Three ways in

• A diagnosis: You want an accurate read of your own organization, or of a system you are dealing with that will not open its record to you. Tell me roughly what you are looking at and what decision is riding on it. Diagnoses are data-intensive.
  dave@davemcooper.com
• Speaking: A keynote, a resilience retreat, or a leadership offsite. Useful to know: the audience, the date, and what you want the room to think differently about afterwards.
  dave@davemcooper.com
• Everything else: Questions about the framework or the process, or a question that does not fit the two above.
  dave@davemcooper.com

What to expect from the first conversation

Mostly questions. The same ones a physician asks before touching anything: what is the system, where does it end, and who else is in it. The team. The organization. The countries involved, if there are any. The competitor, the regulator, the counterparty across the table. I am trying to find the boundary of the thing before I say anything at all about what is inside it.

Then the practical half, because Soundings runs on a record. A thin record produces a thin reading — the instrument says so honestly, which is worth something, but it is not what you came for. So: what can you show me? Documents, structures, decision history, the things already written down. And what does not exist yet and would have to be collected before a sweep is worth running.

And the part worth saying plainly. If what you need is not this work, I will tell you on that call rather than three weeks into an engagement. That holds for a diagnosis, for leadership work, and for a talk. Engagements run with a small number of teams at a time, and if the timing does not work, I would rather say so than stretch to fit it.

Or send it here

Whichever route you use, a couple of sentences about the actual situation is more useful than a formal brief.