Constellations can be used to overcome organisational defensive routines of the participants of a change process.

It has been shown using hundreds of thousands of case studies over the last 40 years that the elements that make up a system can be usefully represented separately by people or objects. The system can be a social group, a family or a business. The representatives are placed in positions that demonstrate how they interrelate, and how they fit into the big picture of the system. Constellations get their name from the sky ‐ we see constellations as fixed, but in truth they are all travelling at speed, and the juxtaposition will be seen differently from different vantage points.

Maybe your parents wanted you to be a boy, and you came out as a girl - born into disappointing your parents - It happens more than you might imagine. Some simple sentences used to dispel that pain can prove surprisingly effective!

In a systems constellation workshop or session, the first part is seeing how everyone, or everything fits together. It may be people ‐ such as customers, the manager, staff etc, or it may be elements such as cash or quality ‐ they all have their place in the business.

Having observed the placing of the people and or things in the business, the next step is to see how the system works if we move things ‐ for example, it may show up that the business is not seeing "quality" anymore, and if we move "quality" into a better position we can immediately observe how it affects the other players in the business.

We can use people, or little table top objects (even PlayPeople™) or felts. Squares of felt are used when I work with an owner or manager, because I can get him or her to place the felts, and then stand on them to witness how everything looks and feels from the different places ‐ he/she gets to see how it works being a customer (for example) of his/her business, which is enormously empowering.