<\/a>What is Clean Language?<\/h2>\nThe other day, I was talking with a friend, and we were agreeing that “clean<\/strong>” is rather a loaded word!\u00a0 There’s “clean” as opposed to using illegal drugs, “clean eating” as opposed to “junk food” – and even the original meaning of “clean language” meant “not using rude words”.\u00a0 Potentially kind of a judgemental ambiance!<\/p>\nIn this context, though, it means something more like:\u00a0 intentionally choosing language which isn’t carrying your own agenda or your own presuppositions<\/strong>.\u00a0 You might’ve already noticed: some phrases are more “open-ended” than others :-)<\/p>\nThe two most classic and multi-purpose Clean Questions are:<\/p>\n
\n\n- “Is there anything else about ______?<\/strong>“<\/li>\n
- “What kind of ______?<\/strong>“<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n
(The “blank” part in those sentences would always be something that the other person already said, so that you’re not “putting words in their mouth”.)<\/p>\n
Even then, you’re still choosing which question to ask, and when exactly to ask it.\u00a0 Your agenda could still leak through via those choices if you’re not careful.\u00a0 But starting with carefully-chosen words can make an enormous difference.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, one thing I’ve done a lot of over the years is Thinking Sessions<\/a>, as developed by Nancy Kline<\/a>.\u00a0 And the key question in a Thinking Session is also a “clean question”:\u00a0 “Is\u00a0there anything more you think, or feel, or want to say about that?<\/strong>”<\/p>\nSo without really thinking about it in those terms, I\u00a0had<\/em> been practising a form of “Clean Language” at those times.<\/p>\n<\/a>Where did it come from?<\/h2>\nDavid Grove<\/a> (1950-2008) was the originator of Clean Language, and then other people have learnt from him, built on his ideas, and adapted them for different contexts.<\/p>\nHe became interested in traumatic memories and phobias and while working with Vietnam War veterans he realised that some of them couldn\u2019t remember particularly traumatic events, but they would still have feelings about them.\u00a0 While observing very carefully what was happening, he noticed that, \u201cIf I didn\u2019t force people when they were talking they would naturally start using metaphor to describe their experience.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Even when the person couldn’t talk directly about what had happened to them, they could<\/em> talk about the metaphor<\/em>.\u00a0 Then when he and that person spoke in terms of the metaphor, it would often change in some way.\u00a0 And the changes in the metaphor could transfer across back to the real-life trauma, and have healing effects on it.<\/p>\nDavid also became interested in the use of questions in therapy.\u00a0 He analysed the questions or paraphrases used by major therapists like Virginia Satir and Carl Rogers, and noticed they would often redefine what their clients said.\u00a0 David thought this \u2018robbed\u2019 the client of some of their experience and so began to look for a way of working that would be free of any presuppositions.\u00a0 He found that repeating clients’ words verbatim and asking questions which \u2018interfered\u2019 with the client\u2019s experience the least were in fact the most effective in bringing about change.\u00a0 Clean Language was created as a means of questioning clients\u2019 metaphors in a way that neither contaminated nor distorted them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Some of the questions which historically had been asked in therapeutic contexts, he was rejecting for, in a sense, carrying too much of “the therapist’s agenda”.\u00a0 Instead, he tried to develop and fine-tune questions which would be as respectful as possible of the unfolding of that person’s metaphors.<\/p>\n
That was the beginnings of Clean Language, and the metaphor-landscape aspect of it is what we’d nowadays call Symbolic Modelling.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Into varied contexts<\/h2>\nSince then, these skills haven’t stayed only in therapy-world<\/strong>.\u00a0 There are loads<\/em> of contexts where it’s useful to be able to ask questions without accidentally injecting your own presuppositions into the conversation!\u00a0 For example,<\/p>\n\n\n- If you’re enquiring into an accident or a crime, or doing research, you don’t want to “lead the witness”<\/strong> and warp your results.<\/li>\n
- If a friend is trying to think through a problem, it’s often more helpful to encourage their own ideas<\/strong> than to try to solve the problem for them.<\/li>\n
- If you’re at odds with someone, sometimes the apparent disagreement can be resolved by getting a better understanding of what they<\/em> mean<\/strong> by a word they’ve used.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n
