Those who know me know that I am at home in both worlds. I work systemically, with organisational theory, role clarity, decision architecture and cybernetics. And I work shamanically, with rhythmic drumming, inner journeys, archetypal images and ritual framing. The question I hear again and again is: how do these belong together? Is that not a contradiction?
My short answer is no. The longer answer follows.
What systemic thinking actually means
Systemic thinking is not a method in the narrow sense. It is an epistemological stance. At its core lies the understanding that a system can never be fully understood from outside. Every observation is itself part of the system. There is no neutral external perspective. What becomes visible depends on where and how we look.
Something far-reaching follows from this: reality is not simply there and then described. Reality is co-constructed through perception, language, relationship and context. What a team experiences as a problem is not the problem in itself. It is the way the team turns what it experiences into a problem.
Gregory Bateson, one of the founders of systemic thought, put it this way: the map is not the territory. Our descriptions of the world are never the world itself. They are always models, simplifications and constructions. And they shape what we experience as possible.
What shamanism actually means
Shamanism in the Harner tradition is neither a religion nor a belief system. It is a practice. More specifically, it is a structured method for entering altered states of consciousness and gaining access there to perceptions and forms of knowing that are not available in ordinary consciousness.
What happens in this process can now be described neurophysiologically: the prefrontal cortex, responsible for linear analysis and narrative self-construction, temporarily loses some of its dominant filtering role. Other channels of perception become accessible. What Harner describes phenomenologically as a power animal or helping spirit can, from a systemic perspective, be understood as another source of information, one that lies beyond the habitual frame through which experience is constructed.
Where they meet
Both approaches share a fundamental epistemic stance: reality exceeds what habitual consciousness can grasp. Access to this wider reality requires a change in the stance of perception, not simply more information.
Systemic coaching works to make a system’s constructions visible. It asks: how are you turning this into a problem? What would change if you described it differently? Which patterns repeat themselves, and what function do they serve?
Shamanic work does something similar on another level. It works not primarily through language and reflection, but through experience and image. It bypasses the habitual frame of construction rather than analysing it. The result is often similar: something that had appeared immutable suddenly reveals itself as one possibility among others.
Bateson anticipated this too. He described learning as taking place at different logical levels. First-order learning changes behaviour. Second-order learning changes the rules by which learning takes place. Third-order learning, the rarest and most profound, changes the frame within which thinking and perception themselves occur.
Shamanic work, when practised well, can be understood as third-order learning. Not through analysis, but through direct experience.
What the apparent contradiction really is
The contradiction appears when systemic thinking is equated with rationalism and shamanism with irrationalism. That simplification does justice to neither.
Systemic thinking is not rationalist in the sense that it assumes enough analysis will lead to the correct answer. Quite the opposite: it is fundamentally sceptical of the idea that there is one objectively correct answer. It keeps asking: who is describing this, from where, and with which assumptions?
Shamanic practice in the Harner tradition is not irrational in the sense of denying causality or rejecting science. It expands the idea of what can serve as a source of knowing. It says that some forms of knowledge are not accessible through language and analysis, and that there are methods for approaching them.
Both arrive at the same point: the habitual way of thinking is not always sufficient. Sometimes another form of access is needed.
How I work with this in practice
I do not separate the two fields rigidly. In my work with teams and organisations, I work primarily systemically: role clarity, conflict work, decision architecture and communication structures. That is the field I offer and the remit within which I work.
In one-to-one coaching and individual accompaniment, there are moments when I experience the approaches as complementary. When someone has understood everything analytically and still cannot move, hypnosis, meditative paths of insight or shamanic work may open a frame that systemic reflection alone cannot open. The boundaries between these three fields are surprisingly fluid.
These are not contradictions. This is methodological pluralism with a coherent epistemic foundation. The different approaches ultimately ask the same question: how does a person or a system come into contact with what is real, beyond habitual constructions?
The answers differ. The direction is the same.