A water utility, executive team

The presenting problem was described to us as "the exec does not behave as one team". The diagnostic — eleven interviews and two observed meetings — found something more specific: four directors believed the capital programme was over-committed and three believed it was under-ambitious, and this had never been discussed as a group in eighteen months.

Everything the client had labelled as a behavioural problem followed from that. Meetings ran long because nothing could be concluded. Papers grew because authors were defending against an argument nobody would have out loud. Two directors had stopped attending a sub-committee.

We surfaced it in session two, using their own interview data read back anonymously. It was an uncomfortable ninety minutes and it was the whole engagement. The remaining four sessions were about building a decision protocol that made that kind of disagreement routine rather than exceptional.

Measured at ninety days: meeting time on status reporting down from 40% to 12%, papers shorter by about a third, and both directors back on the sub-committee. What we cannot claim is that the capital programme is now right — only that it is now argued about in the room.