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

No, this is not the first line of a joke. It describes an actual scenario that took place at one of Third Angle’s St. Michael’s House Experiences. St. Michael's Experiences are breakthrough business retreats that lend new perspective to big questions that inherently impact businesses and the people involved. During the Experiences we break open alternative ways of seeing the situation, and we map out strategies and practices that can be immediately integrated into work.

A design maxim we use to customize each St. Michael’s House Experience is borrowed from the field of architecture’s working principle: Entry-Path-Goal.

Entry → Path → Goal

Entry: Where Growth Begins

In crafting the Experience, we often bring together leaders from different domains, industries, and companies who share a similar question about their businesses. If the group is from within a company, we encourage cross-functional and even customers and partners be part of the mix.

Our priest, physicist, and corporate executive (from three different institutions) were simultaneously plagued with a common symptom of disintegration: Their big picture and strategy were not translating to execution and the minds and hearts of the people tasked with living and doing the work, day to day.

As we work together to construct a shared framing question, and prepare for the immersive event, participants admit to never realizing the depth of the question, and how much they have in common with other industries and professions, and with other silos within their own business.

They enter St. Michael’s House with different training, mental models, language, and different emphases on various forms of capital and rewards. Yet, all of them share a deep need for their businesses, teams, and themselves to get unstuck and grow.

Path: Where Perspectives Meet

Upon entering St. Michael’s House, pathways are designed to (1) evoke Epiphany experiences (A-Ha moments) that give participants breakthrough insights, (2) form a richer, deeper network of friends and colleagues, and (3) provide creative yet practical actions to take home and put into practice, with our help.

Naturally, given their different entry points, some participants, like our priest, lean towards a path that emphasizes reflective practices. Others, like our physicist, prefer a path of deep quantitative and qualitative analysis. The usual path for many of our corporate executives is to try to synthesize many moving parts of their businesses to arrive at predictable results. All these paths are useful. None are complete.

The pathways taken during the event, and those that provide support to participants when they go home, utilize reflection, analysis, and synthesis.And they weave in new ways of seeing, integrating, and doing things that catalyze growth and are amazingly resonant across professions and industries. The fresh ground covered, and reinforced once they go home, ignites and sustains motivation to put what they learned into practice and recognize growth as it unfolds.

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Goal: Integrated Growth

Growth – Integrated Growth where the business, and the people it touches, grow stronger, together.

That’s the underlying and overarching goal of those who come to St. Michael’s House. However, like our priest, physicist, and corporate executive, each may initially frame the goal differently.

And yet the whole Experience (before-during-after the immersive event) is designed for a share goal and for different pathways to cross creatively, in mutually beneficial ways, throughout the process.

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Applying the Entry–Path–Goal Principle Today

How can you use the Entry–Path–Goal principle before ever crossing the threshold of St. Michael’s House?

3 Ways Leaders Use the Entry–Path–Goal Design Principle to Innovate and Grow

1)    Invite diverse perspectives, interested in the same underlying challenge and goal, to enter a shared creative conversation and experience.

2)    Design for pathways to cross rather than compete, with the promise of building on each other to reach the overarching goal.

3)    Keep reminding each other of the goal. Frame and reframe it so the players can see themselves and their part of the business in it, and so they can resonate with the deeper goal of integrated growth.

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