What we are for
An expansive world where organisations and the people in them grow to the size they actually are, not the size they settled for.
Organisations rarely underperform for lack of ability. They underperform because of limits that were inherited, never reviewed and never written down, and that everyone has learned to work around.
Those limits are the most expensive thing in any organisation, and they appear on no budget line.
We call one a box. A box is a rule being treated as a fact.
- Talent, fully used
- Every person contributing at the level they are capable of, not the level they have been assigned to.
- Collaboration without a ceiling
- Teams where the difficult issue is raised in the meeting rather than afterwards, and the best idea wins regardless of where it came from.
- Human expansion
- People and organisations growing beyond the point they had settled for, using potential they already own and are not realising.
Boxes stand in the way of all three.
How we work with organisationsA box decides who is ready before they have been tested, so talent goes unused. It decides what can be said and by whom, so the difficult issue stays out of the meeting. And it sets the size an organisation is allowed to think, so it settles for less than it could do. None of this is written down, which is why it survives. Our work makes it visible, and then gets people to act against it.
The idea
“The box is what's in your way. Not who you are.”
A box is a limit you're treating as a fact.
What this is not
Thinking outside the box leaves the box exactly where it is.
Think outside the box
Be cleverer inside a limit nobody has questioned. It is a creative exercise, it is safe, and the limit is still there on Monday.
Refuse the box
Ask whether the limit is real. Most are not. They are decisions that hardened into facts, and a decision can be remade.
Where it shows up.
In you
- You have the answer in the meeting and you say it in the corridor
- You wait to hear what the most senior person thinks, and then you find that you agree
- You will not raise a problem until you have solved it, so nobody ever helps you with it
- You will not apply for the role you are already doing, and you call it timing
In a team
- Two teams in the same building, under the same policies, and only one of them will tell you the truth
- Everybody knows what the issue is, nobody names it, and nobody will say that nobody names it
- The real decision happens in the meeting after the meeting
- Risks arrive as a joke first, to test whether it is safe to say them properly
In an organisation
- A segment nobody is building for, because somebody decided long ago there was no money in it
- Something you already know how to do, that you have not done for years, and nobody can remember deciding to stop
- A product that never shipped because it tested badly with the customers you already have
- The person who never gets promoted despite the talent, and nobody can say out loud what is actually missing
None of it appears on a balance sheet. All of it is paid for.
What it costs a business- Executives & C-suite
- Founders & entrepreneurs
- Leadership teams
- Public sector
- Police & frontline leadership
The box is the same mechanism wherever it sits. In a person, in a team, in a whole organisation.
Work with organisationsOrganisations we have worked with
Refusals
On the boxes we mistake for facts
No Amount of Salt Changes a Pool Into the Ocean
My wife told me I had done good work, and then, after a pause, that I had done it at my own expense.
Read02You Cannot Improve the Fruit Whilst Starving the Tree
A chief executive looked at a page of his own people's words, and reached, instantly, for the machine.
Read03Refusing Needs No Permission
There is a difference between refusing a box and proving you do not belong in it. From the outside they look identical.
ReadIn their words
“We are very selective of the speakers brought in to share their stories, I'm so glad Lindani shared his truly inspiring and unique approach to 'togetherness'. His energy and approach to life is definitely worth investing in.”
Laggi Diamandi, Head of Learning & Development, Foster + Partners