterious process – and we don’t know exactly how it happens – but the experience of practitioners over the past 30 years is that the process has an incredible power and can lead to significant “aha moments”. We see the system from a different perspective. Where we might have felt stuck before, we are now able to see promising new pathways through that can provide new motivation and momentum.

We will work with this methodology in a number of different ways, doing short co-coaching exercises, doing system mapping in small groups, as well as constellating issues in the whole group.

An important part of the process is creating a safe space where everyone feels confident that everything that happens in the workshop and whatever is explored and discussed will be treated with utmost confidentiality and will not be shared beyond the workshop participants.

Who is the workshop for?

You will be an individual who is a member of a family with an inter-generational family business. You may be working in the family business, or not. The questions you are holding might be around your own individual purpose and work, your place within the family, issues relating to family dynamics, or issues relating to the business, or a combination of these.

The workshop is open to those with experience of Constellations and those who are new to it. The key requirement for participation is that you are open to exploring issues in new and innovative ways. Systemic Constellations are very embodied and intuitive, so the most important thing is to be open and willing to trust the process and go with flow.

We are expecting a small, intimate group – most likely between 6-10 participants.

Facilitator

The workshop is being facilitated by Charles O'Malley who has been a Systemic Constellations practitioner for twenty years, mostly using it to work on his own personal and organisational issues. His main work for the past two decades has been across a number of issue areas in the sustainability space, working with everything from start ups and social enterprises, through to large global companies, governments and multilateral institutions. One of his major clients was a large 5th generation family business, where he ran a team developing their global sustainability strategy. He currently works part time as Senior Systems Change Advisor at the United Nations Development Programme. In his earlier career, he spent more than a decade in corporate finance, venture capital and the impact investing space. Through his Constellations work he is now bringing together the worlds of personal development, sustainability and social impact.

Co-convenor

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