In this podcast, Katie talks with CRR faculty member Mish Middelmann about the Relationship Sytems Intelligence at Work Program (RSI@Work). At the centre of the RSI@work program is Building Relationship Systems Intelligence in teams and organisations. Across this conversation, Mish and Katie cover a range of topics including:
If you feel the RSI@Work might benefit your coaching practice and the organisations you work with- then do check out www.crrglobal.com/about/rsiwork to find out how you can become an RSI Licensed Facilitator, or how you can bring an RSI licensee to your workplace.
Mish Middelmann is a serial social entrepreneur and transformational systems coach who holds the worldwide RSI@Work program on behalf of CRR Global. He has been a member of the CRR Global faculty since 2015, leading the full range of ORSC courses worldwide as well as supervising on the ORSC Certification program. He was the southern Africa partner for CRR Global from 2012 to 2020. Prior to that, he was the co-founder and first CEO of a hi-tech start-up serving the social development sector in the early 1990s in Johannesburg, South Africa – a business which still thrives independent of Mish. He sees the extraordinarily diverse, purpose-driven company he helped to found almost like a third child, along with his two flesh-and-blood sons.
For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time
We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.
In this podcast, Katie talks with CRR faculty member Mish Middelmann about the Relationship Sytems Intelligence at Work Program (RSI@Work). At the centre of the RSI@work program is Building Relationship Systems Intelligence in teams and organisations. Across this conversation, Mish and Katie cover a range of topics including:
If you feel the RSI@Work might benefit your coaching practice and the organisations you work with- then do check out www.crrglobal.com/about/rsiwork to find out how you can become an RSI Licensed Facilitator, or how you can bring an RSI licensee to your workplace.
Mish Middelmann is a serial social entrepreneur and transformational systems coach who holds the worldwide RSI@Work program on behalf of CRR Global. He has been a member of the CRR Global faculty since 2015, leading the full range of ORSC courses worldwide as well as supervising on the ORSC Certification program. He was the southern Africa partner for CRR Global from 2012 to 2020. Prior to that, he was the co-founder and first CEO of a hi-tech start-up serving the social development sector in the early 1990s in Johannesburg, South Africa – a business which still thrives independent of Mish. He sees the extraordinarily diverse, purpose-driven company he helped to found almost like a third child, along with his two flesh-and-blood sons.
For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time
We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.
Key
KC – Katie Churchman
MM - Mish Middelmann
[Intro 00:00 – 00:09]
KC – Hello and welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity, to nature, to the larger whole. I’m your host, Katie Churchman, and in this episode I’m talking with CRR Global faculty member Mish Middelmann about the RSI@Work program. Across the conversation we cover a range of topics including Who the program is for, its impact and the power of integrating the ORSC language within organizations. At the center of the RSI@Work program is building relationship systems intelligence in teams and in organizations, here’s the essence of what the program addresses: The how and why of leading from the “we” for the good of the whole system, what it really takes to get team and employee engagement – collaboration and co-responsibility from the get-go; addressing conflict skillfully and constructively as a source of innovation and growth; what it takes for all members to really express themselves and really be heard. Mish Middlemann is a serial social entrepreneur and transformational systems coach who holds the worldwide RSI@Work program on behalf of CRR Global. He’s been a member of the CRR Global faculty since 2015, leading a full range of ORSC courses worldwide as well as supervising on the ORSC certification program. In addition, Mish was the Southern Africa partner for CRR Global from 2012 to 2020. Prior to that he was the co-founder and first CEO of a high tech start up serving the social development sector in the early 90s in Johannesburg, South Africa. So without further ado I bring you, Mish Middlemann talking about the RSI@Work program.
KC – Hi Mish, welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast, I’m so happy to have you back on the show here in the main season.
MM – It’s a great pleasure to be here and to connect with everyone worldwide who cares about this kind of work.
