What Is Possible?
Leadership Conversations That Can Change Everything
By Tim Seeton
with Jim Selman (1940–2024)
Co-Founders of ParaComm International
Your organization is closer to realizing what’s possible than you might think.
The gap between what it’s capable of and what it’s producing can close.
Your leaders have probably tried the conventional playbook: sharper strategy, cleaner structure, stronger talent, better execution. They’ve adjusted what’s visible (strategic plans and goals, org charts and performance metrics) and each time, real progress is within reach.
Yet month after month, year after year, something curious keeps happening. Meetings often still sound the same. Culture drifts in a familiar direction. People work harder, yet deliver similar outcomes. Results, measured honestly, stay predictable.
Here’s the insight that changes things: applying new strategies while everyone works with the same old observations and assumptions won’t generate a significantly different future. Working harder inside the same perception produces more of the same thinking. The same thinking produces more of the same results.
Albert Einstein put it this way: The significant problems we have in the world today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
What does it take to close that often persistent performance gap?
We have spent 45+ years closing that gap in organization after organization, across industries, continents, and cultures. It’s been a privilege. Every client we’ve worked with has made the work worth doing.
We’ve learned that the gap doesn’t persist because of what people are doing. The gap persists because of how people are seeing their world. And that is something that can change.
People often cannot perceive anything outside of what their current way of seeing allows. (This one of our core insights and also our biggest source of leverage.)
Most leadership approaches never reach this deeper level of work, which means that what is possible for an organization stays hidden from view and out of the conversation. You cannot see the substrate (the medium) within which teams work.
That’s the opportunity: bring what’s possible into view and close the gap.
“Change the observer, change the results.”
This is our motto.
And yet ParaComm is neither a change management firm, nor a talent consultancy.
We don’t install processes, redesign structures, or manage recruitment and compensation.
Nor do we deliver training programs (valuable as they are, they tend to improve performance only within an existing way of seeing).
ParaComm is a transformational leadership firm.
What drives results is often invisible. Our work makes the invisible, visible. That leads to a whole new way of observing what is possible and what is missing. This is the power that creates breakthrough results.
We don’t train your people. We transform how leaders see, think, and act.
Our commitment is to build a self-generating leadership community within your organization that keeps producing extraordinary results long after our engagement ends.
When what individuals see changes, results change. Once a person sees differently, everything shows up in a new light. They cannot unsee the possibilities now available to them and to the organization. And so they think, relate, and act differently.
When enough people across an enterprise are seeing, thinking, relating, and acting differently, the organization’s performance shifts, and not just incrementally.
Breakthrough results can become the new norm.
Why culture?
Back in the 1980s, the consulting industry was focused on fixing processes, systems, and structures. Jim Selman and I were exploring something more fundamental: culture.
Coaching was present in every area of human endeavor where performance mattered except in business. We saw the opening and began experimenting with creating a culture of coaching inside organizations. In 1988, Jim wrote the first published article on business coaching. (Until his passing in 2024, he was widely recognized as one of the founding figures of coaching in the business world.)
Early on, we recognized that culture is not a byproduct of good management.
Culture is the medium, (the substrate) through which everything in an organization happens.
It either brings strategy to life or quietly lets strategy die.
Culture doesn’t live in org charts and values statements. It lives in the real conversations people are having and the ones they aren’t.
“Shift the conversations, and you shift the culture.”
We had grounded the insight that results are a function of how a person sees in two ontological ideas.
- How people observe the world determines how they act in it.
- Language can be used not only to describe reality, but also to create it through declarations and inventing possibilities.
Returning to these two ideas, we studied the conversations people were having—internally with themselves, externally with each other—and the outcomes those conversations produced for their organization.
We found that when human beings work together over time without deliberately examining how they are seeing, they often revert to business as usual. They “default” to their organization’s invisible accumulation of unexamined assumptions and historical habits. (We call this “The Drift”.)
We could see The Drift running through every conversation. In Foreground Conversations that occur publicly in meetings, memos, and formal communications. In Background Conversations that happen in the corridors. And, most powerfully, in the unspoken assessments that run in the background and quietly shape how people interpret everything their leaders say.
What’s in the background turns out to be far more influential than anything in the foreground.
Left unexamined, what’s in the background has people default to behaving “the way everyone behaves around here” and doing things “the way things are done around here.”
Leaders in default mode normally plan forward, projecting the past onto the future, waiting until they see a clear path ahead before committing to a destination. They ask, “Given where we have been and where we are now, what can we achieve?”
Consequently, the organization will tend to drift on the currents of circumstance into the future.
There may be a better question to ask, a question that often changes everything.
What can interrupt the drift?
To answer this question, Jim and I returned to the ontological idea that people’s language can generate a new reality, not just describe an existing one.
Declarations, Offers, Promises, Requests Assessments, and Assertions (a.k.a. “speech acts”) can bring a new future into existence. Used precisely, these speech acts let a leader’s every word express a commitment to that new reality.
- Not commitment in the sense of dedication, intention, or motivation.
- Commitment in the sense of a declaration that a specific future will come to pass, regardless of current circumstances.
- Commitment in the sense of a stand that a leader takes, in language, for that possible future, before anyone knows exactly how it will be realized.
