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In fifteen years, The Coaches Training Institute (CTI) has trained more than 20,000 co-active coaches. But CTI’s never been in the conference business—until now. “This is the most significant event for co-active coaching and leadership since CTI began,” said Karen Kimsey-House, CTI’s founder and CEO.
Next February, CTI will host the first “Global Co-active Summit” at Marco Island, Florida—a three day event that promises not just to give attendees training and networking, but to be “part of an evolutionary leap forward.”
In fact, CTI prefers not to even use the word “attendee” in describing the coaches who will gather in Florida. “Attendees go to conferences—leaders participate in a Summit,” reads a brochure for the event, which bills itself as a “transformative experience.”
“The world is changing rapidly and the work we do as co-active coaches is more important than ever,” said Kimsey-House, who has been thinking of doing a summit for four years. It was the confluence of world events, including the collapse of the world economy, that convinced her not to put the plans on hold—put to push them forward.
“Approaching the events that happen in our world from a perspective of problem solving is limiting and simply will not work given the complexity of the challenges that we are facing,” she said. “The rate of change is accelerating rapidly and it is my sense that there IS no ‘getting things back to normal.’ Instead, we need to learn to embrace everything that is coming as an opportunity to grow and evolve.”
So for three days, co-active coaches will take a fresh look at what they’ve learned and how it can be adapted to a changing world. Unlike a coaching conference, Kimsey-House says, the summit will include a series of coordinated events and breakout sessions—the entire event designed create a shared sense of community and mission among CTI’s coaches and leadership program graduates.
“We need to move to a greater level of interrelationship,” said Kimsey-House.
The summit follows a process of reflection among CTI’s leaders at their headquarters in California. “We’ve been getting more clear here…about what it means to be a CTI coach,” said Kimsey-House, who says the global summit will be preceded by “Leader Days,” where CTI training leaders from around the world with gather to discuss how their methods can be adapted—or fundamentally re-created—to best serve coaches and their clients.
“What we’re getting clear about here at CTI is that the coach does have an agenda,” said Kimsey-House. “And that agenda’s the highest possible transformation of each client. We’ve never said that fully. It’s been passive rather than explicit.”
In many ways, the Marco Island summit will be about making things explicit. What it won’t be about, Kimsey-House says, is presenting a challenge to existing coaching conferences, primarily the ICF.
“It’s not our intention to compete with the ICF…we’ve done our best to position the summit so it doesn’t compete” with the ICF’s international conference, which is set for Las Vegas in September, 2011. CTI’s event will be a global gathering and teaching event—but not the first of a series of CTI-branded get-togethers.
“It’s about global leaders coming together to create change,” reads a brochure for the summit, in line with Kimsey-House’s belief that the world needs the best-prepared leaders possible to react to an unprecedented set of challenges.
“I think that as a species, humankind is headed for a true transformative leap,” and adapting coaching—in a global way—to prepare is what the summit is about. “I think there’s a lot of great work that’s being done to support and inspire this leap,” said Kimsey-House, who sees CTI’s coaches as “transformative change agents” in “an ever-changing world.”
Are you a CTI coach?
What are your thoughts about the summit? Will you attend, or not? Do you agree with Karen Kimsey-House that coaching has a global role to play in preparing for—and adapting to—the problems the world faces?
As Kimsey-House puts it, “It’s time to bring visibility back to the role of the coach.”
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There are 2 Responses so far...
With so many initiatives undertaken and put forward by umpteen coaching organizations/providers/practitioners, coaching seems to me, to be ‘evolving’.
There are many tried formats and frameworks including ‘Leader Days’ which have already been practised by one coaching provider for more than 6 years.
Many coaching organizations/providers/practitioners have over the years also developed coaching benchmarks/standards; methodologies, concepts, approaches, evidenced-based practices, models, etc.
However, there is yet an integrated and holistic framework or identity that distinctively can be considered and branded as ‘coaching’.
So even with so many concerted efforts, what is the end outcome of all these initiatives?
Will these initiatives end up elevating the ‘coaching profession’ or add more to the confusion?
Billy C H Teoh
Malaysia.
An athlete who has real potential engages a sports coach and is proud of the fact, especially when the athlete ends up winning medals.
By contrast, it is usually the failing businessperson who gets coached.
I often ponder whether a new word should be invented to cover the field of “coaching a successful person so that they become even more successful”.