In this episode, we are joined by pioneering systemic psychotherapist, organisational consultant, and author Christine Oliver for a rich conversation exploring systemic approaches to organisational life, leadership, and change.

Drawing from over 30 years of experience across the NHS, charities, international organisations, faith communities, and private consultancy, Christine reflects on how systemic and social constructionist ideas can help organisations navigate complexity, conflict, hierarchy, and uncertainty.

Together, we explore reflexive inquiry, relational leadership, organisational culture, moral story-making, appreciative inquiry, and the power of conversation in shaping teams and systems. Christine shares insights from her influential work in consultancy and psychotherapy, including how organisations can create spaces where people think together with greater clarity, accountability, and respect.

We also discuss power and positionality in organisations, the challenges of leadership, and how systemic practitioners can work collaboratively in ways that move beyond expert-driven models of change.

This episode will be valuable for therapists, leaders, consultants, coaches, educators, and anyone interested in applying systemic thinking beyond the therapy room.

Christine brings warmth, wisdom, and decades of experience to this thoughtful and deeply practical conversation.

http://www.christineoliver.net/

In this episode of The Systemic Way, we speak with Rick Murphy and Lisa Dvorjetz about their book A Systemic Approach to Integrative Counselling (2024) and the growing need to bring relational thinking into everyday therapeutic practice.

Together, we explore how familiar counselling models such as person-centred, psychodynamic, CBT, Gestalt, and action-based approaches can be reworked through systemic ideas of context, relationships, patterns, and meaning. Rather than locating distress solely within the individual, Rick and Lisa invite us to consider how problems are shaped and sustained through interaction, culture, family histories, and wider social systems.

We discuss what this means for therapists working one-to-one, how counsellors can develop systemic thinking without abandoning their core model, and why integration needs more than simply combining techniques. This is a rich conversation about practice, ethics, creativity, and the future of counselling.

Essential listening for counsellors, psychotherapists, family therapists, trainees, supervisors, and anyone interested in moving beyond individualised understandings of human struggle.

A Systemic Approach to Integrative Counselling (Amazon)

https://amzn.eu/d/02FDlcHh

Celebrating our 100th episode of The Systemic Way Podcast.

We took The Systemic Way to @EFTA-RELATES 2025 Congress in Lyon and stepped into a space shaped by change, tension, and possibility.

Across four days, we spoke with therapists, researchers, and practitioners working at the edges of systemic practice. You hear their reflections, their challenges, and the moments that stayed with them. From conversations on migration, trauma, and social justice, to explorations of family therapy, organisational work, and community resilience, this episode captures what it felt like to be in the room.

This congress brought together voices from across the European Family Therapy Association and Red Europea y Latinoamericana de Escuelas Sistémicas. It created dialogue across difference. It held both innovation and uncertainty. It asked what systemic practice can offer in a world shaped by rapid scientific change and ongoing violence.

In this episode, you hear how people are responding. How they are working with complexity. How they are holding onto hope.

Real conversations. Lived experiences. Systemic thinking in action.

A massive thank you to Umberta Telfener, Parveen Kaur, Yvonne Rose, Ana Draper (she/her), Poppy Thorn, @Karen Franco; Matej Vajda, Carol Jolliffe, Jennifer McKinney, Francesca Balestra<