Developed by Siraj Sirajuddin over the past 20 years as a no-nonsense approach to individual and group transformation, Temenos is a unique combination of
- story telling about our past, present and future
- rich visualizations supporting those stories and
- the container (gr. Temenos) we operate in as a metaphor for the habits we adapted to a specific context.

Organizations are looking for passionate people. Employees who drive value forward, working with a purpose, engaging for mastery, enjoying autonomy.

With passion and purpose we make an impact.
Our products make a difference.
Our customers achieve something which our products or services make possible or more valuable.

Today's economy requires more than value impact to retain customers. Authentic connection changes the customer we connect with, like art. We help them grow by helping them evolve their potential.

After a Temenos lab our team has a compelling shared vision. We've become a team who know what they want and how to help each other get it.
All the icons and images from our stories are brought together in the big picture of our shared vision.
It creates a thread through all our stories. It anchors our joint future and the purpose of our team in what we know about and cherish in one another.

To achieve a shared vision, everyone creates a personal vision:
Who do I want to be?
What do I want my future to be like?
How do I want to feel?
Who will I be connected to?
Where will I belong?

Stories differentiate us from all other beings. The ability to imagine co-evolved with our increasing brain capacity... We're built to create, share, and memorize stories. They act as "genes" for our far accelerated evolution as a species. Stories ARE human. Humans ARE stories.

Humans imagine possible futures through stories. We shape the one we choose through the actions we take, which we base on our beliefs. Roles emerge complicitly with the systems we play them in. All of this grows the complexity of our identities.

Culture is collective identity. It is what makes us human - complicit dance of intelligences with their extelligence ... It is created and shared through stories. Stories flow through authentic connections.

A Temenos lab starts with sharing our influence maps.
We become who we are through our individual and unique history. What happened to us, what we experienced, what we did... The successes and failures, how we dealt with those or not, shape our identity. We share relevant stories about our past to raise trust and create resonance in the group. This is the basis for authentic connection.

In a Temenos lab, we support our stories with visuals. They help us to reflect and inspect when we draw them, they enhance our story telling to form a story line, and they help the group to memorize. In addition, the group co-creates a graphic vocabulary of rich metaphors which nurtures and amplifies our tribal identity.

Most contexts we operate in lack authentic connections - we see and treat each other as roles, opponents, even objects, rather than human beings. This deprives us of joy, and creates pain.
Well-being, meaning, belonging, and healing, they all require authentic connections.
Temenos is an effective method to create authentic connections in a group.

In the course of our lives, we grow in and through different roles. Each of them belongs to a system: our self, our marriage, our families, teams, companies... We behave differently, act according to different beliefs... Our systems shape our multiple identities.

We are not commonly aware of our systems and our differences in behavior. We become intentional once we identify how we fail a system and how it fails us. How it doesn't meet our expectations and we don't meet its expectations.

We help others understand their pace of movement through life, appreciate how they grow. We highlight the deepest for of connection we feel with the other human being. We select an archetype, a character from a well-known story, the other reminds us of.

We use archetypes for feedback to make it stick, to add another level to the relationship and to easier identify common patterns. The archetype makes the feedback optional, and fun.
Giving archetype feedback we frequently realize we're talking to ourselves...

Siraj created Temenos.
To his left: Michael Sahota, expert on organizational culture.
To his right: Olaf Lewitz, creator of these slides.

Michael Sahota and Olaf Lewitz will host the next open Temenos lab on the weekend right before the Agile conference near Nashville, TN.
Register at http://agile-2013-temenos.eventbrite.ca/