<\/a>Systemic Modelling<\/h2>\nSystemic Modelling<\/a>, SysMod for short, is one of the offshoot things which built upon David Grove’s work.\u00a0 The most obvious differences from the original stuff are that it’s for groups<\/strong>, and that it’s for “ordinary” (non-therapy) situations, anywhere a group of people want to share ideas<\/strong> or collaborate more effectively<\/strong>.<\/p>\nAs you can read in her book From Contempt to Curiosity<\/a><\/em>, Caitlin Walker started thinking about how David’s ideas could be useful to the young people she was then working with:\u00a0 kids around 11 to 14 who were having difficult times and getting “into trouble”.<\/p>\nI wanted to find a way to hold the young people in the same space of acceptance, respect and curiosity, and to find a way that they could hold themselves and one another in that space too.\u00a0 [That is, the same kind of accepting space as David Grove would generate for working with one<\/em> person.]<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nThis wasn’t a therapy context:\u00a0 it was an educational one.\u00a0 And it wasn’t likely that most of the young people would want to sit quietly by while one of them went in-depth!\u00a0 So for the Clean Questions to be useful in that situation, there obviously had to be some practical differences from the one-to-one version.<\/p>\n
Instead of following the trail of one<\/em> person’s metaphor, Caitlin would ask similar questions to each person in the group, taking turns<\/strong>.\u00a0 This meant that, as well as understanding themselves<\/em> better, the young people were also getting ideas from each other<\/strong> – a\u00a0theme which remains central to Systemic Modelling to this day.<\/p>\n<\/a>Stories from the book<\/h2>\nOne of the first things that first group did – because several of the young people had wanted this topic – was to model how each of them typically lost their temper.<\/p>\n
For one, the metaphor was \u201cI\u00a0just switch<\/span>\u201d; for another, it was \u201cI\u00a0go red<\/span>\u201d, and for another, \u201ceverything just goes quiet<\/span>\u201d.<\/p>\nAs the young people took it in turns to describe their experience, pretty soon they weren’t only noticing how they lost<\/em> their temper:\u00a0 they were having ideas about what could help each of them to stay calm.<\/p>\nOnce [the first child]<\/span> had a strategy for managing his temper then they all wanted one.\u00a0 We set about finding the difference between one for someone who snaps and one for someone when things go quiet.\u00a0 These metaphor models acted as an amazing form of group learning.\u00a0 Each of the kids … started getting curious about how their anger worked.<\/p>\n… once we’d got the anger stuff sorted and the kids in both groups were a calmer unit, we could move on to the other themes they’d wanted to cover.\u00a0 …\u00a0 Just as with their models for anger, each kid developed and drew a metaphor map for when they were learning really well and again these went on the wall.<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
I realised how important it was that I’d started from a position of not knowing.\u00a0 If I’d started the sessions by asking Moses to control his temper or James to learn to read, then I would have given them the message that they weren’t good enough as they were.<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
[As the sessions went on:]<\/span>\u00a0 They wanted to know how things worked and what could be done about them.\u00a0 They started using the tools outside of the sessions.<\/p>\nOne boy explained to his teachers that he couldn’t manage crowds in the corridor and they agreed he could arrive at the class early and leave early so he could keep his state calmer.<\/p>\n
One girl said that her teacher had said that her form group would never amount to anything and she’d asked “what’s your evidence for that miss?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ha!<\/p>\n
I could go on quoting more and more bits from Caitlin’s book, because it’s full of good stories. But\u00a0for now I’ll just include one more, which is possibly my favourite:<\/p>\n
There was a lovely point in my work with the girls’ group when I was rattling off instructions to the class and Mary Lou interrupted me.<\/p>\n
Mary Lou:\u00a0 You’ve got to slow down, Miss.\u00a0 You’re talking too fast.<\/p>\n
Caitlin:\u00a0 What do you mean Mary Lou?\u00a0 You talk faster than me.<\/p>\n
Mary Lou:\u00a0 It’s not for me, it’s for Naomi.\u00a0 When she’s learning at her best she likes to get one idea like a pebble in a pond and then the ripples to settle, so she knows she’s got it.\u00a0 When you talk fast it’s like you’re throwing pebbles at her and she’s all over the place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
… The kids had moved from learners to facilitators and were now starting to advocate for one another’s needs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I love that!<\/p>\n