KC – And today we’re talking about a really important part of the work, brining RSI systems intelligence to the workplace and we’re focusing on this program RSI@Work. So I wonder if you could start, Mish, by telling me a bit about this program, RSI@Work?
MM – Well, the idea is to take this whole body of knowledge and wisdom around relationships systems intelligence and bring that into the workplace through a training program. So many of us practitioners are coaching using this methodology, but some of us are finding that organizations, leadership teams are looking for how do we lead more with the system in mind? You’ve had many other conversations on this podcast series about systems inspired leadership, so that’s going on. That’s a movement that cannot be stopped in the world. And RSI@Work is a short, flexible program that allows you to train this into teams and leadership teams and even throughout a whole organization. If you’re looking for a kind of common language and common skillset to build systems intelligence into the way the organization works.
KC – So it’s less about training coaches and now training leaders and, I guess individuals in organizations to understand the concepts around relationships systems intelligence – is that sort of where it’s focused?
MM – Correct. And it’s only available in-house, so any individual who wants it should take our regular public courses but where there’s an organization that’s trying to build something and wants to use these concepts as kind of the building blocks of what they’re building, then this program allows you to customize it so that we take all our case studies and all our examples from either your own organization or even your team or at least your industry and market and community, kind of take those concepts that you mentioned and work out how do you turn these into reality? And some examples are how do we get more capable of navigating change fast in this organization? How do we improve engagement of all our people? How do we become skilful at having the difficult conversations? Those are some of the examples of things that bring people to this program. In many cases they’ve already had ORSC coaching or some of their teams but they’re kind of going how do we solidify this? And that’s where there’s this place for training, it’s not the whole solution but there’s a place for training in the bigger puzzle in transforming your organization to be more effective.
KC – What an interesting way of bringing this work to a team, an in-house sort of focused way of spreading this language, I guess, because then you’re going through this with your colleagues, with your teammates, and suddenly you have this shared language around these concepts that must then help with so many different issues that show up.
MM – That’s what we find, you know. For example I was working in a very large oil refinery, the engineering department, you can imagine there’s a gazillion engineers in an oil refinery and I’m sorry to mention oil refineries in this era where they’re supposed to be going out of fashion but they still exist, and what they’re grappling with is people are good at the technology but they’re realizing with thousands of people on that plant they need better relationship skills. And many of the managers were saying, you know, all I need for management is a size 10 boot and they were kind of laughing and saying I realize that’s not enough, command and control is not enough for me to manage people but I’m an enigineer and I wasn’t really taught much about people, I’m very good at technical systems. So that was the problem say, like we’ve got 100 senior engineers and 500 people reporting to them and 100s if not 1000s of contractors reporting into them and we wanna go beyond command and control in the way we work at this whilst still maintaining high technical standards. And they put groups of 30 managers through this program a group at a time and then they got all those groups together to have this conversation about so what needs to change about the way we lead? And what needs to stay the same? So like the rigour needs to stay the same. Accountability needs to stay as it is. But we need to engage the people better and we need to get the hearts and minds of our people better connected and that’s where RSI@Work was really helpful to this organization.
KC – That’s such an interesting take and I could see how this works sort of alongside coaching too because obviously coaching creates the long term systemic change but in between those sessions or after those sessions finish this gives them the tools and the skills, I guess, to have that coach like approach internally, would you say?
MM =- Yes. We’ve got another client where we’ve been doing leadership team coaching and they’re really trying to pivot their entire organization to be far more customer-centered, so they’ve kind of gone we need to be more customer-centered, oh, we need to be more people centered inside the business for our people to really focus on the customer. So the leadership team, the top team has been doing ORSC systems coaching with us since the beginning of the year but then exactly as you said, they kind of said well you know, and we’re not quite sure how this is impacting our direct reports and their direct reports and we’re not quite sure if we know how to explain that to our people. We’re shifting the way we’re behaving with each other but we want to first of all solidify that in our team and secondly cascade it through the organization. And that then became an item – oh, ok, let’s do an RSI@Work, and there in this current era working hybrid, a lot of online work, so the design is some of the sessions are online and they’re short, like maximum half a day, and there’s gonna be one session where we all meet together in person as a sort of finale for a whole day and it’s sort of bolted onto a management offside that they’re running, so again it’s that blending of like business management is the core of what they’re there for and they’re taking on board new skills to do the business management better.
