Over the past few years I've had the privilege of working with Heston Blumenthal, whose restaurant, The Fat Duck, was named the best restaurant in the world by The Restaurant magazine in 2005. Heston has given me his permission to touch on that part of our work that has used Symbolic Modelling in a generative frame.

We interviewed James Lawley to find out how he has successfully used modelling, metaphor and a clean approach in business and organisations. James is one of the most experienced facilitators and sponsors of this approach which, combined with his 30 years experience as a manager and consultant, made him an ideal 'model'.

We introduce our organisational coaching process, Systemic Modelling, outlining where it comes from and how it works as a cornerstone of our organisational development work. We present a case study and evaluation of results. We track the shift in thinking of a group of senior managers from a silo mentality, blame or defense culture to networking, collaboration and creativity.  We conclude with a reflection of the impact team coaching had on organisational learning.

Published in Rapport, November 2008 this article is based on an academic paper presented at the British Educational Research Association's conference in 2007, 'Training PGCE Teachers in giving and receiving Clean Feedback in the classroomwhich'. It was delivered with our partners at the Centre of Excellence for Teaching and Learning at Liverpool John Moores University.

Meetings can be the bane of a project; taking up time, causing conflict, achieving little. How often have you listened to people complain about meetings at work? Meetings can also be the boon of a project; co-inspirational, a chance to air and dispel fears, a time to rehearse the next steps and share great practice and get the support you need to work at your best. What would it be like to look forward to meetings knowing you had a tool to navigate more successfully through them?

I ran a workshop at the 10th International Anti-Corruption Conference held in Prague in October 2001: "How to create a 'clean' company" i.e. one run in such a way that the risk of corruption is prevented. The workshop was designed for the strongly multi-cultural setting, and the metaphors generated were sometimes much richer than those one might meet in a workshop with UK nationals.

This paper was written in preparation for the facilitation by the Clean Team* of a Large Group Metaphor Process at The Findhorn Community during 13-16 January, 2003. The paper's aim was to raise the Team's awareness of:

• the key features of self-organising systems
• how these might manifest in a community setting
• how this knowledge can inform the way we facilitate.

* James Lawley, Penny Tompkins, Steve Callaghan, Wendy Sullivan, Phil Swallow, Caitlin Walker and Marian Way.