How many of you, who are responsible for delivering outstanding business results, take pride in your ability to navigate the complexities of the market and achieve those results?

How effective are your skills and behaviors in maneuvering through the uncertainties of team dynamics, shifting priorities, and market challenges?

The Spacious Complexity experience offers a process and coaching that will help you discover your internal compass and external support systems, creating clear pathways for improved performance with reduced effort and stress. It is a thought-provoking process rather than one that provides ready-made answers. It ensures that you find the right answers for yourself instead of receiving them pre-digested.

Organizations can be complex mazes with many turns, dead ends, quick routes and choices. The best path to reach your destination is rarely a straight line…

The key to being successful in navigating complex organizations is easily and successfully finding your way through the maze to your goal.

The best way to do that is to embrace the complexity and ambiguity of organizations, rather than resisting them, and to become a “maze-bright” person.” (FYI For Your Improvement, Lombardo & Eichinger, 236)

Being a “maze bright” person requires that you tune into and utilize the “forces” introduced in Spacious Complexity, such as Invisibility, Continuum, Belonging, Choice, Reciprocity, and Creativity. These forces provide valuable support in becoming adept at handling complexity:

Invisibility: Similar to how thermals enable a skydiver to soar or crash into a cliff, there are always invisible forces at play behind every visible response or action. While you cannot see the thermals, you can learn to read them. The same is true for the invisible forces at play within your organization, and learning to “read” them will mean the difference between initiates flying or dying.

Continuum: Recognising that, outside of a few scientific disciplines, like engineering and mathematics, there is never only “one best answer”. Rather, everything exists on a continuum, with dysfunction at the extremes and a series of contextually dependent best solutions or approaches in between.

Reciprocity: Understanding and experiencing the complex dynamics of the give-and-take of reciprocity, allowing the positive impact of reciprocity to naturally emerge in collaboratively building solutions to complex issues.

Creativity: Utilizing deep listening and understanding to ignite and allow the contributions and creative abilities of individuals and teams throughout the organization.

Belonging: Building relationships with others that go beyond getting tasks done, accessing a higher sense of commitment, contribution, fulfillment, and purpose.

Choice: Realizing and harnessing the power of individual choice to create new business realities and successes. Invisibility and Continuum provide the context in which these forces live, influence, and impact both you and the business world.

While each force can be seen as independent, it is the invisibility and complexity of their dynamic interactions, along with the leader’s ability to access their natural power that underpins the concept of Spacious Complexity.

By tapping into the wisdom and power of these forces within the context of your current challenges or problems, you can create internal spaciousness and breathing room to navigate the myriad of decisions, options, and roadblocks in today’s business world.

Accessing these natural forces grants you the gift of increased clarity and wisdom, along with an enhanced competence in managing both complexity and ambiguity.

View Our Spacious Complexity Program

We encourage you to start noticing where the forces of Spacious Complexity manifest in your environment and experiment with demonstrating their impact for yourself

For more information on why we developed this program, please refer to our blog post: The NEED Driving the Innovation

How often have you said or heard one of your managers say, “I would love to be able to increase my teams’ performance?”


If increasing your team’s performance is your goal, you may be chasing the wrong target. Performance is a by-product rather than a goal in itself,  as with happiness in a relationship.

Like high performance, happiness is a desired state; yet if we chase it, eludes us.
Neither can successfully be established as the primary goal. 

Happiness (as with performance) is the result of something – for example meaningful work or a good marriage.  Happiness is the result of focusing on establishing understanding and respect in a marriage, not of a focus on happiness. In the same way, high performance comes by focusing on developing key elements in your company, not by focusing on the performance itself.

High-performing companies have three key elements: a clear, compelling strategy in alignment with the company values and people committed to the cause.

Clear, Compelling Strategy

Remember playing broken telephone – you all sat in a circle and one person initiated a message which was then passed around the circle, whispered from ear to ear until the last person repeated aloud what they heard?  Usually, it was a garbled distortion of the original message.  Company strategies are often communicated in a similar fashion.


A strategic communication approach, where it is left for each level of leadership to communicate to their direct reports, has the same ‘broken telephone’ effect. Understanding (and commitment) decreases with each communication at each level it is passed down. Even if the strategy statement remains clear, does it engender commitment?  Does anyone care? A professionally worded statement may be clear, but is it compelling?

For a strategy to translate into focused performance, it must be clear and compelling.

Imagine the focus in a company where everyone has a clear picture (and can tell you in their own words) of the company’s reason for existing, where it is headed, and what its strategy is.


If you want to test the uniformity of the direction your employees or team are working towards, survey (formally or informally) and check the uniformity in understanding of:

  1. Why the company exists?
  2. Where is it headed?
  3. What is its strategy?

Personalisation of a clearly communicated, well-understood strategy may well give you as many different wordings as people, however, you will be able to tell if they’re all describing the same picture.  If they “get it”, they will have personalised it.

