Personal-Systemic-Inter-Personal
The Personal-Interpersonal-Systemic lens diagnoses a problem at three levels at once, inside the individual, between people, and in the wider structure, so an intervention isn't aimed at the wrong layer.
Three panels sit in a row, each framing the same challenge from a different vantage point - self, relationship, system.
Reach for this when…
- A coaching conversation keeps circling the individual but the real driver sits in the team or the structure.
- An intervention keeps not working and you suspect it's aimed at the wrong level.
- A conflict is being treated as a personality clash when it's actually structural.
How to run it
- Name the three lenses: Personal, what's happening inside the individual; Interpersonal, what's happening between people; Systemic, what's happening in the wider structure, culture and history.
- Run the presenting challenge through each lens in turn.
- Ask what a purely personal intervention would look like, then what a purely systemic one would look like.
- Identify which lens has been ignored or underused so far.
- Design a response that draws on all three, weighted to the one that was missing.
A worked example
Situation. Han Ji-woo was operations director at Haneul Retail Group, a department store chain in Busan, South Korea, where two regional managers were in open conflict that HR had labelled a personality clash.
Applied. Running it through the three lenses, the personal read showed both managers under real strain, the interpersonal read showed a trust breakdown from one broken promise, but the systemic read exposed the real driver: both managers were held to the same regional sales target with overlapping territory.
Result. Ji-woo redrew the territory boundary before running any relationship repair work. The conflict, which HR had spent two months coaching as a personality issue, eased within weeks.
The catch
It is tempting to stop at the first satisfying explanation, usually the personal one, because it's the easiest lens to access in a one-to-one conversation. The systemic lens often needs authority the coach doesn't have to actually change, only to name. Running all three properly takes real discipline when a client just wants the individual conversation.
If every case you diagnose comes back personal, check whether that's the lens you're most comfortable using, not the one that's true.