Why Purpose? and Motion to go where?
The likelihood that Pablo and Mike would ever meet, much less become close friends and business partners is close to null. And yet here we are: On 1 January 2020, after three years of working and exploring together as inTension Consultancies, we launch together Purpose+Motion, the consultancy dedicated to changing the game: to supporting all those who are transforming businesses, NGOs or entire industries to create meaningful and sustainable ways of working and living.
We believe that this unlikely partnership — and the way it has been nourished and maintained over the past three years — offers as many insights into what we can achieve and bring to our partners as descriptions of our services or projects. That is where we start this journey. With the “WE”.
A story of contrasts
Where Mike grew up in a small Swiss village outside Geneva, Switzerland, one of the safest, wealthiest and most democratic parts of the world, Pablo grew up in Bogota, Colombia, which was in the midst of an intense “war on drugs” meaning bombs, kidnappings and death were a common occurrence. Peace and war. Stability and uncertainty. “Developed” and “Developing” world.
Pablo’s mother has indigenous ancestors and mother of three, is a worldwide recognized teacher of Biodanza, a form of semi-guided conscious movement which helps individuals connect with themselves and others to unlock their full potential. His father, descendant, in part, from the Afro-Colombian community, worked as a businessman for decades. Mike’s mother, on the other hand, is British, brought up 4 kids, created and ran her own Montessori pre-school, and trains Montessori teachers around the world. His father is American, worked 30 years on energy efficiency and security at the European Commission for Europe of the United Nations. Indigenous and expat. “Minority background” and “privileged background”. Limited and immense opportunity.
Where Mike learned to be structured, to plan and to be diplomatic through the international school of Geneva, an MBA, a coaching diploma and officers’ training with the Swiss Military, Pablo learned to trust his intuition and his emotions, connect mindfully with others and with nature, and express his truth in a fully embodied way through the Biodanza training, his coaching training and his yoga practice. Planning and intuition. Mind, heart and body.
Where Pablo, after graduating from university with a bachelor in political sciences and international relations, worked for a decade in business consulting in Colombia, Mike studied history and worked for a decade in the “aid” sector in Geneva and the Arab World. Business and aid. Aid worker and potential beneficiary.
We literally could go on for pages of such contrasts. It would be fun, but it’s not really the point. What is so fascinating to us both is how these contrasts (and our ability to see them as opportunities) organically connected us together, built us into the team we are today and eventually led to the emergence of Purpose+Motion.
Letting the future organically emerge
That we, Mike and Pablo, would end up working together in Berlin of all places was also rather unlikely. Invited to Berlin in 2015 by our mutual colleague and friend, Sonia Herrero, to attend a training which she and Pablo would co-facilitate. Mike also joined one of Pablo’s biodanza sessions for the first time. The connection was set.
Indeed, when Pablo moved to Berlin in 2012, he spoke no German, had no job lined up and was mainly moving to be with his young son and his German mother. Mike, arriving in Berlin in early 2017 after 2 years in Cairo, also had no real plan of how things were going to work out.
In April 2017, having worked together since November 2016 on a project supporting Egyptian NGOs to be healthier and more effective, we supported one another to each do a personal “visioning and strategic planning”. This was the first time we spoke about the future, about how we understood the world, about our dreams and contributions for the future. As we did this, surprisingly we started to see connections and synergies appear between our personal purposes and strategies, the target audiences of our strategies, and our methodologies. We saw that we shared a purpose.
On a personal level, we also increasingly sensed how Pablo’s groundedness and trust in life complemented Mike’s detailed planning and attention to detail; Mike’s relationship building complemented Pablo’s ability to say the hard truth in any situation. And, we just started having immense fun working together. InTension Consultancies was born as a name for us to both work under, but no incorporated company… for the moment, it was a partnership.
Consciously working on the “WE” and our purpose
Nevertheless, both being coaches, we realized that for us to build a truly successful partnership, to deal with our darker shadows and habits, and to create something that would allow us to sustainably drive towards our purpose in life, we would need support and we would need to work consciously on what we began to refer to as the “WE” space: not the “I” space of our inner worlds, emotions, thoughts and needs; but the space between us, the relationship, the partnership itself.
This is where we called upon, Sonia, the person who had brought us together, to continue what she started in connecting us, by coaching us together on a monthly basis to keep this “WE” space “clean”. Through these regular deep dives into the relationship we were building, we were able to bring to light innumerable habits, emotional triggers and reactions or deeper needs which we each brought with us, and which were either contributing or (more often) limiting the effectiveness and healthiness of our joint venture. Out of these coaching sessions also emerged many concrete practices or insights which we then implemented in our work.
As two men beginning a professional relationship, diving into each other’s emotional inner worlds is hardly the way most people get started. For us, it was crucial to stopping in their tracks many of the biggest risks to our success, and also to removing many of the uncertainties, assumptions, fears, unsaid-norms and never expressed needs which lead to so much wasted time and energy in most relationships. It allows us to work many less hours with much more effectiveness in those hours worked. Win-win situation for everyone (including our clients!)
On a more day to day level, we implemented the coaching principle of a “check-in” and “check-out” at the start and end of any conversation or meeting we had (internally, but also with most clients). This again gave us a space to clarify any “on-the-spot” issues, feelings, or assumptions which, if left to linger, could snowball into unmanageable, wicked problems that affect all the work and the whole relationship from the darkness.
We also kept regularly spending time on reconnecting to the purpose that brought us together, our goals and the strategy we were pursuing, as well as reviewing all the work we had done, were doing and had planned or in the pipeline. Every few months, an in-depth conversation allowed us to notice trends in our work that we could better synergies on, to spot opportunities, to recalibrate when something felt amiss or to explore questions or hypotheses which emerged during such sessions.
