About CaMiNa
The Name
CaMiNa comes from the Spanish caminar—“to walk.” It evokes a direct passage: walking in a straight line across the fence toward Point B, rather than circling endlessly through trial and error.
Most leaders advance through long arcs of repetition and reaction—learning by accident over years or decades. The CaMiNa process accelerates that journey by making its structure visible. When the map becomes clear, the path straightens. Leaders move with intention, alignment, and grace—walking, at last, with purpose and presence.
The Founder
Michel brings an unusual combination of intellectual depth and practical grounding to leadership development. His academic background in medieval literature—where he studied how stories carry ideas across cultures and centuries—informs his conviction that frameworks shape perception, and that the right map can transform how a leader sees.
His formation as a contemplative practitioner at Georgetown University’s John Main Center grounds his work in presence, not merely performance. And his immersion in the tradition of adaptive leadership—where the work of change is understood as the work of identity—shapes every engagement.
The Leadership Arc framework emerged from this intersection: literary attention to pattern and narrative, contemplative discipline, and the practical demands of working with leaders under real pressure. It is not a borrowed model repackaged. It is an original architecture, tested in practice, grounded in research, and refined across hundreds of hours of coaching and consultation.
“I discovered I was him,” Michel writes in The Terrain of Transformation—describing the moment he recognized his own loops in the patterns he was studying. That honesty—the willingness to have done the crossing before guiding others through it—is the foundation of CaMiNa’s work.
Philosophy
CaMiNa holds three convictions about leadership development:
Sight before strategy.
Most development programs add tools to an unchanged operating system. CaMiNa begins by making the operating system visible. When leaders can see the pattern that runs them, the pattern begins to loosen—and new possibilities emerge without force.
Formation over information.
Knowing about leadership and being able to lead under pressure are different capacities. CaMiNa’s work is formative, not informational. We do not teach concepts; we train perception, expand range, and develop the practiced capacity to choose differently in the moments that matter.
The crossing is the work.
The Fence between Point A and Point B cannot be dismantled with technique. It requires a willingness to release strategies that once worked, to tolerate uncertainty longer than feels comfortable, and to trust a different quality of movement. CaMiNa provides the map, the mirror, and the company for that crossing.