Most of my work with teams over the past year has begun with some version of the same conversation. Budgets are shrinking and mandates are contested. Institutions that took decades to build are being asked to justify their existence inside a news cycle. The people in the room did not choose any of this.
The launch of my new website should begin by acknowledging that context. But the context is not the whole story. Once a team has named what lies beyond its control, a different question becomes available: what can it still change?
Seen on an organigram, an institution is a structure. Lived through a working week, it is a sequence of conversations. Strategy becomes real in those conversations, and decisions get made there or quietly deferred. Disagreement is handled in the room or carried into the corridor, and trust is built and spent the same way.
Thinking well together will not bring a budget back. It changes the decisions that follow: what to protect, what to stop, and what to ask the people who remain to carry. The wider political environment shapes those choices, but it does not wholly determine them, and the quality of the conversation they emerge from is one of the few variables still largely in a team’s own hands.
That observation, repeated across hundreds of rooms, reshaped my practice. I began mainly with individual leaders, and I still do that work. A leader who can see their own defaults, and the commitments underneath them, is harder to catch off guard and easier to trust. But individual progress is difficult to sustain inside a team that keeps rewarding the old behaviour.
So more of my work now starts with the team. In most institutions it is the most workable unit of change: governance reform takes years, while a team can change how it runs its decisions within a quarter. In systemic team coaching the client is the team itself, and the material is its real decisions and disagreements, especially when the stakes are high.
The book came out of the same shift. The Systemic Self, due this autumn, took several years to write, and most of that time went into a single discipline: turning what I had seen in rooms into an argument that stands without the room around it. Its claim, compressed to a sentence, is that groups think inside conditions they inherited rather than designed, and that those conditions can be designed, as deliberately as institutions already design strategy and budgets. The book develops the argument. The work with teams is where I keep testing it.
I want more professionals, and more institutions, to better use the agency they still have. Optimism is beside the point. Leaving that agency unused concedes more than the geopolitics has demanded. The institutions able to hold the long-term interest, human and planetary, will mostly be ones that already exist, rebuilt from the inside.
That rebuilding is usually small and unheroic. A team agrees which decisions actually require consensus. Or a director finally names the assumption everyone has been working around for two years. Sometimes it is nothing grander than a meeting that produces energy instead of absorbing it, for the first time in anyone’s memory.
These essays will appear occasionally, when a pattern has become clear enough to describe. They will draw on work across the UN system, research, civil society, and corporate sustainability, and they will not name clients.
That is the ground I intend to cover here on my new website and the Room To Think notes.
