For those who attended the community call last week, we wish to convey our profound gratitude for your presence and thoughtful engagement. This is truly the beginning of a commitment to being in dialogue with our community as important stakeholders in the conversation around how we shape our organization and industry to be more equitable and inclusive. 

In the spirit of transparency and accountability, we have created the summary of the call below, along with an overview of next steps that CTI is committed to.   

WHY WE HOSTED THE CALL

• We were following a sense that our community wanted to be in a more real-time conversation with each other, and we were honoring the urge to facilitate that. 
• We wanted to create an opportunity to further explain our published statement and share more of the process we are in, as we think it is relevant and matters to coaches and leaders. 
• While the date was further away from the moment, we decided to hold the call because we are committed to continuing to be in relationship and leading through the moment.  

WHY WE MADE A STATEMENT AND WHY IT MATTERS

• At the heart of our strategic framework and orientation towards equity, inclusion and diversity is a commitment to lead in moments that matter. 
• We felt this moment mattered because it lived at the intersection of coaching, leadership, and equity. It was a place where we could influence relative to our position of power, and it was an opportunity to be responsible for our commitments and accountabilities. 

OUR PROCESS — CO-ACTIVE IN THE MOMENT: 

Throughout our journey in leading these moments, we have consistently leaned into the Co-Active process. While many of us associate Co-Active with both being and doing, there is a deeper dimension that guided our decision-making. Here’s a breakdown of the Co-Active process:  

• Co (Relationship): This aspect encourages us to build relationships with ourselves, stakeholders, community members, customers, and the larger systems we are part of. It fosters connection over separation and helps us grow our awareness and consciousness. 
• Hyphen (Messy Middle of It All): The hyphen represents the space where we grapple with the complexity and wholeness of situations, embracing “both/and” thinking and navigating the tension between opposing viewpoints. We often call it the “messy middle.” 
• Active (Empowered Choices): The “active” component inspires us to make empowered choices, take responsibility for our world, and shape it according to our vision. It emphasizes that our actions may not always be perfect, but they should move us closer to resonance and integration. 

We applied the Co-Active process to our decision
about the ICF Converge conference in Florida: 

• We first became aware of the “moment” as we witnessed our community and industry engage in conversations, primarily on social media, voicing various opinions and taking actions to convey their concerns. 
  
• We moved first into relationship and sought connections and conversations with the ICF and our faculty, co-founders, board members, staff, and customers. We also got into relationship with ourselves and remembered that we are in a different position of power than individuals and got clear on what that difference was. 
• We then took all the insight from those relationships and began to grapple with the complexity and nuance of the situation. We allowed ourselves to be with, and sit in, the tension of it all. 
• This process led us to our statement and the setting up of a community call

Why this matters: 

• It helps you see into how we are engaging and navigating these moments 

• As we lead and coach others, our job is to support and enable them to get in relationship with themselves, others, and the larger narrative/system; to build the capacity to include more and navigate complexity by grappling with the inevitable tension and paradox that exists; and to move into empowered choice and creation that includes and integrates more. This is at the heart of what we are trying to influence — transforming the way we relate and create from moments that matter. 

WHAT CAME OUT OF OUR CONVERSATION AS A COMMUNITY 

OUR COMMUNITY WANTS MORE COMMUNICATION,
AND WE WANT TO BE MORE TRANSPARENT

• We discussed how important communication is and how people are longing to be in more dialogue, so they can see into and track how we are influencing the industry, how we are shaping our organization, and what we are committing to. 
• CTI took responsibility for not communicating sufficiently — the last time we addressed the community was a year ago.   
• We see this as a strong desire to hold us accountable, which we genuinely appreciate and want — this is how we will be successful together. 
• We need to create a communications plan, and you need to know about it. 

OUR COMMITMENT: We have a goal of stepping into quarterly updates to our community.  We will start in November by sharing more about what is happening with our curriculum changes and faculty training.  We will also be moving towards creating more clear and measurable goals that we can track to.  This will be something we put I place for 2024. 

OUR COMMUNITY WANTS TO SEE US USE OUR INFLUENCE TO INSPIRE
SYSTEMIC CHANGE, AND WE WANT TO PLAY OUR PART

• We shared how one of the ways we are trying to do this is through the investment we have made to audit our entire curriculum,  to redesign it to support coaches and leaders in accounting for power dynamics and in understanding how identity shapes behavior and how to navigate and include difference, as well as to train our faculty to deliver our experiences with this lens. 
• We shared how in our conversations with the ICF we talked about how CTI might be able to support and inspire other organizations to take similar steps to adjust their content and delivery. 
• There was a request made to have us let the ICF know that the community wanted to hear from the ICF and wanted to be part of that conversation with the ICF alongside CTI.  

OUR COMMITMENT: To follow up with the ICF and let them know we had a community call, share some of the things that came up, and let them know that the community would like to hear from them.   

THE COMMUNITY WANTS MORE CONVERSATION
AND WANTS TO MAKE MORE OF A CONTRIBUTION,
AND WE WANT TO FACILITATE THAT

We heard a lot of great ideas for how our community could contribute, and we experienced the contribution directly in this intimate conversation between the community and our CEO.  

• Communication of our equity commitment: We acknowledge that we have work to do and accountabilities to hold in our communication on our equity stance. We pledge to be clearer and provide more communication on the work that is currently taking place and to provide a timeline for the future work we need to do.  
• Using CTI’s position of influence to support greater equity in the industry: CTI has just finished over 12 months of work; the entire curriculum has been audited and redesigned to account for power dynamics, identity, and navigating difference. We are in the process of training our entire faculty to be holding this deeper equity lens. In conversation with the ICF, CTI has offered to open-source elements of this work, as part of our responsibility to share the investment we have made with other organizations within the industry, for us to create alignment on and support for equity.  
• Deeping the conversation — CEO roundtables: We are in the initial stages of planning CEO roundtables to continue these important discussions, including but not limited to how we shape a more equitable ecosystem and use our position of power to influence. We will provide more details in the next few weeks on how to participate.

Thank you for your partnership in building a brighter, more inclusive future for our community and the coaching industry as a whole. If you have additional feedback that you'd like to share with CTI, please submit it here. 

With appreciation,

Co-Active Training Institute (CTI)