where they want to go.
Step 7: Agree actions and client dismantles scene
Throughout the 7 steps of the PMT, the client has been experiencing new ways of thinking about their challenge and possible solutions. It is important now to make these concrete by establishing specific next steps that they are committed to taking after the session.
At this point, you may ask the client to provide a brief summary of the actions and what they will be committing to do to move things forward. This may include:
• Recapping important insights
• Agreeing the actions to take to achieve the outcome
• Giving specific details of the next steps
• Including a way to assess the success of that action
• Committing to a specific date and time
• Ensuring the client is accountable for the above
• Asking them if there is anything else they wish to add.
Finally, it can be very useful to ask loaded, or leading questions with presuppositions of success in order to finish with a sense of mastery and leave the client recognising that something profound has occurred:
• What was the most useful part of this for you?
• What insight do you feel will be the most helpful in making a change quickly?
• What resources do you have at your disposal already to begin to make this happen now?
Inform the client that you will send their report to them within a specific period (e.g. three days).
Client dismantles the scene
The client needs closure – and to recognise the importance of what has just happened and their ownership of it – by taking this final step. Invite the client to dismantle the scene and put all the objects back in place. Remember, as coach, you never touch any part of the scene.
By putting everything back and dismantling the scene, there is a strong unconscious presupposition that the client is in charge of their thinking about the challenge and their ability to influence it. By creating their own physical metaphors, changing scenes and experimenting, they have demonstrated their ability to think (and act) outside the box.
This brings the PMT session to an end.
CASE STUDY
A regional CEO in the financial sector was having serious challenges: her large geographic region that stretched across several countries was not meeting its numbers; her leadership team was ground down by the continuing pressures to turn around their performance within a highly competitive market; her boss was under pressure to deliver and felt his job was on the line; and the regional CEO was almost at a loss as to how to catapult the business into being a success where others had previously failed. The world was on her back and her posture showed it.
She requested some coaching to support her developing different ways of thinking about the challenges and identifying practical, new or different solutions to move towards turning the business around.
She explained to me that although she had engaged her boss, her peers and her team members to gain their insights and perspectives, the outputs were not far reaching enough to make the difference that was now imperative. She was stuck in her present way of thinking.
On the first day, knowing that she wanted a different approach, I invited her to use the meeting room as a landscape for the problems she was facing and to place and rearrange objects in the room (large or small, tables and chairs included) to show the nature of the problem she was facing. The team became the chairs, the regional countries became the table and her boss became a large heavy sculpture in the corner of the door. Then we got into the detail.
As her coach I invited her to consider the following questions to support her new thinking:
• Who are the other key people and organisations who are part of the scenario?
• Who are the key competitors?
• Who are not competitors, though key influencers in the region?
• Who do you know (a friend or ex colleague) that has significantly different views from you and can challenge you to think ‘outside the box’?
• What would they ask you? Suggest to you?
• What would they do in your position? What stops you from doing that too? How could you do a variation of that?
As we continued with these types of questions, she was constantly moving around the room, moving objects around the room, and talking out loud about the different possibilities this type of questioning and technique was triggering in her.
She was excited. She was starting to become aware of new choices she could make and options available to her.
Within the hour she decided that she had sufficient ideas to discuss with her key stakeholders and gain their inputs, ideas and support for these.
We followed this with one further session to take her thinking to the next stage, and another one to work on building her own identity as a leader and reinforce the huge strengths and talents she had and the confidence this gave her, something she had forgotten over so many recent years of challenges and missed targets.
The result was that she discovered some ingenious ways forward that all employees within the region became a part of. She was on a mission! Together, with the huge efforts from all the teams across the region, they achieved a giant leap in business performance and went beyond their targets.
For a more in-depth look at techniques to work with and leverage one’s identity go to Chapter 10: ‘Coaching for Identity Grows Purpose and Performance’ by Aidan Tod.
Coaching insights and summary
The Physical Metaphor Technique (PMT) technique is a powerful and systematic way to externalise the challenge that your client is exploring as physical mutable metaphors that they control. This tends to increase their confidence and willingness to test and explore solutions, whilst gaining the necessary perspectives to leave behind any negative or unhelpful thinking that may have kept them stuck.
Although this technique is developed along the lines of military war games, it can also be used with groups of individuals for business, or corporate war gaming. In this way, leaders and decision-makers can come together and ‘shape the battlefield’ by creating the competitive landscape and playing out (simulating) a range of potential scenarios and decide on the best prospects for their businesses. Whichever sector your clients work in, no one really knows what next year’s ‘trends’ will be. However it is the smarter ones who take the time to ‘mould the space’ and create next year’s ‘trend,’ and who lead in their fields.1
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We hope you enjoyed reading about this experiential hands-on technique that can be used with individual clients, or indeed
