We design, host, support, and scale highly impactful and practical “Transformative Circles” for groups of leaders and their teams. Leadership and teamwork circles cultivate the trust, empowerment, and self-organization needed for accelerated and sustained collaboration, innovation, and transformation at the speed of VUCA.
“An outstanding framework and powerful tools. A huge impact!”
President, Kelloggs
Key Benefits Of Transformative Circles
In Leadership Development & Team Effectiveness
Transformative Circles are designed to rapidly and sustainably boost psychological safety, empathy and trust, mutual aid and authentic belonging, interdependency, resilience and wellbeing, collective agility and adaptability, self-organization and empowerment, relational reciprocity and reliability, and sustained collaboration and co-creation.
Transformative Circles are a powerful and profound innovation in leadership development, team building, and culture change. They empower individuals to contribute fully to the organization and embed reflection, collective sense-making, emergent execution, and relational reciprocity in their team and company culture.
Transformative Circles can transform organizations of all kinds by boosting agency, agility, and inclusivity, building a profound and generative sense of safety and fellowship, and spreading self-organization and distributed leadership without chaos.
Transformative Circles can protect against market disruption and displacement by harnessing the full creativity and capabilities of employees. They can subtly but decisively transform organizations and cultures for good without losing the management efficiencies of hierarchy.
Build Individual Resilience & Wellbeing Through Reciprocity & Belonging
Transformative Circles, when initiated wisely, unlock outsized resilience and well-being at work by ensuring individuals experience actual belonging, strengthen interpersonal connections, appreciate the lived experience of interdependence, and enjoy the transformational potential of relational receptivity, reciprocity, and responsivity.
Unleash Peer-To-Peer Empowerment, Self-Management & Self-Organization (Without Chaos)
Transformative Circles, when enabled smartly, provide safe yet structured spaces for leaders and team members to share personal challenges in a spirit of mutual vulnerability, respectfully coach each other with a growth mindset, explore potential solutions from each other, and identify opportunities for mutual aid and support.
Generate Radical Trust & Safety For Innovation & Transformation
Transformative Circles, when designed and facilitated correctly, accelerate groups towards the trust needed to navigate the tensions and stresses inherent in all genuine transformation and innovation—by presencing actionable psychological safety, ensuring everyone feels seen, heard, and valued, demonstrating inclusivity, and enabling nervous systems to reset and rewire together as people truly listen to each other.
Forge Cognitive Coherence & Emotional Resonance For Strategic Alignment & Synchronistic Action
Transformative Circles, when held well, create the ideal conditions for leaders and team members to make sense of complexity together, find coherence in their sense-making and decision-making even in rising uncertainty and complexity, and ensure that emotional inner landscapes come into resonance so hearts and minds are woven together.
Build Energized Teams That Can Deliver Breakthrough Innovations & Business Transformations
Transformative Circles, when led effectively, provide safe yet brave spaces for leaders and their employees to challenge groupthink, question assumptions, propose future-forward insights, imagine better futures, and navigate the many tensions and troubles of authentic business transformation as a collective.
Build Relational Intelligence For Co-Creation & Collaboration That Delivers Unprecedented Outcomes
Transformative Circles, when sustained over time, build collaborative cultures where conflicts and tensions are surfaced and solved elegantly, blockages are broken through collectively, and ambiguities and uncertainties are resolved with all involved, unlocking concrete collaboration and co-creations that can deliver truly breakthrough innovations.
“We left like we’d just been called to serve in the army: motivated, inspired, provoked, and challenged.”
Team Leader, Rand Merchant Bank
Our Comprehensive, Brain-Based Teamwork Intervention Armoury
We have a huge range of powerful interventions that we use to shift specific problematic dynamics across three core areas of teamwork: behaviors, mindsets, and emotions/culture.
Our design experts and teamwork facilitators can draw on these and more to move your team towards lasting, positive change—and so reduce, resolve, or remove conflict, historical issues from toxic management, tensions, miscommunication, misalignment, personality differences, cultural dynamics, complaints, complacency, accountability issues, and more.