Anyway, that work was years ago now, and as well as continuing to support young people, Caitlin has been bringing Systemic Modelling skills to teams and organisations all over the place.<\/p>\n
It’s evolved, but what’s stayed a constant theme is that people come together in a group of about 5 or 10 participants, share ideas about something, hear from others, and – if\u00a0it’s an ongoing team – discover how to work better together.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Back to my own learning journey<\/h2>\nSoon after I found out about the nowadays-online stuff, I had the chance to sample & enjoy a few SysMod sessions as a participant.\u00a0 Then I got interested in learning how to run the process myself.<\/p>\n
Caitlin had plans for more books, and not enough time to write them all, so after various bits of conversation, we came up with a trade:\u00a0 my writing & co-writing skills, for the opportunity to be on some of her courses.<\/p>\n
Catching covid last autumn put a big dent in my activities for a while<\/a>, mainly due to dysautonomia which limited my ability to stand up or sit up.\u00a0 But with a bit of ingenuity, the SysMod process-learning & practising turned out to be something I could do while horizontal!\u00a0 It took some experimentation to arrange the laptop, my notes and me :-)<\/p>\n<\/a>Putting together the ingredients<\/h2>\nAs I started trying out the process, it\u00a0turned out I did already have some of the ingredient-skills.<\/p>\n
One ingredient is knowing a handful of Clean Questions, which I’d already practised on & off over the years.<\/p>\n
(Behold a tatty piece of paper which I’d kept for many years.\u00a0 I think this was maybe actually from that first taster day in 1997!\u00a0 It shows a small set of Clean Questions which are recommended as good ones to learn early on.)<\/p>\n
![\"(alt](\"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/CQDiagramOldPrintout.jpg\")
<\/div>\nAnother ingredient-skill which I already had is keeping track of fair shares of time & attention in the group.\u00a0 I’d got in the habit of noticing that when running other group things, like discussions or social meetups or this other thing I invented called Unstick Your Creativity.<\/p>\n
Among the things I didn’t<\/em> already know were some new useful phrases (like the SysMod classic “Who’s got something different?<\/strong>“), and the overall structure of a Systemic Modelling session.<\/p>\nAnother skill is sensing when’s a good time to invite the group to start asking questions of each other<\/em>.\u00a0 This transition is important, because the idea in SysMod isn’t<\/em> that the facilitator stays at the centre of the conversation:\u00a0 you want to be catalysing communication in a network all across the group.<\/p>\nTo my great satisfaction, in June I got to Foundation level.<\/p>\n
![\"alt](\"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/SysModFoundationCertificate20230616SmallVersion.jpg\")
<\/div>\nThat means I have all the skills to run a basic SysMod session. Yay!<\/p>\n
At Professional level, which I’m studying now, you learn a lot of other useful skills as well.\u00a0 For example, you might be using “evidence, inference and impact” to unpack any disagreements which come up in the group.\u00a0 You’d also be encouraging the participants to notice and learn the skills themselves, so they become more and more able to do the process without you.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Resources & opportunities<\/h2>\nFor anyone interested in the general area of “Clean”, there are quite a few good resources nowadays.<\/p>\n
Penny Tompkins and James Lawley<\/a>, the first people to study and build on what David Grove was doing, have an abundantly rich web site with essays to read for free<\/a>, as well as some paid-for courses and videos, and a book, Metaphors in Mind<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\nSeveral other people have written books: for example, Wendy Sullivan & Judy Rees’s Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds<\/a><\/em>, Julie McCracken’s Clean Language in the Classroom<\/em><\/a>, or Marian Way’s Clean Approaches for Coaches<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\nMarian and Caitlin host a friendly online space called the Clean Campus<\/a>, where anyone can make an account, take part in conversations and find out what’s coming up.\u00a0 In fact, you can read quite a lot of that site without<\/em> making an account.<\/p>\n
