Start with Who Approach

Before you decide what to do, look at who is doing it.
Start With Who is the leadership and development approach created by Marcus Marsden, Managing Partner of TWP, and explored in his book Start With Who.
Most development begins with two questions:
What do you want?
Why do you want it?
Both are useful. Neither is the true starting point.
Before there is a goal, a strategy or a purpose, there is a human being looking at the world. That person already has beliefs, assumptions, habits, emotions, physical patterns and a sense of identity.
These shape what they can see, what they believe is possible and what they eventually do.
Start With Who begins there.
Who are you being now?
Who do you believe you can become?

The observer comes first
Two leaders can share the same purpose and behave completely differently.
One becomes curious. The other becomes defensive.
One asks for feedback. The other protects the story.
One changes course when reality answers back. The other becomes more certain.
The purpose may be identical. The observers are different.
Purpose tells you where you hope to go.
Identity determines what you can see along the way.

Context creates results
Leadership development often focuses on visible content: goals, actions, behaviour, strategy and results.
Start With Who also examines the invisible context producing them.
That context includes:

  • the assumptions you treat as facts
  • the stories you have stopped questioning
  • the emotions and moods shaping your choices
  • the way your body responds under pressure
  • the identity you are protecting
  • the possibilities you can no longer see

Context creates content.
Content reveals context.
Your actions and results therefore provide a mirror. They show you something about the person, team or organisation producing them.
The work begins by keeping that mirror clear.

Beyond behavioural change
A new technique can improve a simple task.
Complex human challenges usually ask for more.
When the same problem keeps returning, another action plan may simply produce another journey
around the same loop. Start With Who examines the person taking the action.
What becomes possible for this leader?
What disappears from view?
What do they consistently avoid?
What do they become under pressure?
What are their current results revealing?
As the observer develops, the range of possible action expands.
Different action becomes available because a different world has become visible.

Identity can develop
Identity gives us continuity. It can also become a prison.
Statements such as “That is just who I am” often turn familiar behaviour into an apparent fact.
Comfort begins to masquerade as authenticity. Past success becomes a reason to stop developing.
Start With Who treats identity as both stable and fluid.
The work expands a leader’s range while preserving what is essential. A leader can become more
direct without losing warmth, more open without losing judgement, more decisive without becoming rigid.

Development becomes an act of authorship.
You are not limited to repeating the identity that brought you here.
Feedback keeps the mirror clear
We define feedback simply:

Information about how another person experiences you and the impact you have on them.

It is neither a verdict nor an instruction.
Alongside your objective results, feedback helps reveal the context from which you are leading. It makes the invisible more visible.
You remain responsible for what you do with it.

One approach. Many applications.
Start With Who sits beneath our work in:

  • leadership development
  • executive coaching
  • top-team development
  • organisational culture and change
  • coach training

The setting changes. The starting point remains the same.
Who are we being?
What is that making possible?
Who do we now need to become to create the future we say we want?

The book
Start With Who by Marcus Marsden, Managing Partner of TWP, sets out the thinking behind the approach and shows how identity, context and the observer shape leadership, development and results.
Start with who—and everything else follows.