Workshops
A shared way of solving problems.
Half a day that gives a whole company one problem solving routine, teaches its managers to coach with it, and stays with you weekly for the month afterwards. Built in your language, with your sponsors, before we arrive.
Book a discovery conversation- FormatFour hours on site, including two breaks. Delivered by both partners.
- Suitable forA whole company or division of up to about sixty, with a manager cohort of ten to twenty.
- Best usedAt an offsite or annual gathering, immediately before a working session on real problems.
- IncludedDesign work with your sponsors beforehand, all materials, and weekly follow through for the first month.
- Starting atUSD $24,000Travel and accommodation at cost, itemized. The number is set before we talk to you, not during.
The problem this is for
Efficient today, less capable tomorrow.
A problem appears. An experienced manager solves it, quickly and well. A month later the same problem appears again.
Excellent organizations attend to two things at once: how well they solve the problem in front of them today, and how much more capable they are a year from now. The second is built through the first, in the way today's problems get handled. So when an issue reaches a leader, there are really two problems to work on. Resolve the thing, and understand why the person closest to it needed to escalate at all. What was missing may be capability. It is just as often permission.
It is worth being precise about which problems keep coming back. Capable people in a fast moving business become very good at solving technical problems, and those problems do get solved. What looks like a recurring technical problem is usually being held in place by an adaptive one, which is to say a human one. It is almost always easier to keep fixing the dents in the car, the technical issue, than to have the conversation about whether grandma should still be driving, the adaptive issue.
If the practiced response to a consequential decision is to call the manager, a capable person will call the manager, even when they understand the situation better than the manager does. And a manager who can already see the answer really does resolve it faster by taking it. Both make sense on the day. Repeated often enough, they teach one person to escalate and the other to take over. The manager stays in the weeds and the team stays dependent on the manager.
What gets practiced
Two habits, honed until they hold under pressure.
Habits are what people fall back on when uncertainty is high and the stakes are real. Two of them are worth building deliberately.
First principles thinking begins by getting clear on what you are actually trying to achieve. It breaks the problem into its most fundamental components, asks what perfect would look like at that foundational level, and builds back up from there, rather than accepting the assumptions and constraints already built into the current system.
Scientific thinking is how you proceed when you still do not know the answer, which is the normal condition of anything worth doing. Predict what you expect to happen, run a test that is safe to be wrong about, compare what actually happened against what you expected, and adjust.
The shift the session works toward is from managers as the primary problem solvers to managers who develop problem solvers. The people closest to the work solve the technical problems, managers develop the people who solve them, and executives develop the managers who do that and protect the conditions that let people learn in front of each other. The analogy is a coaching staff. Players are coached by assistant coaches, and the head coach makes sure the assistants are developing people and that the team is working as one system.
The shape of the day
Everyone meets a problem before they meet the method.
Activities, language, digital format and timing are refined with your organizers, so the session fits how you already work and connects to the rest of your event.
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45 minEveryone
Establish a shared foundation. Everyone takes on a short hands on challenge together, in groups drawn across teams, before they have met any of the method. A keynote then takes up what has just happened in the room: why the fastest answer today can leave an organization less capable tomorrow. The block closes by introducing the shared structure the whole group will use later.
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15 min
Break, and the room resets.
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1 hr 30Managers
Learn to use it, and to coach it. Managers look back at what everyone has just done, then learn to use the routine and to coach with it. Most of the block is practice from both sides: reasoning through a problem, and helping someone else reason through theirs.
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10 min
Break.
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1 hr 20Managers
Put it together. Teams practice the whole structure on a simulation, light hearted and low stakes, rotating through owning the problem, coaching a colleague, and coaching the coach. A guided debrief hands them into your own session afterwards.
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Yours
Your own problem solving session. The first live application of the shared structure by the whole group. The managers have practiced it, and their teams have already been introduced to it.