\nEditing note November 2025:\u00a0 This post originally carried on with some info about free events coming up.\u00a0 Those particular ones have gone now, so I’m editing them off.\u00a0 But there are more – see e.g. the events page on Clean Campus<\/a>.<\/p>\nWhile doing that edit, I also took the opportunity to update the quote about David Grove:\u00a0 originally the FAQ had referred only to questions<\/em> asked by other therapists, but for Rogers and maybe others, they don’t necessarily ask questions and it’s more about how they shift the meaning as they paraphrase.\u00a0 Some of us talked about that<\/a>, and then Caitlin and\/or Marian updated the FAQ phrasing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What I’ve been learning about recently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sysmod-clean-language","category-teams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2667"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2954,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2667\/revisions\/2954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
In this context, though, it means something more like:\u00a0 intentionally choosing language which isn’t carrying your own agenda or your own presuppositions<\/strong>.\u00a0 You might’ve already noticed: some phrases are more “open-ended” than others :-)<\/p>\n The two most classic and multi-purpose Clean Questions are:<\/p>\n (The “blank” part in those sentences would always be something that the other person already said, so that you’re not “putting words in their mouth”.)<\/p>\n Even then, you’re still choosing which question to ask, and when exactly to ask it.\u00a0 Your agenda could still leak through via those choices if you’re not careful.\u00a0 But starting with carefully-chosen words can make an enormous difference.<\/p>\n Interestingly, one thing I’ve done a lot of over the years is Thinking Sessions<\/a>, as developed by Nancy Kline<\/a>.\u00a0 And the key question in a Thinking Session is also a “clean question”:\u00a0 “Is\u00a0there anything more you think, or feel, or want to say about that?<\/strong>”<\/p>\n So without really thinking about it in those terms, I\u00a0had<\/em> been practising a form of “Clean Language” at those times.<\/p>\n David Grove<\/a> (1950-2008) was the originator of Clean Language, and then other people have learnt from him, built on his ideas, and adapted them for different contexts.<\/p>\n He became interested in traumatic memories and phobias and while working with Vietnam War veterans he realised that some of them couldn\u2019t remember particularly traumatic events, but they would still have feelings about them.\u00a0 While observing very carefully what was happening, he noticed that, \u201cIf I didn\u2019t force people when they were talking they would naturally start using metaphor to describe their experience.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Even when the person couldn’t talk directly about what had happened to them, they could<\/em> talk about the metaphor<\/em>.\u00a0 Then when he and that person spoke in terms of the metaphor, it would often change in some way.\u00a0 And the changes in the metaphor could transfer across back to the real-life trauma, and have healing effects on it.<\/p>\n David also became interested in the use of questions in therapy.\u00a0 He analysed the questions or paraphrases used by major therapists like Virginia Satir and Carl Rogers, and noticed they would often redefine what their clients said.\u00a0 David thought this \u2018robbed\u2019 the client of some of their experience and so began to look for a way of working that would be free of any presuppositions.\u00a0 He found that repeating clients’ words verbatim and asking questions which \u2018interfered\u2019 with the client\u2019s experience the least were in fact the most effective in bringing about change.\u00a0 Clean Language was created as a means of questioning clients\u2019 metaphors in a way that neither contaminated nor distorted them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Some of the questions which historically had been asked in therapeutic contexts, he was rejecting for, in a sense, carrying too much of “the therapist’s agenda”.\u00a0 Instead, he tried to develop and fine-tune questions which would be as respectful as possible of the unfolding of that person’s metaphors.<\/p>\n That was the beginnings of Clean Language, and the metaphor-landscape aspect of it is what we’d nowadays call Symbolic Modelling.<\/p>\n Since then, these skills haven’t stayed only in therapy-world<\/strong>.\u00a0 There are loads<\/em> of contexts where it’s useful to be able to ask questions without accidentally injecting your own presuppositions into the conversation!\u00a0 For example,<\/p>\n Systemic Modelling<\/a>, SysMod for short, is one of the offshoot things which built upon David Grove’s work.\u00a0 The most obvious differences from the original stuff are that it’s for groups<\/strong>, and that it’s for “ordinary” (non-therapy) situations, anywhere a group of people want to share ideas<\/strong> or collaborate more effectively<\/strong>.<\/p>\n As you can read in her book From Contempt to Curiosity<\/a><\/em>, Caitlin Walker started thinking about how David’s ideas could be useful to the young people she was then working with:\u00a0 kids around 11 to 14 who were having difficult times and getting “into trouble”.