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'.

Leader, leading, leadership. Follower, following, but not follower-ship; why not? The metaphor of ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ is so embedded in our culture and language that we tend to forget there are other ways to think about and describe the relationship. Interestingly much of nature operates quite successfully without an overt-leader. The lack of a leader in an antifragile self-organising system warrants a re-think of our models of leadership. This paper explores the systemic nature of the leader–follower dynamic from a 'clean' perspective.

Modelling Shared Reality is a new qualitative research methodology which is rooted in Clean Language & Symbolic Modelling. It minimizes  undesired influence of the researcher during all stages of the research: design, interviews, analysis and reporting. The methodology is action oriented: both the process and the results function as a catalyst for action, behavioural and organizational change.

Chapter 19 of Innovations in NLP describes the clean community – a "community of practice" created by people gravitating to like-minded people who have a passion for something they do, the desire to learn how to do it better, and the motivation to interact regularly.

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.

How leaders, managers and supervisors can help push responsibility back down the organisation, and to move an organisation from problem thinking to outcome thinking – one five-minute conversation at a time.

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.