Context
Teams
“When the team doesn't work as a team”
“When meetings replace conversation”
Most teams are not yet a team. They are a group of competent people coordinating tasks, and rarely stopping to talk about the way they work. The symptoms are familiar: meetings that fill the calendar and decide little, silences everyone notices and no one names, things that are only said in the corridor.
A team's most decisive raw material is the way it converses. Four kinds of conversation circulate in an organisation: action, possibility, relationship, and metaconversation, the conversation about how you converse. Almost every team practises mainly the first. Our work is to give them back the other three.
A team is a group of people who have agreed on how to reach agreement when they do not agree.
Level 1
Provoke
An offsite or working session designed from individual listening conversations with each person, because listening happens in conversation, not in a questionnaire. It puts on the table what the team already knows and has not yet said: what got us here, what is holding us back, what agreements we want to make.
Accenture, 2026
Two days out of the office with the senior team of an account of hundreds of people, stuck in permanent firefighting mode. Day one: what made us successful, what is holding us back, and a team contract. Day two: the future. They left with priorities, and with conversations that had not happened in years.
Level 2
Develop
Support over several months, what we call a Team Learning Journey. A conversation with the leader, facilitated sessions with the team, work between sessions. In practice: naming the unsaid (the "kitchen conversations"), revisiting the team's rules and principles, practising metaconversation. Facilitation, not therapy. And the goal, paradoxically, is to make ourselves dispensable.
Galp, Auditoria Interna, 2017
Two days of strategic and cultural design with the Internal Audit team, followed by team coaching. The measure of success was unusual: the team ended the engagement earlier than planned, because it already felt autonomous.
Level 3
Transform
When the team that needs to change is the one running the organisation. Long-term support for executive committees and leadership teams, including work within their real meetings, because that is where the team's culture shows. The whole system is in the room: the leader, the team, and the way they talk to each other.
AbbVie, parceria plurianual
A years-long partnership with the leadership team: themed conversations, work on purpose, culture and strategy, and programmes co-designed by the leaders themselves, year after year.