18 September 2026 by Jennifer
Thoughts on the phases of a learning journey.
For a few years now, I’ve been on a learning quest related to Systemic Modelling, a.k.a. SysMod. It’s an approach to working in groups or teams: more sparking of the group’s combined intelligence, fewer conflicts or misunderstandings. I wrote about it here a while back.
In this post, what I wanted to reflect on is not so much what I’ve been learning, but more the process of learning, for a field like that with many interweaving ingredient-skills.
Getting interested
I always like things about how people communicate, how groups collaborate, inclusion, exclusion, learning and difference.
The initial pull for me to get into SysMod in particular, back in 2022, was seeing a video of Caitlin explaining some stuff which I already partly knew. She was talking about how something we experience as “a problem” can also be seen simply as one element in a system, sometimes with strengths yet to be identified.
I was like: aha yes!
It crystallised something I’d been thinking about, and pingled my “interesting things here” sensors. “Someone here I can learn from”.
Based on that intuition (plus already having read Caitlin’s book a few years before), I signed up for one of her Inside Story courses – following a project where there had been tricky conflict within an organisation.
What I learnt and observed kept on being interesting to me, and I decided I wanted to learn this territory myself. In a sense, that decision was the first transition stage of the journey.
Gathering skills
So then it was like: okay, I’m officially learning SysMod now. Here’s a list of skills, I gather the skills.
I embarked upon a phase of gathering and practising.
I knew from past experience of learning other things that my brain was gonna need some real data to play with. I went to a lot of Peer Practice sessions, and if someone said “I’ve got a topic, who’d like to facilitate”, I’d pipe up “I will if no-one else wants to”.
It was intrinsically rewarding to learn in this way, because we talked about real things, and I could sense the conversations being useful to people.
Over a similar timespan, I also did some more courses. Every now and again, one of the trainers would explain something specific that made something fall into place. And then I’d have a new thing to practise.
After I got to Foundation level, I was still really in this same mode of gathering skills: it was just that now, they were more advanced or more varied skills. For example, at Professional level, one of the things you have to do is co-facilitate with someone else – so I started practising that, along with some people who were ahead of me, or about the same level. (Thanks to Pascal, Valerie, Matt & Ratha!)
The being of not yet knowing
As I was learning “new stuff”, I would also be drawing parallels or making connections with “old stuff”. For example, “evidence versus inference” was familiar to me from years ago, and so was “noticing the vibe of making someone wrong” (which overlaps with SysMod use of the Drama Triangle). There were lots of times when I would think: oh, I recognise this element, yeah.
But in this stage, it was overall from a position of “not assuming that I know how to do this“.
I think that’s a good attitude to have at a certain stage. You don’t want to be coming in like “I already know this, I already know that, I already know this”, or you’d never be able to learn anything new! You’d be like the would-be Zen student whose teacup is already full:
He poured and he poured and the tea rose to the rim and began to spill over the table and finally onto the robes of the wealthy man. Finally the visitor shouted, “Enough. You are spilling the tea all over. Can’t you see the cup is full?”
The master stopped pouring and smiled at his guest. “You are like this tea cup, so full that nothing more can be added. Come back to me when the cup is empty. Come back to me with an empty mind.”
I don’t think what I did was “emptying” my mind exactly, but I think there is a kind of “bracketing off earlier skills”, which can be helpful when you’re trying out new stuff.
Like if you’ve done ballet for years, and now you’re starting tap dance, you want to be able to set aside how your legs and feet “know” how to go into ballet positions. A tap shuffle is different from anything in ballet, and the pull of ballet habits would get in your way.
Transitioning, consolidating
That kind of open, provisional “being of not yet knowing” can be a great place to come from when you’re learning something new.
And, it’s not necessarily the best place to ultimately be standing as a facilitator! At what point do you start transitioning back towards “the being of being on top of it“? haha.
When you’re in charge of a thing that’s happening, you have to have integrated the new skills enough, so that you’re using your own senses to sense what’s happening. You can’t be running as the proxy for somebody else’s ideas of what to do.
You might have a blueprint in your back pocket, but the blueprint always needs adjusting for the circumstances. You have to do your own experiment.
Your own way
Many many times as we’d been learning, Caitlin would say things like “some of this is just how I do it – you’ll have to figure out your own way”.
