About
I have spent eighteen years in the room where it goes quiet
Before the advisory work and the course, I ran operations inside three companies that were very good at strategy and very bad at saying things out loud. I am not a communications coach. I am someone who kept watching good decisions die in the gap between what people thought and what they said.
- Based in
- Brooklyn
- Working since
- 2008
- Cohorts run
- Nine
The long version
How I ended up doing this
I was thirty-one and running operations for a company that had just raised a great deal of money. We had a strategy offsite in a hotel outside the city. Two days, forty people, an outcome everybody applauded. Six weeks later almost nothing had happened, and when I asked people why, every single one of them told me a version of the same thing: they had known it would not work while they were in the room.
Nobody had lied. Nobody had been cowardly, exactly. They had all made a small, reasonable calculation — that raising the objection would cost more than staying quiet — and forty small reasonable calculations had produced a very expensive silence.
I spent the next decade trying to find the mechanism. Not the culture, not the values poster, the actual mechanism: what has to be true in the first five minutes of a conversation for the true thing to get said. It turned out to be smaller and more teachable than I expected, and almost nobody is taught it.
So now I teach it. In an eight-week cohort, on stages, and one-to-one with a small number of people each year who are carrying something specific and hard. That is the whole business. There is no book yet, and I am in no hurry.
Forty small reasonable calculations produced a very expensive silence.
The route here
Not a straight line.
- 2008
Operations, then more operations
Three companies in eight years, all in the middle of scaling faster than their decision-making could carry.
- 2016
The first workshop
Run as a favour for a friend's leadership team, in a room with no windows. It was three hours long and about half of it worked.
- 2019
Advisory, one at a time
Standing 1:1 work with executives. The material got sharper because the stakes were somebody's actual Thursday.
- 2022
Cohort One
Twenty-two people, eight weeks, a shared vocabulary that outlived the course. That was the thing worth building.
- Now
Nine cohorts, forty stages a year
And a letter every other Thursday, which is where most of the thinking gets tested first.
What changed
The sentence people repeat back to me.
I had been circling the same conversation with my co-founder for eleven months. We had it on a Thursday. It took forty minutes and it was not even that hard — I had just never separated what I saw from what I had decided it meant.
Cohort SevenAdaeze Nwosu
Co-founder, a Series B fintech
Our leadership team now has a shared phrase for the thing we used to avoid naming. That sounds small. It has changed how long our decisions survive contact with the rest of the company.
Team programmeMarcus Feld
Chief Operating Officer, healthcare
She did the closing session at our offsite and I watched two hundred people stop performing agreement. I have never seen a room turn like that in ninety minutes.
KeynotePriya Raman
VP People, global logistics
The part I did not expect: it made me kinder. Being clear turns out to be the considerate option. Being vague was the thing that was costing people their time.
Advisory, 1:1Tom Beaufort
Managing Partner, design consultancy
Where to start
The conversation you are avoiding is already costing you.
You do not have to book anything to begin. Read one letter, take the fit finder, or write to me and say what is actually going on.