PURPOSE
Build confidence to address difficult issues, increase candour, challenge constructively and make faster, better decisions.
Primary Outcome : Courageous conversations create productive challenge, candour and faster decisions.
Duration : Two Days
DAY 01
Productive challenge
09:00–10:30
What Are We Not Saying?
Exercise : The Undiscussables
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Gather anonymous input beforehand on issues the leadership team is unwilling to discuss honestly.
Surface themes and choose the most important.
10:45–12:30
Challenge Without Destruction
Practise advocacy, inquiry, testing assumptions and separating people from ideas.
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Exercise : “Make the strongest case against your own position.”
13:30–15:00
The Difficult Peer Conversation
Participants bring a real conversation they are avoiding and practise it live. Feedback identifies what they avoided saying, where they became indirect and where they overcompensated.
15:15–17:00
Decision-Making Under Pressure
Simulation involving time pressure, incomplete data and conflicting stakeholder interests. The team must decide and then review how the decision was made.
DAY 02
Decision Discipline
09:00–10:30
Decision Audit
Review major decisions from the previous six months. How long did they take? How many meetings? Who really decided? Were decisions later reopened?
10:45–12:30
Designing Decision Principles
Agree principles such as: decisions should be made at the lowest competent level; disagreement happens before the decision, not afterwards; and perfect information is rarely available.
13:30–15:00
The Challenge Session
Take a live strategic decision and run a formal challenge process with a decision owner, advocates, a red team and stakeholder voices. Then decide.
15:15–17:00
Team Commitments
Create a Challenge and Decision Charter.