KC – It’s that ripple effect.
MM – Yes.
KC - I guess then they’re bringing tools like the design team alliance to their teams because they’ve gone through both the coaching experience, realized the benefit, and onw they’re, through this training, starting to take some of those skills into their leadership so they can be systems inspired.
MM – Correct. And what we do in the run up to this, we’ve just been doing it with this particular team, is we have conversations with all of them about where these issues shoot up in their organization. So you mentioned design team alliance, so we go and say to them how do you get engagement and collaboration in your teams? What do you do when you’re setting up a new task team? What do you do when you’re collaborating with an external contractor and building a kind of internal/external collaboration? How do you do that? And they all say well, you know what, we just sit down and here’s the agenda, let’s get the work done. And we say to them well what if you use the skill of like let’s talk about how we want to be together so that we get work done better, and that then becomes the prototype for the case studies we use in the training, so when we train them on team alliances we take stuff from their industry and from the typical problems they have around collaboration and team building and so we keep knocking back and forth between these beautiful ideas about systems intelligence and the hard reality about what they’re trying to do in their organization and leadership.
KC – So would you say it’s quite integrated then? In terms of because it’s in house it’s integrated and bespoke for that team or that organization.
MM – Correct. Quite a lot of our RSI licensees worldwide blend it into their programs, so they’re doing some coaching and they’re doing some training. It can be done solid, just two solid days, but it can be done four half days or even six sort of quarter days, 1/3 days, like 2-3 hour sessions. And then what some of our facilitators do is they teach a piece of this then they take the afternoon to do some coaching around, so let’s just take some more time to kind of breath in and go… so we’ve got this cool idea, how to work with conflict, now lets’s spend the afternoon looking at some more examples of conflict as it’s showing up in our organization and where can we be more skillful about navigating conflict in a good way. And then it might be either, it might be a day or a week or even a month before the next session so they really kick the tires of these ideas in the workplace before they come back for another round of new ideas and new experience.
KC – Ok, so there’s sort of the key tools and skills and competencies that get covered but throughout that there’s a lot of space to personalize depending on the people in front of you.
MM – Correct. And they’re very much empowered to be part of that collaborative design. You know that’s what we’re teaching, right, so that’s how we have to operate as well, and you know, all of our facilitators have been specially trained around this process of collaborative adapting this work to suit the particular client organization that’s the focus of this iteration.
KC – So what’s the benefit or some of the benefits you’ve seen from this collaborative dance between the client and the facilitator, the trainer, the coach?
MM – The sort of things that people are coming for is they’re wanting better cohesion. They’re wanting to have, they’re saying we’ve got a lot of people here and they’re all very skilled but we’re not totally sure that they’re fully engaged. We’ve got a lot of people who’s saying you know what, we say we believe in collaboration but we’re not totally sure that we’re reaping the benefits of collaboration either within our team or between teams or even between internal and external parties in whatever value we deliver. People come in saying, and this is very common in the sort of post-pandemic and immediate aftermath of the pandemic, they come in saying there’s just a kind of absence of energy, people are getting effected by the kind of state of the world and they’re struggling to drag themselves into a more positive state and to find the ways our business or our NGO or our government organization can just be more alive, and you would know, Katie, and many people listening to this would know that the kind of body of work that CRR Global has developed is fabulous for generating positivity and liberating energy and getting people alive with their purpose. So those are all things that have brought people to RSI@Work.
KC – And so is it somewhat similar to the fundamentals of the ORSC programs but bespoke, personalized and flexible depending on the needs of the client?
MM – Perfect, you’re absolutely right.
KC – Ok.
