A priest, a physicist and a corporate executive walk into a bar.

That is not the opening of a joke. It describes an actual evening at one of our Saint Michael’s Experiences, which are breakthrough retreats built around the big questions that shape a business and the people in it. We spend the time breaking open other ways of seeing a situation, and then mapping strategies and practices that can be put to work immediately.

The design principle we use to shape each one is borrowed from architecture, where it is a working maxim: Entry, Path, Goal.

Entry, or Who Is in the Room

When we craft an Experience, we usually bring together leaders from different domains, industries and companies who happen to share a similar question about their businesses. If the group comes from within one company, we push for cross-functional representation and often for customers and partners to be in the mix as well.

Our priest, physicist and executive came from three entirely different institutions and arrived with the same symptom of disintegration. Their big picture and strategy were not translating into execution, or into the minds and hearts of the people who had to live the work day to day.

As we work together to construct a shared framing question and prepare for the immersive event, participants almost always tell me the same two things. They had not realised how deep their own question actually went, and they had not expected to have so much in common with other industries and professions, or with the silos inside their own business.

They walk in with different training, different mental models, different language and different emphases on what counts as capital and what counts as reward. Underneath all of it, every one of them needs their business, their team and themselves to get unstuck and grow.

Path, or How Each Person Gets There

Once inside, the pathways are designed to do three things. To create the kind of epiphany that gives someone a real breakthrough insight. To build a richer, deeper network of friends and colleagues. And to produce creative but practical actions that people take home and put into practice with our help.

Naturally, given their different entry points, people lean toward different routes. Our priest gravitated to reflective practice. Our physicist wanted deep quantitative and qualitative analysis. The usual instinct for our corporate executives is to synthesise many moving parts of the business into something predictable. All of those paths are useful, and not one of them is complete on its own.

So the pathways we design, both during the event and in the support that follows people home, deliberately use reflection and analysis and synthesis together. They weave in new ways of seeing, integrating and doing that catalyse growth, and I continue to be struck by how well those resonate across professions and industries. The fresh ground covered, then reinforced once people are back at their desks, is what sustains the motivation to actually practise what they learned and to recognise growth as it unfolds.

Goal, or Integrated Growth

The overarching goal for everyone who comes is Integrated Growth, where the business and the people it touches grow stronger together.

That said, like our priest, physicist and executive, each person will frame that goal differently at the start, and I would not want it otherwise. The whole Experience, before, during and after the immersive event, is designed so that a shared goal and several different pathways can cross creatively and to mutual benefit throughout.

Using This Before You Ever Arrive

You do not need to cross the threshold of Saint Michael’s to put Entry, Path, Goal to work. Three things to try:

• Invite diverse perspectives into a shared creative conversation, choosing people who are genuinely interested in the same underlying challenge and goal, not people who already agree with you.
• Design so that pathways cross rather than compete, with the explicit promise that each approach builds on the others rather than taking turns to win.
• Keep reminding each other of the goal. Frame it and reframe it until every person can see themselves and their part of the business inside it, and until it connects to the deeper aim of integrated growth.

Most stuck rooms I walk into are not short of intelligence. They are short of pathways that cross, which is a far more solvable problem to have.

‍