Effective supervisors ensure that they attend to what is happening across the whole Supervisory System. To do this they pay attention to 3 sub-systems or 'Worlds':

1. The Work World - which consists of the coachee in their workplace and wider life.
2. The Coaching World - which consists of the coach and coachee in the coaching session. Like the Work World, the supervisor has only indirect experience of Coaching World, either through what the coach tells the supervisor overtly or through what is unconsciously evoked in the supervisor.
3. The Supervision World - which consists of the supervisor and the coach in the supervision, and which the supervisor has direct experience of (because of course they are part of it!)

These worlds are linked together in two principal ways:

• By the coach, who is present in the Coaching World and the Supervision World. It is they who bring the coaching world into the supervision session (and so provide the content for the supervisor to work with). It is they who then take the shifts they make and the insights they have back into the coaching session.
• By the coachee, who is present in the Work World and the Coaching World. They bring their experience of the work world into the coaching session in order to explore the challenges they face (and so provide the content for the coach to work with). They then take the shifts they make and the insights they have back into the workplace.

These linkages create resonances between the worlds which lead to aspects of the Coaching and Work Worlds being present within the supervision session. So when the coach enters the supervision session, they bring with them a whole network of conscious and unconscious knowledge, feelings, imaginings, perceptions, needs, desires and intuitions about what happened in the coaching and back in the coachee's world. By encouraging and amplifying these resonances, particularly those that the coach is unaware of, and by developing sensitivity to them, the supervisor is able to access information about, and generate insight into, what is occurring in the coaching session and the coachees world. This information and insight can then be used to help the coach gain insight and develop new choices in their coaching work.

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