MM – And that link up is interesting because the link up allows, we typically find in an organization there are a few kind of champions of this work. They take this thing because they are leaders and to work with their teams but they get, they get the bug and they want more. And what happens there is they use this for a pre-requisite to do the ORSC series, so some individuals will take this with their teams and then go I love this, I wanna do some more and they’ll go into our public access series through the network of partners worldwide. And take their training further, and they then become the champions, and also if we have a roll out through the organization they have a role to play in the scaling of this across multiple teams in an organization.
KC – So this really does work with the systems at play, I mean this is practicing what we preach in many ways, not just the individuals now operating within a vacuum but very much going back to the organization from which they’re from and spreading this work.
MM – That’s the kind of essence of this thing, is it’s saying let’s take fundamentally organizational leadership approach and let’s say how does systems inspired leadership influence and improve and transform that organization and how does a coaching stance, what value does that add to leadership and team membership? So we’re not trying to turn people into coaches, we’re trying to let the brilliance of coaching infuse their leadership and their team membership. And the brilliance of systems inspired leadership infuse into the way the organization is run.
KC – So would you say sort of brining a coach approach to leadership? Any organization who’s saying we wanna bring more of a coach approach, this would be a great option?
MM – This would be a great option.
KC – Ok.
MM – Absolutely. On the other scale of the spectrum, and I know Marita and I have talked about this quite a few times, there are a lot of organizations that are saying you know what, we really need to do better at hearing all voices. This often comes up around how people who are different or included, how organizations really embrace diversity and get a real benefit for everyone from it, and it may just be that they’re trying to be more innovative in terms of hearing all voices, so whatever reason, that as you know is a kind of thread that runs through this work, how do you listen to all voices? And I find a lot of those leaders kind of say to me yeah Mish, nice idea but in practice, you know, we have to get things done around here. And what we’ve found is when we try to listen to all voices we kind of get bogged up and yet they wanna do something about this. I say try something like this because we do keep holding the business purpose and their agenda of the team or the organization as primary, and then we look at so what happens when you do hear all voices? And we take it on head on that not all of those voices are gonna be comfortable or easy to listen too, as you know, that whole principle of deep democracy, of hearing all voices including the ones that were previously marginzalied. And in this course we take them to the first elements of that, how do you just get the landscape of all the voices and how do you develop the muscle to listen to that in a good way? And encoperate the innovative energy and the liberated energy from all those voices in what the organization does. And we just find it a lot of leaders come back saying well I’ve got a whole load of practical skills but more than that I got challenged to rethink my approach to leadership and it feels like I can lead more as if people really matter.
KC – Am I right in thinking this creates a lot of action and sort of tangible, concrete accountability because it’s not just staying in the training room, it’s very much integrated in their working lives?
MM – Yes. That whole process I described earlier of the facilitator working with the client to make all the case studies action oriented is part of what helps, but it’s also that ongoing coaching that helps and the program usually has built-in to the program some follow up and most our facilitators do much more long term follow up as coaches, so you come out of this thing with some clear, key commitments to organizational change and organizational accountability, and you’ve typically got this wonderful ORSC coach and facilitator who’s there to be your accountability partner. And also what we’re doing, Katie, that’s kind of exciting is we’re piloting tweaking the materials to just give more focus on what are the agreements that are being made in your organization which lead to solid accountability. So there’s not just a nice to have but they’re a firm agreements and there is accountability possible on those firm agreements, so this is where kind of the cutting edge of ORSC in the workplace, where it both has all that wonderful relationship matters essence energy and it has business results matter energy.
KC – Right.
MM – Those two come together in the sort of center of the RSI@Work program.
KC – I know you said this can be a two-day training and it can also be very much a hybrid approach of training and coaching, half day training, half day coaching, and I imagine that’s a very powerful hybrid approach because they then have to practice what they’re preaching. It’s one thing to say oh yeah, this would work, but then to keep applying it to that system, as anyone knows who’s ever been coached in a system, it’s quite a lot different than just being the coach, being a part of it now that’s a different story. Do you notice that with the teams you’ve taken this through?
