Whole Systems Design: Inquiries in the Knowing Field

Book Review by Marilyn Hamilton, Founder, Integral City

 Constellating for the Collective is how Diana Claire Douglas describes her work. And if you want to learn how she came to facilitating constellations for the collective, then read this book.
Whole Systems Design is not only logical and informative with its 3 Sections of: Diana Claire’s Story, Conversations with Colleagues and Interviews with Constellators, but it is a pleasure to read (benefiting from Diana Claire’s deep experience as co-author, editor and publisher).
Diana Claire shares her rich and diverse background that led her to this powerful Systemic Constellation Work. She was attracted to the calling through the doorways of Personal and Family Constellations, followed by Constellating for Organizations. These smaller scale constellation experiences built a solid foundation for her to gradually accumulate knowledge and experience for constellations that served communities, cities, societies, and global emergence.
Readers will benefit from the author’s clear description of how she prepares for constellations by researching the issues involved as well as establishing a strongly respectful relationship with the host or client of the question being explored. They will then learn how Diana Claire harvests the impacts and documents the shifts in situation relationships, both graphically and through written reports.
In addition to Diana Claire illustrations of the theory, structure, and practice of constellating she describes constellations through conversations with colleagues. Especially tantalizing are the leading- edge inquiries she has co-initiated into the Conscious Witness Project and systemic Co-Creation and Collaboration.
The third interview section of the book provides a world of insight into Diana Claire’s peer group of Constellators. Her interviews reveal the practices of Constellators for the Collective who come from nine different contexts – each showing how constellations can make visible the invisible elements of situations as complex as conference constellations of 250 people, ancestral trauma, colonization, the relationship between the quantum field and knowing field, healing and archetypal mythodrama.
In this book, Diana Claire reflects her wise facilitation of constellations through her generous sharing of knowledge, experience and on-going learning of Constellating for the Collective. I have been waiting for this book for years. I am not disappointed, and I am recommending it to all Integral City practitioners, catalysts and meshworker. (This book illustrates why Diana Claire was awarded Integral City Meshworker of the Year 2018.)