Our work is to inspire your confidence and passion with our top drawer tools, workflows, instruction and collaborative mentoring.

Your work is to learn from gurus in the Circle until you feel confident and inspired to get cracking. Then, go out and work your ass off to apply the new stuff. In the heat of the work, you will discover what you don't know and a focus for learning more. Then it is back to the Circle for another round.

This is the definition of work at our learning edge.

What a cool adventure.

The Question

We each carry a life question, or many. Life and death, finding and doing right work, choosing well in relationships, bets on the market, the unknowns, joys and risks of parenthood and on. These are enigmatic questions which lead us not to answers, rather to more compelling enquiries.  Without answers, we must make do with hunches, pathfinding, and innovation, with one foot in what we think we know and one foot in an unseen which unfolds as we go along. It helps to love a good mystery and have a personal tolerance for pushing on without being at all sure of our footing. When there are not answers, the question becomes our guiding star. The pursuit of seeing into and through them is the work to be done, carrying us on until the unseen forms into more pragmatic purposes and plans.

When individuals, families, teams, companies and communities experience an upheaval, a disruption, or a spike in uncertainty, the unanswerable questions arise and come to the fore. The person may present their situation framed as a jam, a dilemma, or otherwise. At the root is an unanswerable question to be revealed, explored and more deeply understood.

For our purposes there are four levels of enquiry to manage. 

1. Expert Answers

Depending on what kind of a shingle you hang on your office, you may have a reputation as an expert with answers. A tax accountant knows which forms are required, what goes in what boxes and when and how it gets submitted to the tax man. The doctor hears that I have a headache, assesses the sensations I report and prescribes a useful medicine. A cleric with deep knowledge of which verses are to be studied and prayers to be made has expert answers which satisfy the follower.

Expert answer giving is the very bottom of the transformational scale of things. No harm and no foul here. This is where most of us start out and most continue developing over most of a career. Providing answers pays pretty well and is a valued and immediate path to a successful transaction. If the client needs an answer and their question is limited and clear enough and we think we have a useful solution, we will not likely keep it from them.

However, when upheaval strikes, fast answers may seem filling, like fast food, but do not provide genuine nourishment. We are then called to engage our clients in realms where the outcomes cannot be known at the outset and navigating the unanswerable is our work.

2. Transformational Design

Clients often present a question of choice. There are too many choices. There are no choices. A choice has been taken. It seems risky and uncertain. It's a done deal, now what? Or a question of procedure: How do I bring my teenage daughter around to my sense of what she needs to do with her time? 

As guides, we are torn a bit here. We can fall back into expert advice based on past experience. I assure you that advice will not be useful. We cannot know enough about our client's experience to deliver advice. We have our own mind model of who he or she is. That is not them, it is us. We can pretend and tell ourselves we are really good at advice. Such hubris is simply delusional. Change-driven times hold that element of the new and unseen which make advice, based on past experience, out of date and largely useless. That said, getting all the advice out of our system by writing it down in a private notebook is a fine discipline. It gets it out of us, gets it witnessed by ourselves. With it out, we are not as likely to offer it later.

Or, we can embark on an exploration which will wind up in wise initiatives, but of a type and from a place we cannot predict when we begin. This is the transformational design inquiry. The conversations, maps and tools in these learning sessions help design innovative paths out of the uncertainties. The work is of the client and for the client. The good news is we don't have to be experts at all. We just pursue the conversations and guide clients into the frameworks of thinking. Mastering the maps, conversations and tools gives us these powers and prepares us to converse easily from the transformational, learning edge, viewpoint, without any tools on the table. This is a necessary skill required for the top two levels in this hierarchy.

3. Transformational Enquiries

There are situations and questions where answers, tools and methods are not called for. I suggest the game of business and raising teenagers have similar levels of difficulty. The variables are beyond measure, everything affects everything else, and people are at the heart of them both. Dangerous ground. In disruptive times we are forced to take a view and act on it with virtually no certainty of the outcomes.

At this level we enquire and unpack original questions, seeking deeper insights and passionate focus on whatever we can grapple with from where things stand. The outcome may feel like progress or not. The conversation may simmer or fester for hours, days and weeks. Something may pop for us in the shower or on a bike ride, or not. 

Guiding a transformational inquiry requires patience, gobs of trust, and rigorous listening, and reflection to ourselves as well as the other person. It is as much a commitment to understanding, discovery and the truth of the matter, as it is a skill.

4. Being With

At the very top of the heap is the heat of the night, if you will. The job has evaporated. The loved one is lost to the mysteries of a death. Health and all future assumptions and plans are vaporised in a three minute message from the doctor. Our client is deep in the middle of disruption and uncertainties and there is really nothing to be said and nothing to be done. Every one of us is taken by these forces sometime in our existence.

These are not Hallmark Card moments. Platitudes and feel good slogans are completely unhelpful. We need the art of high attendance, attending to another from the broadest perspective of life, death and the mysteries of human existence. This is the most challenging work for a guide to master. While we appear to be sitting with the other person and doing pretty much nothing, there is much going on under the surface. We are an affirming presence. We are 'there' in the largest and deepest sense of the word. We hold a big, non-judgmental open space for the other to be whoever they need to be at the time.

This work, once fully second nature to us, informs our listening and inner reflections, but it will not be mentioned. We need to have a perspective on deep disruption through direct experience of it ourselves. With good mentoring and fortuitous genetics, we will have a decent bedside manner. Being skilled at this is not a given. Some of us never feel comfortable with it. Yet these deeply human and transforming encounters will present themselves and we need to recognise them and respond as wisely as we can.