Our Background

Since the mid 1990s, Caitlin has been inspiring capability in children, adults, teams and communities. Her work helps people to understand how their individual systems work and then how to work effectively within groups of neurodiverse individuals.

She uses David Grove’s Clean Language to support people to develop their own metaphors and models for their unique experiences and to use these to make sense of themselves and of others. She initially developed this approach with teenagers as part of a Home Office project for pupils unable or unwilling to attend school. The approach allowed these teenagers to become experts on their own systems and to use their intrinsic motivation to make small but significant changes to their behaviours. You can learn more about the background to Caitlin’s work in her 2014 TEDx talk shown here.

Caitlin went on to apply these processes in IT and Knowledge Management Systems where there were mixtures of people with neurodivergent traits who needed to understand and advocate for themselves as well as to better understand and advocate for one another. Caitlin’s work on this project was filmed and used as part of the UK Open University’s MBA programme which led to it being taken into businesses and organisations around the world.

Richard Johnson, now CEO of Healthy Brains Global Initiative, used Caitlin’s approaches in a number of Welfare to Work projects where it was important to him that unemployed service users were treated with deep respect and that the tangible outcomes of the support they received were that they found work that suited their system and which they could sustain over time. Caitlin’s reputation for success grew and with each experimental programme she learnt more about facilitating people from different cultures, with different abilities so that she could test and adapt the approach. Caitlin went on to develop inclusion projects within the health service, the police, schools, universities, local government and businesses. In 2001, Caitlin took on an assistant, Nancy Doyle, to codify the approach and to help her to write up the approach in such a way that it could be learned by others wanting to get similar results. In 2005, Caitlin began working with Dr Barbara Walsh and Dr Sarah Nixon on applying this approach to University students so that they could form self-learning tutorial groups and support one another to learn together at their best. This project also provided a platform for taking Cricket Kemp’s Magical Spelling and codifying this as a clean modelling process to help neurodivergent students learn to spell English well. Much of this early work is captured in Caitlin’s first book From Contempt to Curiosity: Creating the conditions for groups to collaborate. The University publications are now sold as a self-modelling manual: So you want to be DramaFree.

In 2010, following an initial idea from Shaun Hotchkiss and Cheryl Winter, Caitlin, Nancy and organisational psychologist, Cheryl Isaacs, co-founded Genius Within CIC, a company committed to using Caitlin’s Clean Coaching and Systemic Modelling approaches to support neurodivergent individuals and managers of neurodiverse teams to create work contexts where people could thrive together.

Caitlin subsequently left the organisation to continue researching and designing clean and systemic approaches to complex issues in organisations nationally and internationally. Professor Nancy Doyle went on to steer Genius Within to be a world class company and a pioneering organisation in the field of neurodiversity.

In 2014, Caitlin teamed up with long time collaborator and Clean Language trainer Marian Way to co-create high quality interventions and trainings for others interested in facilitating neurodiverse teams. At its essence, this work is about inspiring capability for co-creating safety, belonging and freedom within individual systems and systems of individuals and to find a balance between rights, requirements and the responsibility to make reasonable adjustments for diverse colleagues.

Together with Shaun Hotchkiss, they help individuals, families, teams and organisations to understand neurodifferences, unpack drama and conflict and to co-develop ways of living, learning and working together so that more of us can be at our best more of the time.