That made sense to me in principle. In any field, there are going to be a mix of essential bits and variable bits.
But in the early days of gathering skills, I felt like I wasn’t yet really at that stage. It was like “learn the rules before you break them”, or “Chesterton’s Fence“. First I had to reach some level of understanding of what the essentials were.
One development which turned out to be immensely valuable was when a couple of my fellow learners got permission from their then-current clients for a small supervision group to review their training-session recordings. (Thanks to Blake and Emily and their clients for this piece of generosity!)
That meant I had the chance to witness two more people “doing it their way“, along with snippets of how the sessions were received. Emily and Blake would be doing some things the same as Caitlin and some things different, which makes it much easier to see what is and isn’t essential. It expanded for me the possible territory of “how this can work”
(The funny thing is, we’re trained that if you’re giving examples in the introduction to a topic, you should give at least three examples, otherwise people don’t have enough sense of the territory. And here was an example of three examples :-) )
Blake, Emily and Caitlin all have different styles. Watching any of them, I’d have moments of “I couldn’t do that”.
And then, somewhere around the time of those supervision-review sessions, that’s when the “finding your own way” part became tangible and vivid to me. Well yeah, I can’t do it like them, because they’re them and I’m me!
The flow of playing to your strengths
Then there was a specific thing that Caitlin said to some of us one day: “If you’re gonna use this stuff out in the world, you have to use it in a way that costs your system nothing.”
Something about that statement felt very illuminating to me – like a “different way round” to look at some of the things I’d been mulling over. Things fell into place. It was a bit like that thing in chemistry where you get a supersaturated solution and then tapping on the jar can initiate the crystallisation process.
What I heard in “costs your system nothing” is it’s about finding the way which plays to your strengths. What can you do, which for some people would be alien or difficult, but for you comes natural?
For example, it’s in my natural flow to “be analytical” and to invent practical solutions. My brain likes solving for “how are things put together now, what are the constraints, what else might be possible”.
However, I don’t identify as a quick thinker. If you want me to answer “on the spot” about a load of new data, then you might be out of luck, because my best answers usually come after I slept on it, or a week later… or a month later, when the topic floats back into my head during a walk one day :-) When it looks like I thought of something “on the spot”, it’s probably because we’re on territory that isn’t new to me.
And it’s easy for me to connect with feeling compassion for people, and seeing everyone’s different perspectives (also useful for scaffolding other people’s learning) – whereas sometimes I might not know where or how to draw a boundary line in the moment, especially if the conversation is moving fast.
So then I started wondering: okay, of the whole territory of Systemic Modelling, where is it most useful to be analytical like that, or “see it from all sides”-ish like that? Which parts of this territory are right up my street, and where do I just need to be “good enough that it doesn’t mess up the rest of it”?
And, thinking ahead for the future: what else do I know, that isn’t taught as part of SysMod, but can weave with it and multiply with it?
Metaphor landscape
In retrospect, I can see that my spatial metaphor in the gathering stage was of a kind of “working towards“. There was this destination up ahead, which, when I’d gathered enough skills, I would reach. Each gathering of a skill was also a step towards that destination.
This transition that I’m thinking about now was a kind of other-way-round. Instead of trying to get to somewhere else, now I wanted to be grounded in my own knowing, and gradually bringing the new stuff in to integrate it.
I got the image of a pile of gatherings over to my right, and me, bit by bit, reaching for them and bringing them towards me. As I bring the new skills towards me, I’m making sure that they’re congruent with me and how I work. I’m making sure that they’re like properly installed.
There might be a few elements that I never actually bring in: I leave them on a shelf in case I do want them later, but right now I don’t have a use for them.
That process of integration and “how do I do this” is still ongoing. I actually wrote the seeds of this post back at the end of 2025, and in a sense, the transition has been going along that whole time.
I still am gradually acquiring new ingredient-skills as well. That might not ever stop. The transition I’m thinking of isn’t like “got all possible skills, don’t need any more”: it’s about the relationship between me and the skills, or about my ability to wield them based on my own intuitions.
Or to use another metaphor for the whole thing: To learn, I’ve been playing a card game using specifically a new subset of cards, so as to get familiar with those cards. But then in the long run, I don’t want to be only playing with a “half deck”. Now I have to shuffle all the cards together: old and new. Now I have to figure out the strategies that you can play with the full deck.