The order is the argument. Everyone meets a problem before they meet the method, so the debrief can examine what people actually did rather than what they were told to do. Everyone then meets the shared structure as a learner, which is what makes it safe for a manager to be seen practicing it. Your own session brings both roles back together on real work. One shared language, practiced from both sides, gives people something to point at together rather than at each other.
What you leave with
A routine, and the leadership behaviour that protects it.
One shared routine, in your own language
The routine creates a deliberate pause between noticing a problem and proposing an answer. A team gets clear on what it is trying to achieve and on what is actually happening, using evidence rather than recollection. It names the gap between the two, separates what it knows from what it is assuming, and says plainly what it does not yet know. Only once it is satisfied that it is working on the right problem does it design a small test that would produce useful learning.
The exact wording will be yours, developed with you. People internalize a routine faster when everyone uses the same language and recognizes the same pattern, because their attention can then stay on the problem instead of on decoding each other.
The sign that it is working is that people gradually stop needing it. The script is scaffolding, not paperwork.
Leadership behaviours that protect the learning
A leader can reinforce or undo an improvement effort in a single interaction. Authority magnifies words, so a question can be heard as a decision and a concern can become an unintended veto.
Managers and senior leaders practice understanding someone's reasoning before intervening, contributing a concern without supplying the answer, and leaving ownership with the people doing the work. In the follow up sessions we return to the situations that most often interrupt learning by accident, and work through how to respond without taking the problem back.
Experiments
Safe to run, and worth running.
The objection that ends most of these efforts is fear of error, and it is a reasonable one. People are being asked to try things in a system where being wrong has consequences.
The aim is to limit the consequences of being wrong without limiting the learning. That is a design question, answered case by case with the people who carry the risk: what is the smallest version of this that would still tell us something, what would we watch while it ran, and what would make us stop. A proposal meets a worry, the worry produces a safeguard, and the proposal goes round again. The problem never changes hands.
A small, safe experiment run on the wrong question is still the wrong question, just cheaper. Which is why the routine spends most of its effort before the experiment, on whether the problem is the right one.
Around the day
Most of the work is not on the day.
Beforehand
We build the structure with you, in your language and in a format that fits how you already work, including how you work remotely. The routine is adapted from Toyota Kata and related experimental problem solving methods, translated into plain language and tailored with your sponsors. What we would not change is the discipline underneath: understand before deciding, make the assumptions visible, test rather than argue, study what actually happened, and go again.
That takes a few conversations with your sponsors, who also design their own role as the coaches' coaches, and a conversation or two with managers who will be in the room, so the examples come from your work rather than ours. It also takes one real problem, chosen in advance, that a team is willing to work on in front of colleagues.
Afterwards
Follow through is part of the engagement rather than an add on, and it happens weekly rather than occasionally. Four weekly sessions with the manager cohort through the first month: what did you try, what happened, what surprised you. We sit in on real problem solving sessions and coach the managers on how they coach, which turns a coach's difficulty into the next thing worked on rather than something endured privately.
One session with senior leadership on the obstacles only they can change, such as decision rights, policies, priorities and safeguards. Then a sponsor review at around sixty days, on what is being used consistently and what to preserve or adjust as you carry it on without us.
If it is still us doing the bulk of your problem solving a year from now, we will have got this wrong. The measure is that you are running it yourselves.
What it costs
The number is decided before we speak to you.
Starting at USD $24,000
Half a day with both of us facilitating, the design work with your sponsors beforehand, a structure built in your language, all materials, and the weekly sessions through the month afterwards. Travel and accommodation for both of us at cost, itemized, agreed in advance.
We publish it because a price invented on a call is not transparency. Ours is set beforehand, and it has to be defensible from both sides: not a bargain, and not extraction. If the shape has to change once we have spoken to your sponsors, we would redesign the session around what you need rather than cut pieces out of this one, and the number would move with it, agreed with you before anything changed.
A good deal of what you are paying for happens before the day, in the conversations that turn a shared routine into your shared routine.
Curious how this would work on your team?
Book a discovery conversation. We will ask what you are trying to achieve and what is getting in the way, which is also how every engagement starts. Practical conversation, no sales pitch.