QUESTIONS WE WANT TO ANSWER

By “labyrinth”, we don’t mean “a maze”.

The first thing to clarify is that when we say labyrinth we don’t mean maze. A maze is designed to get you lost. When we pay the entry fee to a maze we are paying for the thrill of getting lost, knowing ultimately we’ll get out of it. Like a rollercoaster ride at the fair, it’s a safe thrill we are buying.

A labyrinth is not designed to get you lost.

A labyrinth is designed to help you find something. And so here – if you reference this picture of the famous labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral in France – you’ll see that it doesn’t even look like a maze. It’s actually very structured. 

And the point of the labyrinth is that people have used it as a practice for hundreds of years to find the answer to something that matters to them. They start on the outside and they formulate the biggest question facing them right now.  What is the meaning of life? Should I marry this significant other? What is the next stage of my career? – or whatever that big question is. 

And you can’t get lost.

And then, relaxed and ready, you walk through the labyrinth – and as you can see from the structure here in this picture you can’t get lost because it’s asking you to go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. It’s giving you a process to follow that helps your contemplation. It’s taking you to the center of the labyrinth, and  symbolically of course that means you’re getting to the heart of the matter. You’re getting to the deepest part of this question to find the truest possible answer.

In the center of the labyrinth is a bench where you sit and contemplate the answer to your question. And when you feel you have the answer, then of course you can’t live that answer out in the middle of the labyrinth. You have to get back into the real world.

Return with real answers.

And so you walk back out of the labyrinth thinking, how will I apply this? I’ve got the answer to my question. What is the meaning of life? Or should I marry this significant other? I’ve got the answer. How will I now bring that to life when I get back to the real world? So I step back, step back, step back and then all of a sudden I’m out there and now my next stage of the journey is the challenge of how will I apply this insight that I’ve received. 

So that’s what a labyrinth is.  

Why now? Why for modern business?

And why does that matter to modern organizations? Because there are lots of things that are in our urgent box which I would describe as ‘straightforward’ – we just know what to do. We know how to do it. We just need the time and the energy or the resources to do it. That’s one category of things. 

There’s another category of things which are the big questions – the big unanswered ones we we never quite get round to, or if we do, the traditional ways of making them happen never quite seem to have the impact that we would intend. 

They require more than a good project management process.

Guidance to the heart of the matter.

Our Labyrinth guides you to the heart of the matter. Because contemplation, reflection, deeper thinking matters.  We shouldn’t let our busy culture negate that truth. 

But you do need to make the results of that contemplation matter in the world. So we guide you out of the Labyrinth with a process that generates energy around solutions, and begins work on it before you return to the real world.

And in that real world we can continue to guide, coach and support.

The real world is noisy and distracting – act now.

As coaches and consultants our sweet spot is the ability to hold individual leaders or teams of leaders to their accountability to go deep into issues – rather than give them the short-term satisfaction of finding an easy answer and let’s go and fix it straight away. That is why many offsites disappoint. They generate lots of ‘we can do this!’ energy but don’t maintain that. We know the biggest challenges need the highest quality of reflection and dialogue – and we create the space for them to do that.

We also create spaces where when they come together in groups, people can feel free to explore divergent thinking to think about a diverse range of options. We encourage that out of the box creative, mould-breaking, divergent thinking. 

We can only do that because we know that we have a process that when that divergent thinking has run its course, we then can transition the group quickly into identifying actions that will create collaboration and a sense of community around these actions. So that when we do go back into the real world, we’ve already subgroups of people, working teams committed to the outcome that we were looking for in the workshop.  We know that this will happen, because we’ve already started it. We are past ‘How do we launch this in the real world?’ stage!

Ongoing support and long term commitment.

One critical thing that our experience has taught us over the years is that the pull of what we people call the real world is very real and is very strong. No matter how great the experiences people have – even in our workshops! – actually the real value is created beyond the workshop. So we stay alongside you to keep you honest to your commitments. We give ongoing support and encouragement and coaching to keep people in the spirit that they experienced in the workshop. And to resist the temptation of – at a personal level – old personal habits – and at a group level – the pull of the old culture ‘the way we’ve always done things around here.’ 

Because those pulls are very real and everybody needs to be very aware that they will be there to tempt us from the path!

One of the things you have experienced over your years is a series of great workshops that didn’t quite seem to deliver the results that you hoped for in the workshop. That’s not the fault of the workshop, or the consultants.

It is that you weren’ t supported in resisting the pull of the real world, the weight of ‘busy and urgent’  will weigh down your best intentions.

Keeping true to your best intentions – the best of you – is where real transformation happens.

What makes us different?

We prioritize bringing people together in person. We prioritize our “5 What Ifs” (see below) and we insist on creating a symmetrical balance between pre-work, open space thinking and “all possibilities”, work in the room, and very guided/structured and action-focused follow up work that shows real and rapid results.

We focus on the human layer that cannot be captured without being together in person, the active layer that cannot be captured without the right people together at the right time with the right question and right facilitation, and we make sure that it is all fastidiously captured, documented, and turned into work product so that it is repeatable within your organization.

Our work with LABYRINTH is also 100% scalable. What we do can be done with 6 people just as easily as 600 people. If you can invite them, fly them to a place, house them for a few days and give us a room big enough, and you can support the elements of pre-work, we can make this work as expandable as you’d like it to be so long as it fits your Big Question and your 5 What Ifs. Think about the scale of that. We can monumentally change massive parts of business in (literally) 2-4 days and with 90 days of support and in ways the organization never would have imagined before the session.

This is not only very very different – it is also work that is impossible to do with any AI or technology. This is where our pure analog human need and our business needs meet the future, and in the current state of business it is a gaping hole and work that is not being done.

We do it.

What happens now?

Now, you call us, you reach out, you let us embrace your big idea and give you the frame and the structure to see your Big Question and your “5 What Ifs” through this lens.

Reach out today to schedule a conversation – start with whichever of us you know better, or just choose one of us. Both of us are always willing to join any brainstorming pre-session.

Find a time with Courtney

Find a time with David