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This chapter describes an application of clean language interviewing to organisational change work through a process we call modelling shared reality (MSR). This process was developed in 2006 by Stefan Outober, James Lawley, Annemiek van Helsdingen, Wendy Nieuwland and Maaike Nooitgedagt (Van Helsdingen & Lawley, 2012). It is based on the clean language & symbolic modelling process (Lawley & Tompkins, 2000). MSR has been applied in a multitude of settings over the last 15 years in the context of organisational change and development, as well as policy decisions and evaluations and other participative processes.

We believe that how people in organisations behave is steered mostly by how they perceive ‘reality’ (Nieuwland & Nooitgedagt, 2018). MSR aims to facilitate movement and change in organisations by enabling participants to explore their individual and collective perceptions of reality.

In this chapter, we describe the principles and steps of the MSR process, highlighting the role of clean language interviewing (CLI). MSR represents a form of action research, the aim of which is to facilitate organisational change rather than to produce abstract knowledge. Illustrated by a case study of a finance department in a social housing corporation, the chapter shows how CLI can be used to work with shared constructs of reality.

In this book the terms ‘clean language’ and ‘clean language interviewing’ are written using lower case, according to the convention of the American Psychological Association (sixth edition). ‘Clean language interviewing’ is sometimes abbreviated to CLI.