A three-day leadership programme built around a video camera. It was designed for the leaders of new agile teams. It reached more than two thousand people.
Ground rules for working together, drawn from Chris Argyris and Roger Schwarz. Share all relevant information. Test assumptions instead of acting on them. Explain your reasoning. Combine advocating your own view with asking about other people's.
Almost everyone agrees with those rules. Almost nobody notices when they break them. Argyris called it the gap between espoused theory and theory-in-use: how we believe we act, and how we actually act under pressure.
People are largely unaware of that gap. Tell them about it in a report and they defend against it. A slide deck on good collaboration would have been agreed with, and changed nothing.
Teams work a deliberately stressful case study for forty-five minutes while a camera records. Within ten minutes, voices are raised.
Playback stops at the moments where a ground rule could have changed the conversation. A business analyst watches herself interrupt the same colleague four times. There is nobody to argue with.
Observations go on flipcharts on opposite walls: patterns of control on one side, patterns of learning together on the other. Only then do we link them to the models. The walls become the contract for the rest of the programme.
People try something different and watch what happens. The analyst holds back and asks a question instead.
Participant, observer, co-facilitator, lead with a senior facilitator seconding, then sign-off. A skill grown step by step, not a train-the-trainer afternoon.
Nobody was sent. Participants told their teams what they had seen on the tape, a waiting list formed, and the programme became part of the division's identity: built by IT, for IT. The learning didn't stay at work either. One senior developer went home and asked his wife whether he behaved like that at home too. She told him she had been saying so for twenty-five years.
We planned it for team leads. We ended up working with everyone in IT, because they kept volunteering. The biggest effects were the ones nobody planned.
Outside facilitators cost money every time and leave when the contract ends. In-house facilitators cost time up front, and then they multiply. They also send a message no outside consultant can: this is something we do for ourselves.
Facing a request like this one? Tell me what you're being asked to build.
Start a conversation