Alignment

Apart from other obvious benefits, a clear picture of the company’s strategy and goals allows alignment with personal goals.  This strong tangible connection between personal and company goals means the company’s agenda is their agenda. Companies that show the “performance difference” have a strong alignment between personal and company goals and philosophy.  They are open in their communication around goals and expectations.  They are a partnership grounded in an understanding of simultaneously moving employer and employee towards their strategic goals.  Synergy is the product of this partnership.


VeriFone doubled its revenues in 5 years (to more than $300 million) and former CEO, Hatim Tyabji, was very clear about the importance of alignment between personal goals and company philosophy, expectations, and direction.  They used alignment at the recruitment stage. Before hiring a new employee they were very clear about the quid pro quo of life at VeriFone. The quid pro quo, in return for all the freedom we offer, is a tremendous emphasis on accountability.  Some hear the message and realise “This is not for me.” Fine. Others start but do not fit the mold and leave.  Left, are those who align and this is seen as integral to the company’s success.

Energy, Initiative, and Commitment

Alignment leads to personal commitment.  A personal commitment to the success of the business unlocks a passion that energises us.  A community of people committed to the same thing not only feeds that energy but also increases the accountability and the expectation of success.  The focus isn’t performance – the focus is building a company of people committed to a clear and compelling strategy; people whose personal agendas are met by meeting the company’s agenda – performance is the result.


When the focus is performance the interaction between the company and employees becomes transactional which undermines commitment.  However, personal commitment is made stronger by being part of a community (all who work for the company) who are committed to the same agenda.

The result?
Even obstacles are approached with initiative and a commitment to seeing the strategy work.

A ‘High-Performance Culture’ is the result of a focus on:

  1. A clearly communicated picture of a compelling strategy.
  2. Open communication around both company and personal goals and an expectation that they will be strongly aligned. Even to the point where it is part of the recruitment process.
  3. Recruiting for, and rewarding energy, initiative, and commitment together with a clear expectation of accountability.

Take one of our assessments to gather the right information and capitalise on your team’s strengths

Assessment Offerings

Services are always hard to determine the value of, how do you know if you’re getting good value from your accountant, architect, or lawyer?  Executive coaching is no different.  You can’t ‘kick the tires’ of a service before you buy it, but you probably do have a few indicators that help you determine the value you want from a service.  This ‘buyers’ conundrum’ has surfaced enough lately that we interrupt our Series on Leadership Secrets to bring you a 2 part Blog on “How to Measure Executive Coaching”.

We believe you can only see the value if you’re asking the right questions, so we co-design feedback surveys with our larger clients on their coaching metrics. 


We measure:

We coach leaders, high potential individuals who are used to challenging themselves to more.  47% of the leaders we coach are senior management to CEO level and 39% are emerging leaders or middle management.  Coach fit is critical to success as the power of the coaching is only as good as the combination of safety and challenge.  These leaders have already challenged themselves as far as they can.  The coach must create a safe enough environment for the client to be challenged beyond what they would do otherwise. 

Part of that safety is knowing the coach has an unwavering belief in them as leaders. 94% of our clients surveyed always “sensed my coach’s belief in me personally”, with 6% mostly sensing the coach’s belief.  56% said they always “felt safe”, with 44% most of the time, and 94% experience the “right amount of challenge to go beyond my comfort zone” most or all the time.

Goal Achievement can be a tricky one as maintaining confidentiality on what the client is working on is key to the success of coaching.  Most of the coaching goals are set by the coachee themselves, however, their boss or sponsor is allowed 1 core goal they put forward for the coachee to work on.  That, in turn, is confidential between the coach, coaches, and boss/sponsor.  We measure this by simply asking “Did you accomplish the majority of your goals?” 100% of clients surveyed say yes to both the sponsor and self-identified goals!  They can elaborate in the comment box -and many do.

The observable impact is measured by simply asking “In what ways have others observed the impact of coaching on you?”.  We know that behaviour change has taken place when third-party feedback confirms it. Examples of third-party feedback are ‘greater trust by others’, ‘More aware of my audience / other team members’ needs and differences ‘, ‘My boss originally said I wasn’t strategic enough and he said there was a marked improvement at the end. I’m a broader thinker. I am now able to stay in a strategic frame of mind and not get dragged into the day-to-day often. Today I think more corporately than departmental.’ and ‘better listening and different analysis and approach on the issues’. 

All difficult to put metrics to, but observable and measurable nonetheless.

