Three programmes, three situations.

Signature programme

Accountable for results you cannot stand next to

Leading Distributed Work · 2 days · 6–12 participants

Who it is for

Managers and team leads answerable for outcomes produced somewhere else — another site, another time zone, a vendor, a project team they see twice a month, or a workflow where AI now drafts, summarises and routes the work in between.

Typical sponsors: Operations Directors, Engineering Directors, Programme Managers, HR and L&D on their behalf.

You will recognise the situation

Commitments that sounded firm in the meeting have gone soft by the time they reach the other location. Approvals pile up with you, because nobody else is quite sure what they are allowed to decide. Escalations find their way around the person who is supposed to own the account, and this has been going on long enough that nobody mentions it any more. The status updates read well — better than they used to, now that machines help write them — and you notice you trust them less, not more.

What happens in the room

We work on your cases, not case studies. Each participant brings one chain of delegated work they actually run. We map where authority actually sits, as opposed to where the organisation chart says it sits, and sort every recurring decision into one of three classes: decide it yourself, propose it, or refer it. Then we rebuild how commitments are made, confirmed and handed over, so that what gets agreed at a distance stays agreed. Every escalation path gets a trigger, a destination and a response time. And we draw the machine line explicitly: which updates and handovers can safely pass through AI, and which ones need to stay a conversation between two people.

What you leave with

A written authority and escalation map for one of your own workflows — yours, not a template. A set of decision rules your team can be told on Monday morning. A handover specification you can reuse. And a shared vocabulary, which for a distributed team turns out to be half the battle.

The thinking behind this programme is developed in When Decisions Leave Their Origin and the other essays.

When the same handover keeps coming back

Decisions and Communication Across Boundaries · 1 day · 6–12 participants

Who it is for

Teams whose work constantly crosses lines — between departments, companies, languages, or into AI systems — and keeps returning for clarification.

Typical sponsors: department heads on both sides of a recurring handover, project and process owners, L&D when several teams show the same pattern.

You will recognise the situation

The same handover comes back with the same questions every time, and everyone has quietly built the extra round-trip into their planning. Two teams leave one meeting and execute the decision differently, each convinced they heard it right. A summary, a forward, a translation or a model's rewrite arrives looking complete, yet something essential has gone missing on the way — the delivery date is still there, while the reason that date was chosen, which is the one thing the receiver actually needed, is not. Nobody can point to the moment where the meaning changed hands.

What happens in the room

We take the team's own transfers — a real handover, a real summary chain, a real specification — and trace what made it across and what quietly fell away. Together we identify the load-bearing context that keeps disappearing from your handovers, and then we redesign those transfers so the receiver can act without phoning back — whether the receiver is a colleague, a vendor, or a model. The distinction matters, because the colleague might have called to ask. The model never will.

What you leave with

Your most troublesome handover, rebuilt — with the old and new versions side by side. A checklist for load-bearing context calibrated to your work rather than copied from a book. And an explicit team rule about which transfers should never pass through a machine at all.

The thinking behind this programme is developed in the essays.

The deadline that meant two different things

Working Across Cultures · 1 day · 6–12 participants

Who it is for

International teams whose members understand each other perfectly — and still misfire on deadlines, disagreement and decisions.

Typical sponsors: leaders of newly merged or newly international teams, HR and L&D after a visible incident, programme managers running mixed-nationality projects.

You will recognise the situation

Everyone on the team understands the words, and the project derails anyway. One side treats the deadline as fixed while the other treats it as an opening bid. Silence in a meeting gets read as agreement by half the room and as dissent by the other half. Feedback is delivered so carefully that it never lands, or so directly that the working relationship needs six months to recover. AI has added a layer of its own: everyone's messages now sound equally confident and equally polished, while the assumptions underneath them have never been further apart.

What happens in the room

We work from the team's own misfires — actual incidents, reconstructed together, because a team learns far more from its own collisions than from anyone's cultural framework. The team calibrates its real operating norms: what a deadline commits you to here, what counts as a yes, how disagreement gets voiced and to whom, how a decision is made and how you know it has been made. Most members discover that what they assumed was universal was local all along. By the end of the day, assumption has been replaced by agreement.

What you leave with

A one-page team charter in the team's own words — what our deadlines mean, how we disagree, how we decide — written by the team on the day and owned by nobody else.

When the programme finds a structural problem

Sometimes a room discovers that the issue is not skill but setup: the workflow itself routes decisions to the wrong place, and no amount of shared vocabulary will fix a broken escalation path. For those cases there is the workflow intervention — one workflow, rebuilt so that authority, review depth, handovers and escalation are explicit and written down.