The Positioning Conversation is a structured mutual inquiry — ninety minutes with a cross-level group of four to six people from your organisation — into where your organisation currently sits, what it is genuinely reaching toward, and whether the conditions for a learning partnership are present. Both parties are assessing. The conversation is as much about fit as it is about possibility.
What the conversation involves
The conversation moves through three distinct phases.
The first attends to what your organisation already holds. It explores when it thinks best together, what remains genuinely difficult, and how it typically responds when it encounters something it doesn't understand. This is not an audit.
The second introduces the developmental territory that a learning partnership works with. This includes three recognisable thresholds through which organisations move when the conditions for genuine learning are present. This serves as a shared reference point for a more honest conversation about where your organisation actually is, rather than where it would like to be or where the last strategy document said it was heading.
The third moves toward what your organisation is already leaning into. It focuses on the questions it keeps returning to, the capacities it senses it needs but hasn't been able to cultivate, and the places where something is reaching toward change without yet knowing its shape. The conversation closes with a simple question: what feels like the most honest starting point?
“Cultivation is not universally appropriate. It fits a particular kind of organisational moment.”
What the conversation produces
Ninety minutes is a genuine investment of time.
Most people who have the conversation will leave with a clearer picture of where their organisation currently sits . This is because the quality of honest collective inquiry tends to make visible things that have been present but unnamed. That clarity is valuable in its own right, regardless of what follows.
The conversation can produce three different outcomes, and all three are legitimate. It may become clear that the conditions for a full learning partnership are present and the work is ready to begin. It may surface a different and more appropriate entry point. THis might be something more specific, more bounded, or more preparatory than a full engagement. Or it may become clear that this is not the right fit at this time.
“What distinguishes an organisation approaching this threshold from one that has passed through it is a specific quality of contact with its own not-knowing”
The invitation
If what you have read on this site describes something your organisation is facing — a form of stuckness that additional information or better project management hasn't reached, an ambition that keeps outrunning the relational conditions that would support it, a sense that something needs to change before you can name what it is — I would like to have this conversation with you.