Last year during summer I participated in the altMBA.

It is an intense 4 weeks online training about leadership, decision-making and the act of making change happen.

While making change happen might seem as if being constantly in action, it’s not the case. The major part of our learning time served thinking, discussing and reflecting.

To make change happen, the change needs to be imagined, to be designed, to be organized. None of this happens without thinking.

An individual easily remains stuck with one scheme of thought. It’s discussing with an engaged cohort which helps to disrupt this scheme. We had leaning group willing to ask the wrong questions. Questions making us curious and allowing us to see a new perspective. Questions allowing us to stop and adapt our decision as we learned to see what others could see.

Being in the action of designing and discussing doesn’t allow us to see the global picture. It’s a situation in which we don’t make a step back to see what’s actually happening. It’s reflecting that allows seeing what actually happened while we made it happen, while we thought and discussed the change.

Delivering our reflection script was the step impressing me most during altMBA.

Stepping back again, reflecting on it as I can see it now: it’s the wise mix of thinking, discussing and reflecting that was most helpful as it happened within a clear structure. The process is oriented towards shipping and showing up with one’s work. Willingness to do the thinking, discussing and reflection tasks in this process allowed to do one’s best work.

The altMBA secret sauce is something else: it’s removing the space available for doubt while providing helpful support for any question we had. It’s providing participants the responsibility to help each other in case of doubt and nudging each other to deliver knowing that we can.

It’s all the difference between shipping oriented thinking and resistance oriented thinking.