<\/p>\n I wanted to find a way to hold the young people in the same space of acceptance, respect and curiosity, and to find a way that they could hold themselves and one another in that space too.\u00a0 [That is, the same kind of accepting space as David Grove would generate for working with one<\/em> person.]<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This wasn’t a therapy context:\u00a0 it was an educational one.\u00a0 And it wasn’t likely that most of the young people would want to sit quietly by while one of them went in-depth!\u00a0 So for the Clean Questions to be useful in that situation, there obviously had to be some practical differences from the one-to-one version.<\/p>\n Instead of following the trail of one<\/em> person’s metaphor, Caitlin would ask similar questions to each person in the group, taking turns<\/strong>.\u00a0 This meant that, as well as understanding themselves<\/em> better, the young people were also getting ideas from each other<\/strong> – a\u00a0theme which remains central to Systemic Modelling to this day.<\/p>\n One of the first things that first group did – because several of the young people had wanted this topic – was to model how each of them typically lost their temper.<\/p>\n For one, the metaphor was \u201cI\u00a0just switch<\/span>\u201d; for another, it was \u201cI\u00a0go red<\/span>\u201d, and for another, \u201ceverything just goes quiet<\/span>\u201d.<\/p>\n As the young people took it in turns to describe their experience, pretty soon they weren’t only noticing how they lost<\/em> their temper:\u00a0 they were having ideas about what could help each of them to stay calm.<\/p>\n Once [the first child]<\/span> had a strategy for managing his temper then they all wanted one.\u00a0 We set about finding the difference between one for someone who snaps and one for someone when things go quiet.\u00a0 These metaphor models acted as an amazing form of group learning.\u00a0 Each of the kids … started getting curious about how their anger worked.<\/p>\n … once we’d got the anger stuff sorted and the kids in both groups were a calmer unit, we could move on to the other themes they’d wanted to cover.\u00a0 …\u00a0 Just as with their models for anger, each kid developed and drew a metaphor map for when they were learning really well and again these went on the wall.<\/p>\n …<\/p>\n I realised how important it was that I’d started from a position of not knowing.\u00a0 If I’d started the sessions by asking Moses to control his temper or James to learn to read, then I would have given them the message that they weren’t good enough as they were.<\/p>\n …<\/p>\n [As the sessions went on:]<\/span>\u00a0 They wanted to know how things worked and what could be done about them.\u00a0 They started using the tools outside of the sessions.<\/p>\n One boy explained to his teachers that he couldn’t manage crowds in the corridor and they agreed he could arrive at the class early and leave early so he could keep his state calmer.<\/p>\n One girl said that her teacher had said that her form group would never amount to anything and she’d asked “what’s your evidence for that miss?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ha!<\/p>\n I could go on quoting more and more bits from Caitlin’s book, because it’s full of good stories. But\u00a0for now I’ll just include one more, which is possibly my favourite:<\/p>\n There was a lovely point in my work with the girls’ group when I was rattling off instructions to the class and Mary Lou interrupted me.<\/p>\n Mary Lou:\u00a0 You’ve got to slow down, Miss.\u00a0 You’re talking too fast.<\/p>\n Caitlin:\u00a0 What do you mean Mary Lou?\u00a0 You talk faster than me.<\/p>\n Mary Lou:\u00a0 It’s not for me, it’s for Naomi.\u00a0 When she’s learning at her best she likes to get one idea like a pebble in a pond and then the ripples to settle, so she knows she’s got it.\u00a0 When you talk fast it’s like you’re throwing pebbles at her and she’s all over the place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n … The kids had moved from learners to facilitators and were now starting to advocate for one another’s needs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I love that!<\/p>\n Anyway, that work was years ago now, and as well as continuing to support young people, Caitlin has been bringing Systemic Modelling skills to teams and organisations all over the place.<\/p>\n It’s evolved, but what’s stayed a constant theme is that people come together in a group of about 5 or 10 participants, share ideas about something, hear from others, and – if\u00a0it’s an ongoing team – discover how to work better together.<\/p>\n Soon after I found out about the nowadays-online stuff, I had the chance to sample & enjoy a few SysMod sessions as a participant.\u00a0 Then I got interested in learning how to run the process myself.