MM – Defintiely and this is also why we have extra training for the facilators. They’re all ORSC certified practitioners already but they need to be organizationally focused and have organizational clients and we give them more training on this because, you’re right, between coaches there’s a different purpose, in a community of coaches to the purpose in a business or a non-profit team. Those are typically have a specific organizational goal and we have to bring that accountability into everything we do and we train the facilitators to hold that sacred and they then train the client to do the same.
KC – And I imagine the ripple effect can be huge then, from that space of training and coaching and passing on those tools.
MM – I mean one of the most exciting examples I can think of on that is we did this, one of our licensees did this with a global transformation agency, really, so broadly speaking a consulting firm but their specialty is working between governments and representative of organizations of specific society, whether it’s trade unions or farmer associations or political organizations, all those kind of groupings. And working with the big social and economic issues of the time of equity and economic progress and ownership of resources and these kinds of issues. And they, they took this because they wanted their people to grapple with this kind of stuff and we had, it’s actually the first time we did it online, just before the pandemic, because they said we want our people, our people are spread across the globe so we want our people to work at this together, so we piloted the online version of this training for them and we were just so lucky that we had that in the bag when the pandemic hit. But it’s a, it’s something about taking the organization out into the world that makes this stuff real.
KC – So this is both for coaches, coaches out in this world doing this work, and also clients wanting to bring this into their organizations.
MM – Yeah, so anyone listening to this who is a systems coach might be interested in possibly qualifying to join this group of specially trained facilitators which we call CRR Global licensed RSI facilitators. So you get a special license to be able to facilitate this and you have to do some extra training and you have to qualify. But what I think it does is it sort of widens the eco-system of these practitioners to say this is not the process or training, the public training is still limited to the been more specially trained front of room faculty of CRR Global which I know you’re a part Katie, and that’s a special group, it’s absolutely a fabulous thing, the public ORSC courses that are only available through ORSC CRR partners worldwide, but this is another special thing where somebody who’s ORSC certified can also take this work out into the world provided that it fits within the limits of an in-house application just for one organization. So it just, just widens the eco-system and the number of people taking this kind of brilliant relationship systems intelligence to the world in a sort of parallel process of some in-house work done by RSI facilitators and then the training of coaches and individual leaders through the public courses.
KC – I wanna underline what you said there, it broadens the ORSC eco-system, and I know probably most people listening to this podcast want more of this work out in the world, and this seems like a great way to do that. Just a sort of logistical question, would, or have you noticed some people do RSI@Work and then go onto to do the rest of the series and certify, does it lead to people doing the whole…?
MM – Yes. Yes it does. I mean I find, like you I do lead the public courses around the world and I find every, you know, not every time but quite frequently when I ask people in the series where did you do your foundation course people put up their hand and say I did RSI@Work in my organization. And that warms my heart because it just feels like this rather unsung part of the landscape ORSC and systems inspired leadership is actually quietly working for change globally.
KC – And that ripple effect is being felt, yeah, I come back to that idea of broadening the ORSC eco-system, I think that’s really the mission and vision of what we hope to do right? Relationship matters and if these tools can be more integrated in organizations around the world the better, I say.
MM – Yes. And it’s also, in fact, the eco-system of the providers of ORSC is also intertwined, so there are RSI licensees who work directly with our partners in their part of the world and actually deliver this seamlessly along with other offerings of those partners. So it is a blended eco-system of practitioners who are inspired to take this to the world, and I think fundamentally we talk about something that’s ORSC and systems inspired leadership and relationship systems intelligence are all slightly hidden gems in the world, you know, there’s not enough people who are aware of, like I think most people are aware that in the world of 2020s there’s a need for better relationship, there’s a need to handle conflict better, there’s a need to listen to all the voices better, there’s a need to embrace diversity in a much more inclusive way, and a lot of people are kind of stuck at the why of that and haven’t really got the how. And what I think fundamentally our entire body of work does is it operationalizes all of this, it says ok you want this, you want more inclusiveness, you want us to really benefit from diversity, you want to really pay attention to relationships preceding results, well come to these programs because they actually give you practical human muscle building skills in how to do this, because quite honestly it doesn’t all come naturally. We all say relationships are important but we all go home and have fights. We all go to work and have fights and that’s normal but we can get more skillful about it.
