Development rarely begins with certainty.
More often, it begins when familiar patterns no longer fully work, when questions become more present, and when change requires both reflection and action.
For more than two decades, Erich Schimmel has worked with people, teams, and organizations in exactly these kinds of moments — across professional, personal, and performance-oriented environments.
His work combines international leadership experience, systemic coaching, sport psychology, and organizational consulting, always with one central conviction: meaningful development becomes possible when clarity and human understanding come together.
Before founding The Evolving Zone, Erich worked across a wide range of organizational contexts, from local structures to international environments, taking on responsibilities in leadership, finance, project work, transformation, and organizational development.
His professional path led him through different countries, cultures, and systems, where he repeatedly encountered the same underlying dynamic:
people and organizations often face similar developmental questions, even when the context appears very different.
How do we deal with uncertainty?
How do we remain effective during transition?
What allows people to grow without losing orientation?
These questions became a continuous thread throughout his work.
Alongside his management and consulting experience, Erich deepened his work through systemic and psychological coaching.
This added another important perspective:
many challenges that appear external often also contain internal patterns, assumptions, and emotional dynamics that influence how people act, decide, and develop.
Today, his coaching work integrates:
The aim is always practical: helping people understand their situation more clearly and move forward with greater awareness.
Sport has also played an important role throughout Erich's life.
As a young athlete, he experienced how quickly ambitions can be interrupted when a serious back injury at the age of 18 suddenly changed what had seemed possible.
That experience created an early understanding that setbacks are often not only physical, but deeply connected to identity, confidence, and motivation.
Years later, this perspective led him to deepen his expertise through sport psychology training with FC Barcelona's own Barça Innovation Hub and to work with athletes, coaches, and performance environments, including experience connected to Field Hockey Bundesliga.
Sport continues to offer one of the clearest mirrors of human development: pressure, learning, doubt, resilience, and growth often become visible there in very direct ways.
Across coaching conversations, leadership work, sport psychology, and organizational development, one observation became increasingly clear:
development rarely happens in a straight line.
Instead, people and systems often move through recognizable phases — periods of stability, irritation, disruption, uncertainty, reorientation, and renewed confidence.
Over time, these observations evolved into what is now known as the Phase Model developed by Erich Schimmel.
The model helps people understand where they currently stand in a developmental process and what often belongs naturally to that phase.
Its purpose is not theory for its own sake.
It is practical orientation during moments where complexity, doubt, or transition can otherwise feel difficult to interpret.
Today, the Phase Model informs work across all areas of The Evolving Zone.
The Evolving Zone emerged as a place where these different experiences come together.
It brings together:
all connected by the understanding that growth often begins in the space between what is known and what is still emerging.
For broader organizational development, transformation initiatives, and consulting assignments, this work is fully connected under the umbrella of Hesse Consulting Group GmbH.
This creates a bridge between individual development and organizational transformation.
People often carry more clarity, resilience, and developmental capacity than they initially perceive.
Erich strongly believes in the power that already exists within each person — even in moments when access to that strength may feel distant or unclear.
He also believes that each of us holds an important degree of decision-making power over our own life: not always over circumstances, but over how we respond, how we learn, and how we shape what comes next.
Sometimes what is needed is the right perspective, the right conversation, and enough trust to move through the next phase consciously.
That is where the work begins.