4. Mutual coaching

Structure Top meetings such that members take turns coaching and being coached by one another. Members bring issues that they are wrestling with and then allow themselves to be coached by other Tops. Mutual peer coaching is a process in which all Tops are working in partnership, committed to and investing in one another’s success.   Even more importantly, it is a process by which all are investing in strengthening the Top System as a whole: differentiation and homogenization, integration and individuation. Power strengthened by Love. Mutual coaching requires skill, both in how we coach others and in how we receive coaching.  So it may be helpful to get professional coaching education to set the process going. It should be   worth the investment, since mutual peer coaching has the potential for fundamentally transforming Top Systems.

5. Interact in non-role settings

Experience one another in settings other than the familiar system ones: for example a community service project and other opportunities to experience different facets of one another.

6. Avoid enthusiastic counter-revolutions

The point behind infusing Love into Top Systems is to enhance the robustness of these systems. It would be counter-productive to assume that Love is the answer, thereby putting too much emphasis on homogenization and integration while devaluing and suppressing differentiation and individuation. These latter processes provide the expansive energy of the system.   The purpose of infusing Love, using the methods described above and undoubtedly others, is to enhance rather than constrain the capacity of the Top System to cope with the complexity and uncertainty of its environment. An overabundance of Love can smother that potential.

Is it too late?

System knowledge is likely to be most productive as people are just entering the Top world, or early on in the relationship when people are able to see the processes in action – differentiation and individuation beginning to harden into separate territories. But, once Top relationships have fallen apart and Power- without-Love dominates, when commonality and connectedness are dialed down to zero, it can be difficult to heal them. The history of mutually inflicted pain may be so intense as to be beyond repair. At this stage, members’ experiences of one another can be felt to be so solid, so deeply personal, and so connected to specific actions and events that it would be difficult for Tops to experience them as merely the outcome of system processes. To do so runs counter to the evidence of our direct senses. The notion that this whole dramatic scenario of Power-without-Love may be nothing other than the consequence of blind reflex may simply be too much to swallow.

Even if the relationship is not to go forward, there can be a valuable healing resulting from revisiting that beginning place of great promise, and retracing the systemic (not personal) scenario by which members went from that optimistic beginning to the current personal, interpersonal, and systemic dysfunction. Once having clarified that history, the members have a choice: to end the relationship or move forward with the commitment to infuse Love into Power.

The key to creating and sustaining satisfying and productive Top Teams lies in our ability to view these collections of individuals through the organic system perspective as these systems attempt to cope with complex, demanding, and uncertain environments. But the issue of Top Teams is part of a larger issue: the willingness to challenge our current personal paradigm and explore the wisdom that comes as we accept our nature as systems creatures, and view our human interactions through the lens of an organic systems perspective.