“Commitment is the one thing that reliably interrupts the drift.”
Based on this insight, we developed what our clients affectionately called “The Merlin Method” (King Arthur’s magician Merlin was, after all, an early practitioner of inventing and realizing a preferred future). Today we call this methodology what it is: “Coming from the Future”.
Over the past four decades, “Coming from the Future” has been tested, refined, and proven across 60 countries with organizations as diverse as Microsoft, Starbucks, Vodafone, Guinness, Safaricom, Amadeus, McCain Foods, and Danone. It has helped these organizations shift from a reality driven by history where the past determines what’s possible to a reality driven by commitment, where the imagination and declarations of their people determine what’s possible.
Where most organizations plan from the present forward toward a future destination, this approach starts by choosing a preferred/committed future and planning from that future to the present. Leaders choose a possible future, stand in it, and ask, “Given what we declared we’re committed to achieving, what must have happened to get us here?”
From that vantage point, actions that appeared impossible when standing in the present become obvious. Participants can describe what happened along the way: the conversations that occurred, the commitments that were made, the breakdowns that showed up.
From the perspective of coming from the future, breakdowns are stepping stones to breakthroughs. They’re not evidence something went “wrong”, and someone is to blame. They aren’t problems or obstacles. In fact, the greater the commitment, the more breakdowns will occur. A breakdown signals that a commitment is not on track or has not been fulfilled, and that something is missing.
That something is always a conversation.
Transformational Leadership Program (TLP)
Most leadership development workshops address what leaders do. They build valuable skills, install frameworks, teach practices and methodologies. All good things. But they often leave the observer unchanged. And so those new skills and frameworks get applied inside the same thinking that produced the organization’s current results.
We have already seen where new results come from and it’s not a new plan.
The source of new results is a new observer.
That is why TLP is not a workshop.
It’s an experience designed to shift how leaders see, think, relate, and lead. An experience that has participants “come from the future”.
It’s an opportunity for leaders to make a set of bold commitments to projects that stretch beyond what the organization currently believes is achievable, and to apply the distinctions of Transformational Leadership to the challenges and commitments they are carrying. It’s also an opportunity to have ParaComm coach those leaders and their teams as they turn those commitments into reality.
Change an observer—how?
Not by giving them more information or enforcing behavioral guidelines. By giving them this distinction:
“What you see is not always what’s there, because what you see is shaped by your already listening of whatever you’re looking at.”
You cannot notice a difference that you have no language for, no matter how sharp your intentions are.
That’s why this can’t be delivered as advice. Telling a leader to communicate more, or care more, doesn’t create a new capacity to see. It just adds pressure inside the same context.
A distinction, precisely given and practiced in the real world, does something advice can’t: it opens up a new capacity. Once a distinction “lands” (that is, once it occurs in a leader’s lived experience), things that were invisible start to become visible.
The assumptions they’ve operated with become visible to them as assumptions, rather than as reality.
The interpretations they’ve been relating to as “facts” become visible to them as interpretations or assessments.
People’s different ways of perceiving become visible to them as perspectives they can consciously choose from:
Spectator • a person in the stands watching the field of play, talking about the actions on the field
Player • a person on the field of play, making requests and promises, forwarding the action
Coach • a person at the edge of the field of play, standing in the future, seeing what’s missing to realize that future, and creating possibilities.
Other distinctions of transformational leadership can “land” now too.
Accountability • a freely given commitment to be counted on and to be called to account for taking care of a specific area on behalf of others
Responsibility • the ability to respond; the source of real power and choice
Straight Talk • saying it the way you see it to create the conditions for authentic alignment, trust, and breakthrough results.
These distinctions open up new ways of leading. Consequently, people start taking responsibility for more than just what they are accountable for.
Practicing straight talk is one of the most powerful shifts any leader, and any organization, can make.
People tend to avoid talking straight, mainly because they don’t want to be responsible for the breakdowns that may follow. Yet breakdowns are the natural companions of real commitment and the necessary stepping stones to breakthroughs.
TLP reframes straight talk as a fundamental leadership practice, grounded in a real commitment to generate a chosen future, rather than a commitment to protect the present or the past.
This methodology generates strategic clarity, aligned commitments, and bold action.
Commitment comes before certainty.
That is not recklessness.
That is leadership.
TLP: Core Program Elements
- Accountability & Responsibility: What They Mean
- Breakdowns as Stepping Stones
- Coach, Player, Spectator: Choosing Your Perspective
- Coming from the Future: Standing in What Is Possible
- Commitment: The Source of Unprecedented Action
- Culture, Moods & the Art of Shifting Both
- Foreground & Background Conversations
- Four Leadership Conversations: Relationship, Possibility, Opportunity, and Action
- Impacting the Drift: From Circumstances to A Declared Future or Commitments
- Leadership as Choice: The Shifts That Define Transformational Leaders
- New Language for Performance: Speech Acts & Commitments
- The Power of Assumptions & the Observer
- Straight Talk as a Leadership Practice
- Thinking Outside the Default: Seeing Differently as the Source of New Results
We don’t do this work because something is wrong.
We do it because something is possible.