We do not begin with a preferred solution. We begin with the situation.
Every engagement moves through the same five movements, at whatever pace the situation permits. The duration changes. The vehicle changes. The sequence does not.
Stabilise — See — Test — Decide — Embed.
Reduce the noise, the reactivity and the sheer velocity to the point where thinking becomes possible again. Nothing useful happens in a room that cannot stop moving.
Establish what is actually happening — including the part the team has not been able to say to itself. This is the step most often skipped, and skipping it is why the rest fails.
Subject the prevailing account of the situation to genuine challenge, before it hardens into a decision. Dissent is engineered deliberately, because it will not arrive on its own.
Reach a decision the team can own collectively and defend individually. A decision nobody will defend on Monday was not a decision.
Make the improved way of deciding survive our departure. If the gain leaves when we leave, we have sold you a dependency, not a capability.
Four things, stated plainly.
We begin with the situation. The engagement is fitted afterwards, and sometimes the honest answer is that no engagement is warranted.
Behavioural coaching teaches an executive to perform differently. It does not change what happens to their judgement at the moment the pressure arrives. We work on what generates the behaviour.
Twenty-seven years in leadership and organisational development, including Country HR Director and HR Leader CEE roles in multinational organisations. We have sat in the room, not observed it from the corridor.
Established research on executive derailment, decision-making under pressure and team functioning, together with our own ongoing research. The evidence supports the method; it is not the sales argument.
A practice is defined as much by the work it declines as by the work it takes.
We decline engagements in the following circumstances, and we say so at the first conversation rather than the third:
Confidentiality in individual work is absolute. The sponsor receives our assessment of the situation. The sponsor does not receive the contents of the room.
If something is happening in your organisation where the quality of executive judgement will decide the outcome, the useful first step is a private conversation about the situation itself. If we are not the right people for it, we will say so.
