Building in the open: our first live workshops of a new programme & delivery platform

behind the scenes culture conversations emotional culture unspoken conversations wharton research

For years, the most important conversations at work have been the ones we never quite make time for. The concern someone carries but doesn't raise. The way a team wants to feel but never names out loud. We built our whole practice around making those conversations sayable, and this week we took a real step forward.

Over the last two days we ran the very first live workshops of a new programme, delivered for the first time on a brand new digital platform we've been quietly building. Two real teams, in real rooms, cards on the table and phones in hand. It was the first time everything came together, and I feel like we're standing at the edge of something.

Two conversations teams rarely get to have

The programme brings together two conversations.

The first is Unspoken Conversations. It grew out of our research partnership with Professor Michael Parke at the Wharton School. The study kept showing the same thing. Naming how we feel about a concern, not just what the concern is, changes the whole conversation. It builds understanding, trust and safety.

The second is Culture Conversations. This is where a team steps back and designs how they want their people, and the people they serve, to actually feel, and how they don't want them to feel.

Two halves of one idea. Surface what usually stays unspoken, then shape the culture you want on purpose.

Why this matters

Here is the bigger picture, and the part I feel most excited about.

Until now, this work has lived in single rooms, one team at a time. What we're building lets a whole organisation go through it, and it quietly captures everything as it happens. The concerns people raise, the emotions they name, the culture they want, and how all of that shifts over time.

So instead of a good conversation that fades away, you're left with the real stories and the real data in one place. That gives leaders a clear picture of how their people actually feel, and a way to see whether things are genuinely getting better. And it stays human the whole way through.

For a long time we've said that emotions are hard data treated as soft conversations. This is our attempt to change that.