Coach professionalism is used for us to monitor ourselves and to see where we can improve. We care deeply about the coaching profession and aim to represent it well.  100% of clients surveyed ranked all our coaches as “Professional” or “Highly Professional” on all 5 indicators, from “Initial Contact” or “Addressing any process issues you had” to “Finalising the Contact”.  All would recommend their coach to others!  This high satisfaction level also speaks to the effort we put in around matching clients with one of our 7 coaches as well as the diversity and skill available on our team.

While we do not get clients to give us feedback on their specific goals, we do ask for feedback on core ‘intangible’ leadership competencies developed through their coaching.  We customise the competencies measured to those most important to the company we’re working with.  Typically we end up with around 9.  Some common competencies measured are; “Self-Awareness”, “Relational Ability”,  “Dealing with Conflict”, “Internal Confidence” and “Influence”.  The feedback usually comes back with the coaching having had a significant impact or having exceeded expectations.

If you want to ‘kick the tires’ of a coaching service before you hire them, use these measurements as questions for their references.  If they claim to be a right fit for all your executives, beware.  Rather look for a team of coaches, like ours, or hire a coach who advises you to first interview 2 or 3 coaches before deciding on the best fit.  Lastly, if you’re planning to make coaching a core component of your leadership development, ask the coaching organization if they’re willing to co-design a feedback survey that provides you with valuable metrics while still honouring the confidentiality inherent in the coaching relationship.

If you found this helpful, you may be interested in Part 2 on Coach Credentials.  Alternatively, you may be reading this as you’re considering hiring a coach.  If you are, we commend your commitment to growing your leadership capacity and encourage you to review our line-up of highly qualified, impactful coaches.

Meet Our Coaches

We’ve shared our thoughts with you.  We’d love to hear how you go about selecting coaches and measuring the impact of your coaching investment.

In our collective years of corporate life we, the creators of this material, have had the privilege of meeting and befriending amazing, talented people in a broad variety of leadership circumstances. In our consulting careers we continue to have the joy of meeting and working with high functioning individuals and teams.  Skilled leaders with vision, commitment and business acumen.  We have also stumbled onto an awareness of 2 critical areas that most of even these leaders struggle with. Two areas that hold them back from bringing their full value to their work.

Dealing with Ambiguity

The difficulty in making decisions in ambiguity. Where a need for control or a need to know and get things exactly right hinders making an “optimal range” decision. We believe it is possible to equip leaders to make sound decisions even in ambiguity.

Strategic Organizational Agility

“Organizations can be complex mazes with many turns, dead ends, quick routes and choices.  In most organizations, the best path to get somewhere is almost never a straight line.  There is a formal organization – the one on the organization chart – where the path may look straight, and then there is the informal organization where all paths are zigzagged.  Since organizations are staffed with people, they become all the more complex.  There are gatekeepers, expediters, stoppers, resisters, guides, Good Samaritans and influencers.  All these types [and more] live in the organizational maze.  The key to being successful in maneuvering through complex organizations is to find your way through the maze to your goal in the least amount of time while making the least noise [or leaving the least wake].  The best way to do that is to accept the complexity of organizations rather than fighting it and learn to be a maze-bright person (emphasis added).” FYI For Your Improvement, Lombardo & Eichinger, 236

Hidden forces, such as gravity, govern all of nature. People, organizations and societies are also governed by inescapable forces.  These forces are at the root of much of the complexity in organizations. Environments where people and ideas thrive, are structured in congruence with these forces.  Environments with a stifling effect, have structures and mindsets incongruent with these natural forces.

Our Vision:

Through this process participants will:

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This is a process full of doors to other world views.  It is a process that provokes thought rather than provides answers.  It demands that you work out the answers for yourself rather than receive them predigested.

We believe that finding the spaciousness within complexity necessitates a stepping back into a quiet ‘space’ that observes the ‘societal laws of human nature’ that underpin and are party to creating that complexity.

The blog invites you to join us in this process of discovery.  A process of rethinking, observing, questioning and integrating an expanded way of dealing with complexity.  An expansion that, paradoxically, creates a spaciousness within complexity.  To do this we will be introducing you to a theory – the Theory of Spacious Complexity.  A theory and process that invites you to suppose things were different to what you’ve understood them to be.  To look beyond the complexity… to pause and notice the forces at play.  Forces.  Societal forces akin to the force of gravity and other the forces of nature.  To discover and experiment with the impact of working with the forces we suppose be truly hardwired into the world.  We will be introducing these forces in the next session and the remainder of our time will be expanding our understanding of the forces and why and how it is of real, practical importance for us to see and work with the forces.

We are suggesting a theory here and will be stating it as truth… know that it is the best truth based on what we see – be part of helping us make it more robust… or bust it open.  Be part of the test – expand our visibility.

All theories are flawed.  No plan… or theory… survives its collision with reality – it is our best guess based on what is visible to us at that point.

We welcome you as part of the testing community!