<\/p>\n Caitlin had plans for more books, and not enough time to write them all, so after various bits of conversation, we came up with a trade:\u00a0 my writing & co-writing skills, for the opportunity to be on some of her courses.<\/p>\n Catching covid last autumn put a big dent in my activities for a while<\/a>, mainly due to dysautonomia which limited my ability to stand up or sit up.\u00a0 But with a bit of ingenuity, the SysMod process-learning & practising turned out to be something I could do while horizontal!\u00a0 It took some experimentation to arrange the laptop, my notes and me :-)<\/p>\n As I started trying out the process, it\u00a0turned out I did already have some of the ingredient-skills.<\/p>\n One ingredient is knowing a handful of Clean Questions, which I’d already practised on & off over the years.<\/p>\n (Behold a tatty piece of paper which I’d kept for many years.\u00a0 I think this was maybe actually from that first taster day in 1997!\u00a0 It shows a small set of Clean Questions which are recommended as good ones to learn early on.)<\/p>\n Another ingredient-skill which I already had is keeping track of fair shares of time & attention in the group.\u00a0 I’d got in the habit of noticing that when running other group things, like discussions or social meetups or this other thing I invented called Unstick Your Creativity.<\/p>\n Among the things I didn’t<\/em> already know were some new useful phrases (like the SysMod classic “Who’s got something different?<\/strong>“), and the overall structure of a Systemic Modelling session.<\/p>\n Another skill is sensing when’s a good time to invite the group to start asking questions of each other<\/em>.\u00a0 This transition is important, because the idea in SysMod isn’t<\/em> that the facilitator stays at the centre of the conversation:\u00a0 you want to be catalysing communication in a network all across the group.<\/p>\n To my great satisfaction, in June I got to Foundation level.<\/p>\n That means I have all the skills to run a basic SysMod session. Yay!<\/p>\n At Professional level, which I’m studying now, you learn a lot of other useful skills as well.\u00a0 For example, you might be using “evidence, inference and impact” to unpack any disagreements which come up in the group.\u00a0 You’d also be encouraging the participants to notice and learn the skills themselves, so they become more and more able to do the process without you.<\/p>\n For anyone interested in the general area of “Clean”, there are quite a few good resources nowadays.<\/p>\n Penny Tompkins and James Lawley<\/a>, the first people to study and build on what David Grove was doing, have an abundantly rich web site with essays to read for free<\/a>, as well as some paid-for courses and videos, and a book, Metaphors in Mind<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Several other people have written books: for example, Wendy Sullivan & Judy Rees’s Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds<\/a><\/em>, Julie McCracken’s Clean Language in the Classroom<\/em><\/a>, or Marian Way’s Clean Approaches for Coaches<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Marian and Caitlin host a friendly online space called the Clean Campus<\/a>, where anyone can make an account, take part in conversations and find out what’s coming up.\u00a0 In fact, you can read quite a lot of that site without<\/em> making an account.<\/p>\n Editing note November 2025:\u00a0 This post originally carried on with some info about free events coming up.\u00a0 Those particular ones have gone now, so I’m editing them off.\u00a0 But there are more – see e.g. the events page on Clean Campus<\/a>.<\/p>\n While doing that edit, I also took the opportunity to update the quote about David Grove:\u00a0 originally the FAQ had referred only to questions<\/em> asked by other therapists, but for Rogers and maybe others, they don’t necessarily ask questions and it’s more about how they shift the meaning as they paraphrase.\u00a0 Some of us talked about that<\/a>, and then Caitlin and\/or Marian updated the FAQ phrasing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What I’ve been learning about recently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sysmod-clean-language","category-teams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2667"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2954,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2667\/revisions\/2954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
<\/a>Where did it come from?<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Into varied contexts<\/h2>\n
\n
<\/a>Systemic Modelling<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Stories from the book<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Back to my own learning journey<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Putting together the ingredients<\/h2>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/a>Resources & opportunities<\/h2>\n
\n