Transformational Leadership Development Program
Briefing Tool
About This Briefing Form
This form has been designed to help us all solve for the unprecedented challenge of how to develop truly transformational leaders through not just informing and educating them but actually transforming them (and your organizational culture) through a leadership development program.
If you seek a high-performing “transformational teamwork” intervention or a breakthrough innovation program, please get in touch with us for a different briefing form.
We have developed this form to give us all the best chance of possible success. We update it regularly as we discover ways we can make program scoping, alignment, design, and delivery smoother, more efficient, and more effective. Please share your responses in a spirit of total confidentiality, mutual reciprocity, and shared trust.
“Deep Design” Of Leadership Programs
We invest a lot of time, energy, and care into what we call the “deep design” of our leadership programs.
We fully customize programs to your actual organizational context, culture, and structure, selecting what we think will work best from our vast array of ground-breaking interventions (from transformative experiences to peer-powered toolkits) and cutting-edge content, tools and practices from Self-To-System™ curriculum. We aim for a harmonic blend of efficiency and effectiveness.
We design our programs to help deliver critical strategic ambitions by including concrete innovation, transformational teamwork, and organization transformation tools and processes.
We work to design the overall journey of weeks and months—and the discrete journey of each session, whether one hour or three days—with a ‘meshwork’ of content, practices, tools, experiences, and formats designed to cultivate the ideal conditions for genuine transformation across hours, days, months, and years drawing our nuanced understanding of individual and group transformation dynamics.
Aligning Ambitions & Constraints
As leadership programs require a delicate balance between delivering on the often competing needs of different stakeholders (e.g., HR/L&D, senior leaders, participants, business units, P&L holders, dotted-line line managers, functions, etc.), alignment is not always as complete and clear as assumed at the briefing or RFP stage.
Because there are always so many organizational/people/budget/time constraints—yet limitless program permutations and possibilities—we can only design effectively if clients are clear about their real ambitions, surface hidden assumptions, and be honest about what they (and their leaders) want and are prepared to do to have it.
For example, many organizations say they want leaders to step up, be creative and innovative, be caring and empathic, and inspire and energize their people… but they are less keen on the uncertainties, necessary investments, time scales, and cultural shifts that such leadership development requires. This lack of alignment can lead programs to fail.
Saving Time, Tension & Money
20+ years of experience have taught us that it is much more cost-effective to engage in conversations about genuine priorities and needs now—even if difficult—rather than midway through a program; or, even worse after a program is complete and did not deliver what some expected (but were not clear about).
To get the best ROI on your investment in your leaders, we invite you to use this briefing tool to align various stakeholders early. A small investment now will pay back dividends in terms of long-term outcomes and concrete results. A few hours spent engaging fully in this briefing tool today can save hundreds of hours of lost time and budget in a year.
The more clear and aligned you are on your priorities and needs, the more you will reduce friction, frustration, misuse of participant energy and excitement, wastage of time and effort, lost opportunities for awesomeness, and unnecessary costs.
The more clarity and alignment there is at the start, the less advisory, design, and project management time you will need from us—which is a win-win-win.
Build Leadership Development Learning
We also have been told by clients who have completed it that it has helped them learn about what is possible in cutting-edge leadership development, discover biases and misalignments they did not realize were there, and awakened more awareness and excitement about leadership and learning.
You will receive a copy of your responses, which you can use in your organization. We just ask that, if you don’t work with us further, you don’t share it with other ‘vendors’ as there is a lot of thinking and insight within it.
Co-Briefing & Co-Design
If you are finding it too difficult to find either the time, energy, or alignment to fill it out, we have found that doing it with us—in a virtual or in-person co-design workshop—can bring stakeholders into coherence rapidly, allow us to explain design options and choices easily, and unlock an energizing and galvanizing ‘North Star’ for the program that we can all come back to as we progress.
Most of all, please remember this: it is impossible to have truly transformational outcomes with traditional ‘training’ approaches and costs.