I have just completed a Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) in Hypnosystemic Organizational Development with Dr. Gunther Schmidt, the developer of hypnosystemic approaches and one of the leading figures in hypnosystemic thinking. This training builds on my engagement with hypnosystemic approaches across various contexts over more than ten years.
What matters to me is not organizational development per se. I understand participatory governance processes as temporary organizations or temporary teams: they bring together diverse actors under time pressure, with conflicting interests, strong emotions, power dynamics, and high expectations. In that sense, they face challenges very similar to organizations, often under much more fragile conditions.
What “hypnosystemic” means in my work:
“Hypno” does not mean hypnosis in a clinical or esoteric sense. It builds on the assumption that every experience is the result of attentional focus. It refers to:
- a constructivist understanding of reality
- the role of attention and focus in shaping perception, meaning, and action
- the fact that emotions and unconscious processes strongly influence interaction, especially under stress, conflict, and time pressure
“Systemic” means:
- focusing on patterns, relationships, and feedback loops, rather than individual positions
- understanding behavior as contextual and relational, not as personal failure
- working with complexity rather than reducing it to linear cause-effect chains
Key insights for participatory processes
- Emotions and conflicts are not a disturbance; they provide information about system dynamics and unmet needs.
- A shared problem understanding matters, but shifting attention from problem fixation to shared solution spaces opens new options.
- Psychological safety enables social engagement and cooperation, even where differences persist.
Combined, hypnosystemic approaches work with attention, emotions, metaphors, and interaction patterns to enable social engagement, cooperation, creativity, and learning, without denying conflicts or differences. Even with persistent differences, joint action and workable solutions remain possible.
For me, hypnosystemic approaches are not add-on tools. They are a way of working with people in contexts of complexity, conflict, and uncertainty in participatory processes, particularly in transformations towards sustainability.
I am curious to further explore how these insights can strengthen participatory governance processes and lead to more just outcomes.
Dr. Gunther Schmidt together with Dr. Elke Kellner