My nephew, who is an aficionado of QI and a fan of obscure and quirky facts, recently shared a couple from the world of classical music – that Beyonce is a distant cousin of composer Gustav Mahler and that Pierre Boulez  was preceded by a brother who died before he was born and who was also named Pierre.

Boulez’ experience reminded me of the work of Bert Hellinger in the field of family constellations, which suggests that to be named after a dead relative, whilst a loving and well-meaning gesture by one’s parents, can bring unintended and unhelpful consequences as all sorts of aspects of the parents’ experiences – their grief at the loss of a child, for example, or the weight of an increasingly idealised image of the deceased – increasingly become entwined in the experience of the young child.

The principles that underpin family constellations apply as much in the workplace as they do elsewhere in life, so that I was curious a while back to listen to John Whittington sharing his experiences as a constellations practitioner with a group of fellow coaches.  I write on the subject today from the perspective of an interested lay-person, curious about the hidden influences that shape our experiences in the world of work.

There is of course, the direct transfer of our experience of family dynamics into the workplace.  It’s a common experience for even the most senior of professionals to expect their line manager to behave towards them in the way their parents did – or to hope that their line manager will offer something of the love and care they yearned for from their parents but didn’t get.  Such expectations are often outside our conscious awareness, or perhaps we’re aware of them but haven’t stopped to question our assumptions about the relationship between a manager and the person s/he is managing.

Some examples reflect responses to experience in the workplace.  In one organisation, for example, a mistake by one employee cost the company a significant sum of money.  But there was a larger cost:  after the employee was dismissed his colleagues understood that to make a mistake was unacceptable and their assessments of risk included a large and unacknowledged dose of the irrational.  This habit quickly became ingrained in the company’s unwritten rules:  because nobody addressed the issue head on, no conscious decisions were made about what adjustments were needed in the company’s approach to risk and yet many adjustments were made.  These were not always for the commercial good.

In his talk John Whittington gave an intriguing example of constellations, when he described how he had asked a group of students on an MBA course to stand in a circle in order of age so that the youngest would end up standing next to the oldest.  When they did, something didn’t feel right to Whittington and he said so, waiting patiently until one of the group owned up:  they had been lying about their age.

Why does this matter?  To work with constellations is to recognise the hidden forces at play in the workplace and to engage with them – in other words to engage with the full range of information that is available and to shine a light on information that is otherwise hidden.  This opens up new possibilities for making progress in areas where previously the organisation, or people within it, were stuck.  It also opens up the possibility of improved health and well-being for the organisation and those who work within it.