1. Tell us why you hired Cosmic Centaurs, what was the challenge you were trying to overcome?

I was worried about the resilience of my organization. We had been doing well through COVID-19, but I could feel the organization getting tired. So, I had a lot of questions for myself and for my team. How do we manage the resilience of our teams?

I was convinced the key to thriving in the pandemic was resilience. Challenges were coming up everyday, we needed people to be innovative, responsive, and empowered. It was really about building resilience in the organization, and what we could do as leaders to strengthen the resilience of our own teams.

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2. What is one thing that surprised you about our work together? 

I was surprised by the academic research that was cited in the workshop, because it told us that this was a new topic for business, and not many people were equipped to provide a definitive answer. It was surprising, but it gave the right tonality. Now we are organizing supply chains for resilience and not just for cost. These things are new. Earlier we were not really looking at resilience in large organizations.

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3.On a scale of 1-10, with one being the least and ten the most, how likely are you to recommend Cosmic Centaurs? 

9/10.

I’m French and we don’t give full marks!

 

4. One piece of advice you would give to our other clients?

Trust the process! It is kind of unusual, so trust the process and lean into the conversation. The topics are new, they’re not simple and if anything I would say take more time.

 

We had a shorter engagement, we could have spent more time or had multiple sessions with Cosmic Centaurs.

It was a very powerful session in the sense that it opened a lot of doors but we could have probably done more subsequent sessions. Allow yourself and your team the opportunity to have a follow up.

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5. Which moment of our intervention stood out to you and why? 

Personally, it was the research you did on resilience. It was an epiphany when I heard you present the extreme cases of people during war and in concentration camps, how you described the situation in Lebanon as well, and what the survivors experienced and how they managed to come out of their situations.

For me the real insight was that these people never thought they would get out of these situations quickly. In the early days of the pandemic, we tried to adjust in crisis mode but we thought we would be back to the way things were relatively soon. The workshop was the moment when I realized we are in it until we are not and that is the language that we needed to adopt. It was a tipping point, a shift in the narrative of the organization. We started thinking, we’re not going to travel again, we’re not going back, we have to organize ourselves to manage things as they are today. That was very powerful, you freed up people from nostalgia and authorized them to think differently and come up with new solutions. Within the team, we also understood that we needed to manage resilience at multiple levels. There is resilience at the individual, team and organizational levels and we became quite mindful of how we develop resilience at each of these levels.