Enact the Future

At the beginning of my working experience I worked at the German Aerospace Centre in Hamburg as an assessor. My job was to evaluate candidates for the Pilot training for main European Flight Companies. Yet several years, I felt I wanted to support people in their growth process and not only in that one moment of their carrier path. Therefore, I decided to become a trainer.

What I noticed in the early 2000s, was that many of the management trainings that were being held, provided pleasant experiences to the participants. The only thing was, according to the attendees, these courses were simply not applicable to their day-to-day work. In fact, with the exception of a few really motivated people, you couldn’t see any significant management improvement after these sessions.

Actually I realize these courses were more aimed at increasing management knowledge of the participants then on actually help them doing something different, which can be a choice. However, I believe that if there’s no significant improvement in management after such a session there’s no point in doing it. That’s why I couldn’t stand the idea of doing training courses, which didn’t have a real impact. And so I decided to “enact the future®” creating my own consultancy firm, Maxim Consulting. I specialized in action learning techniques developed abroad (such as individual vs. team coaching and co-development) and there I was, newly armed to help my future clients with their improvement objectives.

When I talk about “improvement” I don’t just mean their performance but also the quality of their corporate lives and relationships. My mission is to put the means and processes in place that help people take ownership of their actions and to get in touch with their desire to open up, learn, grow, share and ultimately, as a consequence to make an impact.

And here is what I have found out since 2005 from the several hundred managers we have supported as a Maxim Consulting:

1. Change is a choice: some of the managers I have met didn’t want to change. Or rather, maybe they were really fed up with the current situation but the pain of being in that situation was not enough to make them want to change. And no training can make you change if you don’t want to. And this is just fine. Same thing for a Company, you can quickly tell if a Client actually wants to change or if they would prefer a more conservative project. I remember a Client asking for a course “that wouldn’t change anything” and me thinking that we weren’t the right consultancy for them.
2. Choose your future: the people we have worked with had an ideal in mind or if they didn’t we helped them to develop one. Because if you want to change, you have to choose your direction. You have to define the future you want for yourself and develop a vision of the person you want to be and the things you want to do. Eventually that future can also be inspired by the situations you want to avoid or the problems you want to solve. Like some managers we meet who have a memorable Boss or Mentor in mind whose qualities they appreciated so much to make out of them a role model.
3. To enact the future you need a process: a guiding process helps you all the way through to reach your target. Furthermore, it’s an illusion to think that the change or growth you want just happens. It requires work and effort. You will have ups and downs and then according to the future you desire, the process might have to be more or less detailed. If I think of the process I guide my clients through, it might go from a one-hour telephone session to a nine-month change process. The process helps you make a sense of each micro-step you are doing and give continuity to the transformation process.
4. Welcome into the flow: once you have all these things, the magic can happen. Everything is in place to make the future happen, to enact the future right now. And this is literally a moment of bliss and inspiration, where you feel everything is in place and the actions and words just flow the way they should. Like a painter who had a picture for months in his mind and all at once feels he is ready. All is in place and as he is in front of the canvas the movement just flows out of his hands, and knows exactly were to go. Every gesture is just exactly like it should be.

To make a change happen, to embody the future you have in mind, is a creative act.

So again, if I think of the management training I used to do ages ago, I see a huge difference. That was just talking about change or improvement, not doing it. And now that I found the key to perform involving workshops with managers, there’s no way I can go back and work on the surface.

What about you? What is the future you have in mind? What would you like to enact?