It was during these strategic reflections that we developed the “social consultancy” concept whereby the fees charged for our work with larger funder institutions or private sector businesses would allow us to charge smaller non-profits and social enterprises a lower fee or offer pro-bono support — enabling us to sustainably pursue our goals of supporting the transformation of organisations in both sectors.
It was here that we identified our core principles:
· coherence: only bringing to our clients what we have used ourselves, and always striving for our actions, words, emotions and thoughts to be aligned.
· psychological safety: that in our work we build trust and safe spaces for our clients (and us) to show vulnerability, to dare to create the new, to innovate, to experiment, to challenge themselves and to grow. In particular, for them to experience the culture which many of them are striving to develop in their organisations.
· meeting people where they are: showing compassion for where each client or partner is, and starting there, without judgement, to bring them to where they aim to get and where they are able to get to — rather than using some concept, blueprints or ideals that we bring as an agenda or pre-sets for such transformation processes.
· embodied learning: the understanding that people and organizations learn and transform through a process that requires the active involvement of more dimensions of ourselves that just the mind — namely our body and heart/ emotions.
So why Purpose+Motion?
We were clear from the start of our work together that we aimed to support our clients to align their actions with their purpose, and to do so with intentional, sustainable processes in place for learning from their work. Knowing that such way of working requires holding the tensions between where we currently are and where we intend to go with our organization, but also tensions within teams, tensions between our organisations, or tensions between our use of strategic planning and intuition, between collaborating and competing, or between growing and stabilizing. This is where the name “inTension” came to us.
Over the 3 years of working together, we have supported NGOs in Egypt, Lebanon, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Morocco to adapt to uncertainty, repression or internal challenges whilst staying focused on the missions they were created to serve, effectively measuring their progress towards this, and learning from this to improve their work. We supported International NGOs and donors to decentralize authority to their country offices, to develop coherent and evidence-based strategies to best support their target beneficiaries, and to do all this in ways which ensured the wellbeing of their teams and all their stakeholders. We supported teams from the International Criminal Court, social enterprises in Berlin, and an 100-year old private business to adapt to the changes in their contexts, integrating the need for sustainability and well-being to be a central focus of their efforts to be effective. We also supported dozens of individuals through personal coaching cycles to transform the situation they were living, overcome challenges or build new possibilities into their lives.
As we learned alongside our clients, analyzing our impact, learning from our limitations, building on our strengths, we found that we were able to support deep transformation of individuals, of teams and even whole organisations to work more closely aligned to their purpose, finding new meaning in the work they do.
We realized that, increasingly, for us, bringing purpose and meaning to our partners was the most powerful part of the work we do. As people and teams explore and connect to their purpose, they learn to listen more to their deeper needs and those of others. They learn more subtle skills of sensing, of following intuition, of holding space for others to develop. They learn to serve larger goals and visions than only their own, often realizing the importance in their lives of nature, of relationships with others, of a society that works for all, and of business which serves these social and environmental purposes. Purpose needed to be more central for us.
We realized that it was also not a question of simply connecting to this purpose, and then feeling better about oneself. We don’t have the luxury of time for such inaction. This is a time for action, for movement. It is time we get in Motion. It is therefore key for us to support our clients and partners to connect to their purpose AND get in Motion from this place of deep connection. Motion connected with purpose is precise, unstoppable, and attracts support from key stakeholders. It is contagious. It is healthy. And it is effective. Purpose+Motion is born. This time, as a fully incorporated company, bringing quite some seriousness to our partnership!
From individuals to systems
Following this soul searching and reflection on our work, we realized that though in many cases we had a deep impact on our clients’ work and life, if we were perfectly honest with ourselves, in some situations our work had had nearly no lasting impact. Of course, when we notice this we adjust the types of interventions we undertake, we bring in other colleagues to complement our competencies, we develop our own knowledge and competencies, and we innovate new methodologies.
Nevertheless, despite our best efforts, we continue to see some of those we work with struggle to bring what they are learning or seeing differently through our work, into their organisations and daily work, much less to really change the sector or industry they work in. We feel the pain of those brave change makers butting up against many of the same structural, cultural or systemic level challenges which affected the whole sector or industry — putting endless energy and good will towards bringing often too linear solutions to complex systems, therefore never reaching the results hoped for.
And so, we have started seeing how our work supporting individuals, teams or organisations would never be as effective without the ability to affect the larger systems, industries and sectors which we work with: be it the International NGO sector, the corporations whose innovation teams we work alongside at Factory Berlin, or the embodiment professionals in Berlin which Pablo’s Biodanza connects him to deeply.
This is why, as we continue our work with individuals and organisations, we will also be proactively creating processes to support systems wide transformation: we will bring together key actors we refer to as Game Changers (those who can significantly influence the sector or industry, and are already working to innovate), diving deep with them into seeing the systems we are working with from all their perspectives, to identifying the leverage points in the sector, and to prototyping relevant and scalable solutions to some of these leverage points. We then hope to accompany the scaling of these solutions, as they are adapted and mainstreamed. These processes will connect with many other such initiatives working in the same direction, and will allow us and all those participating to develop our abilities to support teams and organisations. We have no idea who these will work out, what will emerge from them, nor which other initiatives will flow out of the interactions in them.
As Purpose+Motion takes off in the next months and years, we are excited and proud to be able to connect with each of you, benefit from your energy, knowledge and connections, to together drive towards our individual and our larger evolutionary purpose. Get in touch with us, with your purpose, and with the motion that this purpose requires of you!
Happy new decade!
Pablo and Mike