Habit & Behavioral Interventions
Team Signature Behaviors/Iconic Acts
Team Spirit Challenges
Behavior Modelling
Habit Building Checklists
Incentive Redesign
Self-Organization/Holarchy
Process Friction Reduction
Individual Micro-Habits
Collaborative Innovation/Purpose Projects
Positive Deviant Support
Disruptive Innovation Fund
Reciprocity Loops
Empowered Delegation Practices
Nudge Architecture
Informa Network Mapping & Activation
Mindset & Cognitive Interventions
Reverse Mentoring
Story Editing
Story Sharing
Double Loop & Triple Loop Learning
Mindset Reprogramming
Self-Mastery & Self-Coaching Tools
Reflection Practice (E.g. Journalling)
Conscious Leadership Toolkit
ResponseAbility Practices
Accountability Practices
Empowerment Practices
Boundary Management Practices
Heuristic/Principles Design
Founder's Mindset
Systems Mapping
Appreciate Inquiry
Emotional & Cultural Interventions
Fail-Forward Repatterning
Failure Celebration
Belonging Design
Sharing Impact Stories
Anchoring
Visioning
Mindfulness
Somatic Practices
Psychological Safety Practices
Dialoguing
Mirroring
Team Common Purpose
Individual > Business Purpose
Task Meaning-Making
Culture Champions
Empathy Mapping
Our Unique Processes, Tools & Toolkits That Work Across All Three Facets Of Teamwork
The Peer-To-Peer Leadership Coaching Toolkit
Transformative Leadership & Learning Circles
The Transforming Communication Toolkit™
Transformational Leadership Starter Kit™
The Resilience Mastery Toolkit™
The Smart Experimentation™ Toolkit
The Conscious Leadership Process™
Harness Our Transformative Circles Pack To Empower All Leaders & People Managers To Lead & Host Team Circles
Transformative Circles are much harder to set up and sustain than might be thought, as they require a wholesale transformation of well-established habits, mindsets, and customs around meeting, discussion, workshop, and training protocols.
We have developed a pack that provides some structure and function support to host and lead Transformative Circles. To ensure each leader and people manager is empowered, we provide every participant in our Transformative Circles programs with their own kit so they can lead and host their own circle and/or start new ones with other teams (that they manage or are part of).
“Transformed how we relate to each other in the senior leadership team, resolving some long-standing tensions, and revealing things about each other we never knew. There is so much more trust in our team now.”
People Manager, Syngenta
The 12 Steps For Unlocking Transformative Team, Leadership & Culture Circles
Having run circles for 25+ years, we have developed a theory and toolset for ensuring circles fulfill their transformative potential in conventional hierarchical organizations, as well as community groups, networks, and other emerging forms of organization.
We have crafted a 12-step framework that we introduce to leaders and team members progressively—in an appropriate way to their level of interest, care, and capability.
Unlock The Full Power Of Transformative Circles For Lasting, Tangible Culture Change
Transformative Circles rewire company cultures to be more participatory, inclusive, respectful, and self-organized.
Transformative Circles are a potentially game-changing antidote to outdated “command and control” hierarchies that disengage employees and disrupt authentic teamwork—without risking a descent into lawlessness.
We have found Transformative Circles to be the safest and least chaotic way of recovering from decades of hierarchy, Command and Control management, and unsafe cultures that breed disempowerment, disengagement, complaints, and “learned helplessness.”
We help organizations fully integrate and embed Transformative Circles into everyday ways of working in order to create the ideal conditions for teams to accelerate breakthrough innovations at velocity, quickly adapt to VUCA realities with agile execution, and embody concrete culture change.
“A pronounced and profound impact. Exceptional.”
CEO, HSBC
Tools & Toolkits That We Harness To
Maximise The Power of Transformative Circles
We have developed other highly impactful programs and toolkits to accelerate team effectiveness, transformative teamwork, and culture change.
All our interventions are based on one unifying and coherent model of change and work synergistically to deliver more exponential impact with each additional activity.
Become A Transformational Organization
Our vision for organizational design that balances agility with stability and purpose with profit is in our book Become A Transformational Organization: Galvanize Agility without Losing Stability to Survive and Thrive in the Digital, Disrupted, and Damaged World.
Contact us if you want a copy before working with you to build one!
Connect With Us
If what you have read and seen is of interest, don't hesitate to contact us.
We can have a value-creating conversation about how we can support you.