KC – Bring more relationships systems intelligence into yeah, our personal and professional lives, that of course is CRR Global’s contribution to the intelligence field and in whatever format it shows up and it ripples out, it’s surely benefiting our wider systems and it aligns with our vision of this podcast or our mantra, relationship matters, from humanity, to nature, to the larger whole. And I just wanna circle back, I’m aware that there maybe, there are many listeners who listen to this podcast who are leaders and maybe they’ve gone through the series, they’ve certified and they wanna bring more of this into their workplace, they feel like right now they’re sort of operating separately and so this is something they can then also then reach out to someone’s who’s a licensee and organize to have delivered in-house, is that sort of how it works?
MM – Absolutely. Absolutely. And I’ve had this, I’ve had some of my clients do exactly that and I know it’s happening around the world and it’s happening across the range, we’ve got like an online retailor who’s done it, we’ve had a luxury goods manufacturer in the Far East doing it, we’ve had, I mentioned the engineering firm, we’ve got like a fast moving consumer goods company, we’ve got the global transformational change agents, we’ve got a healthcare organization, like a big public health care organization, all these people have at some point turned to an RSI licensee and on the website you can find a list of all of the licensees worldwide, really right around the world, they’ve turned to an RSI licensee and said you know, that stuff we were doing together, we wanna widen that, we wanna have our whole team sitting and looking at these things and practicing these things with esch other. And what’s growing is this idea of let’s train our top teams and when they’ve bought into let’s start rolling it out to the organization and involve the champions within our sort of first few rounds, involve them in the roll out because we need to be talking this language amongst ourselves. So yes, you need licensed facilitators and we will integrate your champions into the program.
KC – It’s so exciting, sort of a… my heart is sort of full hearing this because it’s lovely to hear that there’s so much of this work out in the world, the ripple effect is sort of global and this is a wonderful way of more of us spreading more of this work to different parts of the globe that might not have felt the impact yet.
MM – There are lots of people taking this into regions where there isn’t yet an ORSC partner, so exactly as you say, taking it in different languages, different cultures, it’s kind of exciting.
KC – It really is. Thank you so much Mish for sharing this. I wonder, what’s your big high dream for this program? RSI@Work.
MM – Well really that organizations, which is where most of us spend most of our time, most of our waking hours are spent at work, so workplaces in organizations shift gears in the direction of people centered leadership and through that actually create a better life for everyone, for their customers as well.
KC – That’s brilliant. Thank you so much for this fascinating discussion, I had no idea of sort of the ripple effect of this work and thank you for continuing this mission, the relationship matters from the living room to the boardroom and I hope to speak soon again, Mish. Take care.
[Music outro begins 29:55]
KC – I want to say a big thanks to Mish for coming on the show and sharing some insight into the RSI@Work program. Here are some further details about the program. At the center of the RSI@Work is building relationship systems intelligence in teams and organizations. It is delivered in-house and consists of four core modules. The program is interactive, practical and tailored for real-world application in your particular team or organization. If you feel the RSI@Work program might benefit your coaching practice or organization then do check out CRRGlobal.com/about/rsiwork to find out how you can become an RSI licensed facilitator or how you can bring an RSI licensee to your workplace. Thank you for listening to the Relationship Matters podcast. If you enjoyed this episode please share it with your colleagues and friends so that we can continue to spread these ideas across the globe, and if you haven’t already, do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. And for more information on the ORSC courses please visit CRRGlobal.com. For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time. We believe Relationship Matters from humanity to nature to the larger whole.
[Music outro 31:50 – end]