Practices at the heart of what we do

The Challenge

Organizations spend enormous energy assembling the right team — and then largely ignore the initial conditions that will determine whether they will succeed.

Why it Matters

Research from multiple fields shows that initial conditions profoundly shape a system's outcomes. A striking 90% of a team's long-term effectiveness is determined by their initial conditions—60% by conditions created before they start and 30% by how they launch.

In the room

Help teams start strong:

• Create Enabling Conditions: Set initial conditions for the team and sponsor, paying special attention to those that enable the team's self-management and, as such, long-term success.
• Orient the Team: Create orientation experiences that foster mutual value that enhance team performance.
• Establish Safety: Nurture trust and psychological safety from the outset. Ensure the leader's overt belief in the team.
• Design the Physical Environment: Create physical workspaces that nurture a sense of ownership, and encourage reflection and risk-taking.

The Challenge

Cultures that reward speed don't just create the illusion of productivity — they actively starve the conditions that creativity needs to thrive.

Why it Matters

Research shows a counter-intuitive truth: slowing down our minds improves receptivity to novel ideas. Slowing down enables deep understanding, well-timed incubation, and helps teams subtly process information to uncover deeper insights.

In the room

Helping teams slow down to go fast:

• Reflect: Use structured reflection to improve performance and create 'implicit coordination,' helping team members anticipate other's needs.
• Incubate: Find natural opportunities to pause, allowing the team to 'marinate' and discover latent insights.
• Beware of Stuck-ness: Balance slowing down and going fast so teams don't overthink or get trapped in reflection when its value plateaus.
• Accelerate Wisely: Increase the velocity when the team needs to move from abstract thinking to active prototyping and testing. Actively amplify inclusion, as diverse teams solve problems faster.

The Challenge

The invisible dynamics inherent in complex problems often go unexplored and unmanaged, quietly crippling a team's work.

Why it Matters

Understanding hidden and underlying dynamics—in the work, the team, and the surrounding system—is critical for solving complex challenges. These forces can either enable or undermine a team's efforts.

In the room

Helping teams see invisible dynamics:

• Reveal Cultural Forces: Guide teams to explore and share stories about how invisible cultural forces have shaped their behavior and work.
• Challenge Assumptions: Design experiences that delve into the underlying and unspoken assumptions influencing both the challenge and potential solutions.
• Visualize the System: Guide teams to visualize the interconnectedness of the broader system and understand its profound and often unintended consequences.
• Name Dynamics: Explore positive and negative patterns (such as groupthink). Manage energy and conflict as the team explores how to transform negative dynamics into assets.

The Challenge

Diverse teams hold the greatest potential for solving complex problems — and the greatest potential for dysfunction. The difference is whether the conditions have been created for inclusion.

Why it Matters

A team's collective intelligence depends on all voices being heard and included. When team members feel safe to speak up they collaborate more effectively, share information freely, and take ownership of decisions. Creating those conditions require that certain paradoxes are skillfully facilitated.

In the room

Help the team include all voices:

• Create Safety and Challenge: Foster psychological safety and the comfort to challenge the status quo to unlock team members' creativity.
• Change the Geometry: Balance self-expression and collective expression by shifting sub-team sizes sized based on the task.
• Balance Flexibility and Norms:
• Nurture Social Awareness: Guide team members to sense the energy to build social awareness.

The Challenge

Our greatest obstacle to seeing new possibilities isn't ignorance — it's what we're already certain about.

Why it Matters

Overcoming habitual thinking patterns requires psychological safety and curiosity. Research shows that diverse thinking, intentional unlearning, and playfulness create the conditions for teams to explore unfamiliar territory and generate novel solutions.

In the room

Help teams gain insight and explore possibilities:

• Create Safety and Model Curiosity: Create psychological safety and model curiosity and learning behaviors as fundamental enablers for exploration.
• Cross-Pollinate: Help teams explore a range of possibilities by facilitating the intersection of disciplines and ideas.
• Unlearn: Guide the team to unlearn obsolete information or routines to improve their ability to process new information and create novel ideas.
• Play: Create a playful environment to expand creativity and learning through openness and expansive thinking.

The Challenge

When we can't see past our own biases, we lose the ability to truly understand others — and any chance of seeing their challenges clearly.

Why it Matters

Empathy and compassion are core capacities for team problem-solving. They enable better outcomes through enhanced collaboration, deeper understanding, and more innovative solutions.

In the room

Help teams understand and embrace the challenge:

• Love the User: Help teams question their assumptions to cultivate other-oriented empathy, enabling them to understand people's stories, feelings, and needs.
• Love the Challenge: Expand thinking to help teams fall in love with the problem itself and resist the 'Einstellung Effect' which limits ideas due to bias toward prior solutions.
• Love the Team: Build collective intelligence using team perspective-taking to facilitate empathy and understanding for each other's gifts and ideas.
• Move from Empathy to Action: Cultivate empathy to move teams from understanding to supportive action.

The Challenge

Top-down control destroys a team's autonomy and self-determination, crippling the ability to solve complex problems.

Why it Matters

Research shows that self-discovery results in better creative outcomes. Effective learning environments require conditions for experimentation and reinforcement, though self-discovery carries inherent risk as it involves admitting ignorance, doubts, and mistakes.

In the room

Helping teams nurture self-discovery:

• Make Learning Safe: Amplify the team’s learning and performance by creating conditions to test ideas, learn from failures, and iterate toward better solutions.
• Support Experiential Learning:Facilitate cycles of experience, reflection, thinking, and acting to improve team learning flexibility and ability to see problems from different angles.
• Ask Powerful Questions and Step Back: Ask catalytic questions that focus attention on patterns and meaning. Make space for silence and watch your impulse to help.
• Enable Self-Regulation: Foster generative conversations about team strengths and weaknesses to help them self-regulate and overcome challenges together.

The Challenge

Our hunger for certainty is instinctive — but for complex problems, it's the thing most likely to keep us stuck.

Why it Matters

Exploring unfamiliar territory forces our brains to break free from habitual thought patterns, promoting divergent thinking and the ability to generate novel solutions.

In the room

Help teams jump into ambiguity:

• Foster Safety and Courage: Create psychological safety and name people’s aversion to ambiguity. Provide nudges to help teams go into the unknown and explore new possibilities.
• Stay in the Fog: Hold the team in ambiguity longer than is comfortable to avoid premature convergence. Follow unexpected connections, expose teams to unexpected connections, and look wider than the problem demands.
• Channel Conflict: Overcoming our biases can be stressful and result in conflict, so channel conflict to prevent premature alignment through generative dialogue.
• Pay Off the Journey: Harvest learning and insights. Reflect on the challenges and rewards, and how we might become “comfortable being uncomfortable”.

The Challenge

Analytical frameworks and data alone fail to capture the complexity of human experience. Stories and metaphor convey nuance, build understanding, and move people to action.

Why it Matters

Stories convey complex concepts in meaningful and personal ways. Research reveals that stories cause different neural networks to integrate more effectively, helping us understand complex issues and build genuine empathy.

In the room

Help the team bring depth and richness to insight:

• Learn through Stories: Facilitate learning through storytelling to reveal nuances and unexpected insight.
• Connect through Stories: Share stories to create neural coupling between storytellers and listeners, triggering neurotransmitters that build empathy and deep understanding.
• Shift Perspectives: Use stories to reduce cognitive resistance to challenging information and help listeners see problems from new perspectives.
• Explore Metaphors: Use multi-sensory approaches to elicit metaphors that build relationships, reflect on stakeholder needs, and reframe possibilities. Visuals work well here.