IJSP Number 1, 2019

10 Coming to regard supervision as a system, largely a product of these last 40 years, appears to be a highly durable and enduring mega-shift that indeed monumentally matters conceptually and practically. Let’s label these collective system variables as Input—critical pre-existing contributors to the supervision experience. And I would ask that you please hold on to this idea of Input, because its facets, which you see reflected in the top panel of your Figure, will feature prominently in our generic supervision model. Next, what about supervision as relation . We have come a long way relationally from those early 1920 supervisor-as-proxy-therapist days, where the jug-to-mug supervisor role seemingly reigned supreme: Where I as supervisor pour from my all-knowing jug into my supervisee’s oh so empty mug [7]. That jug to mug role does most certainly have a place in supervision, but effective supervisor functioning is so much more than that alone. As Joan Fleming [7] so sagely indicated over half a century ago, we sometimes need to function as potters, shaping our supervisees as is needed. But in other cases, we need to function much more so as gardeners, providing the nutrient-rich soil and growth-enhancing conditions within which our supervisees can develop in the ways that best befit them [7]. Perhaps our most simply stated yet forever unfathomably profound supervision realization to emerge down through the decades would be this: We as supervisor and supervisee need each other, we truly need to work together as a team (a) for anything at all to ever work in supervision itself and (b) for anything at all to ever cross over from supervision into the therapeutic situation. Though ever so simple sounding, that deceptively powerful realization has vast ramifications for our day- to-day practice. And research and scholarly opinion surely support that relationship - as-crucial reality [8], [9], [10]. We as supervisors ideally strive to create a safe supervision space, an interval of freedom, within which our supervisees can fully engage and maximally learn at every turn. But to do that, we have to place our supervisees in front and centre in all of our supervisory efforts. Psychotherapy supervision is forever and always most fundamentally about the “we”, not the “me”. Let’s next label this “we”, the collective variables of relationship, as Process — capturing those critical, trans-theoretical relational components of the unfolding supervision experience. And again, I would ask that you hold this idea of Process in mind, because its facets, which you see reflected in the middle panel of your Figure, will also feature prominently in our generic supervision model. Last, supervision as developmental process . Although supervision has perhaps always been seen as a type of developmental learning experience, developmental supervision thinking did not emerge in earnest until the late 1970s and early’80s. Since then, this way of thinking has become seamlessly incorporated into all that supervision is and has transformed all that supervision is.