It’s a freezing January morning in Berlin. We’re sitting in an industrial-type canteen and I’m talking with my friend and collaborator Kerstin, a psychologist, systemic coach and senior partner in one of the leading German HR consultancies. She’s seen it all and has a healthy sobriety when it comes to change.
Her words confirmed something I’ve seen in my own work.
Since the technology made it practical, we’ve used a digital note taker. And I’d been sitting on this data, sensing there was something to explore with it. So after a recent project with a multinational – a brand value proposition developed over nine months with sixteen senior leaders – I analysed how the language changed over its course.
What the data showed – a change in ownership
What the data showed was striking. The measurable changes – in ownership, in how people framed problems, in who was taking initiative – weren’t happening in the workshops. They were happening in the project team meetings. The small, weekly rhythm of a cross-functional group of senior people thinking together.
In a large multinational, at that level, a leaders’ job is to make decisions. Proposals are presented, briefly discussed, and decided upon. So when we asked questions instead of making proposals, it caused discomfort. “This is not how we do these things normally.” But to their credit, they went along. And soon, the meeting dynamics changed.
The real transformation doesn’t happen in the workshops. It happens in the project team meetings
At the beginning, the expectation was clear: “You are the consultants. You propose and we decide.” “When can I have the outputs?” By the end, the group was openly debating the best ways to fulfil the ambition they had created. “And you guys alone can’t do that.” One devised strategies to engage the executive Board, another adapted his 5-year plan. Ownership was theirs now, and they were taking initiative without being asked. The artefact had been created over five workshops, but the noticeable changes had happened in the project team meetings between them. If you want this benefit, you have to design for it. Most organisations never get it – because whilst they demand transformation, they rely on structures that make it impossible – starting with how they structure the project team.
Three layers of value – from artefact to agency
In our work, we think about value in three layers.
The first layer, creating the artefact, is the job that needs to get done. The strategy, the positioning, the identity – whatever the deliverable is. This is the operational challenge. It needs to be excellent, and is usually delivered through a combination of research, analysis and recommendation.
The second layer is about anchoring. When you involve a cross-functional group of senior people in the creation of that artefact – not as reviewers, but as genuine contributors – they don’t need to be convinced of it afterwards. They helped build it. Plus, a Board will find it difficult to argue with the outputs of a piece of work that their chosen leaders have created. That buy-in challenge largely disappears.
These two layers are well served by workshops. That’s where the artefact is shaped, where the co-creation happens, where the IKEA effect – when you involve people in the creation of something, they will own the outputs and value them more – does its work.
“Agency lives in the project team meetings – but almost no organisation designs them for it.”
But there’s a third layer, agency. And this is the one that interests me most. Because the third layer is where people start to think and act differently. It happens when a leader stops waiting for a recommendation and starts seeing themselves as an agent. When a head of strategy and a head of operations, who’ve spent months thinking together in a project team, say afterwards that they got to know each other in a way they never had before, increasing their ability and appetite to collaborate and align, these are shifts that can have profound impacts on the whole business.
And that third layer doesn’t live in the workshops. Workshops are designed for outputs – short, intensive, geared to produce. Project team meetings, when designed for thinking rather than deciding, create a weekly rhythm of reflection. And it’s in that rhythm, over time, that the shift from recipient to agent happens. Agency lives in the project team meetings. But it doesn’t live there by default, and most organisations never get the benefit.
What most organisations do: they treat the project team as an administrative function. A project manager. An assistant. Someone to keep the project plan on track. Status update, decision, move on.
We design the project team with intention. We insist that it be cross-functional and as senior as possible. Head of strategy. Head of operations or a business unit. Head of people. Head of comms. These are the functions that need to carry any transformation, and these are the people whose thinking needs to shift.
“Most organisations demand transformation while relying on structures that make it impossible.”
The project team as a design choice
The composition of the project team is a design choice, not an administrative one.
And the meetings themselves are not status updates. There’s a brief update, yes – but that’s not the point. The point is testing emergent thinking. Bringing half-formed ideas and asking senior people to respond from their vantage point in the business. Creating what is, in effect, a weekly thinking session for people who rarely get that space.
It takes about three to four meetings for the tone to change. At the start, people expect agenda-decision-move on. That’s what they’re used to. It can feel slow, even like you’re failing to make progress. But by meeting three or four, something changes. The conversations move from coordination to substance. People start contributing rather than deciding. And once the dynamic changes, it builds.
The workshops matter. I’m not dismissing them. They create the conditions – the deliverable gets done, it gets anchored through co-creation, which in and of itself is a huge achievement (and more than happens in many traditional top-down transformations).
But the transformation itself – the lasting change in how people think and work – happens in the weekly rhythm of a small group of senior people, from different functions, thinking together about something that isn’t yet fully formed. Watching it take shape. Contributing to it. Owning it.
Measuring what matters
This raises a question that I think is more important than it first appears.
Organisations are awash with KPIs, OKRs, dashboards – ways of measuring activity and output. But thinking is the highest-value activity a senior executive can do. And we have almost no way of measuring it. No way of knowing whether the quality of thinking in an organisation is improving or deteriorating. No way of showing a board that the people leading their transformation have shifted from waiting for recommendations to generating initiative.
Except, now we do. Because when you transcribe and analyse project team conversations over time, you can see it, not as a definitive measure, but as a way of observing change that is otherwise invisible. You can track the moment when “you are the consultants, you come and we decide” becomes “we need to do this.” You can identify when problem reframing begins, when ownership language appears, when people stop coordinating and start thinking together.
That’s what we were sharing in that Berlin café. Kerstin had seen it in her interviews, I’d seen it in the project teams – the transformation happens in the conversations, not in the workshops.
What our research and practice tell me is that you can design for it. Composing the project team of senior cross-functional leaders rather than coordinators and running those meetings as thinking sessions rather than status updates creates the conditions for that shift of agency.
