Plan
You build four things before anyone travels. Each is a real document you can download and hand to your team, and each feeds the next.
Six questions, one at a time, never a wall of empty boxes. Throughline drafts each answer from your interview and whatever context you upload, and you confirm it or change it. What you keep is a memo you can send.
Wholesale margin against the direct relationship you spent four years building.
Signing roasters quickly against the fulfilment you can actually staff.
Retiring the DTC subscription against the revenue it still carries.
Approved by the leader, and locked before anyone commits 10 hours.
Near zero effort when the draft is right, and one double-click when it is not.
Your own position in the six, not how much the model happened to draft before you saw any of it.
What would make the day a success for you personally. The model never writes that one.
The same four questions go to the leader and to every teammate, so the answers are comparable. Nobody sees anybody else's. What comes back is the distance between what the team says and what usually happens.
When someone doesn't deliver what they committed to, what usually happens?
WHAT KIND OF TEAM ARE YOU
A group of individuals
A pseudo-team
A team, but clunky
A high-performing team
Twelve answered. The mark is the leader's own read, two stages above where the team put itself. That gap is the finding.
THE THREE LENSES
Say vs Do
The gap between what the team says and what usually happens.
Team maturity
The stage the team actually operates at.
Team agreement
How much teammates agree, statement by statement.
Optional, and never blocking. The day drafts in parallel.
The leader answers the same four questions the team does, which is what makes the gap mean anything.
The options are deliberately out of order, so nobody can pick the answer that looks best.
Each one is its own shareable artifact, so you can send the team the part that is safe to share.
Set the length and the start, then dial the balance between People, Strategy and Breaks. Turning one up trades off the others, and the activities recompose to match. The read sets the opening balance, so the day answers the team you actually have.
THE KEY SPLITS
Two came from the decision, one came from the read. A day that has to resolve three things is the same length wherever they came from.
PeopleBuilds your Team Charter, trust, how you’ll work
StrategyBuilds the Plan, priorities, owners, measures
Breaks & energyKeeps the room fresh, warm, connected
THE AGENDA
Dial one pillar up and the others give way. The day cannot get longer.
A goal, a length and the condition that ends it, so the day holds its shape without a facilitator.
Five Forces fires on a where-to-compete call, Seven Powers on a moat call, and each says why.
Drop into the timeline and move things by hand, or take the composed day as it stands.
The message, the artifacts, the shared come-ready-with and each person's own part are all assembled from the three stages behind it. The only thing left to do is send.
Before Thursday
The one call we have to make
Everyone gets their own copy, with their own part in it.
WHAT GOES WITH IT
Twelve copies, twelve different parts, one send.
The subject, the message and the attachments all come from what you already built.
Each person is told what they are bringing, so nobody arrives having read everything and prepared nothing.
The three read-outs go out one by one, so a hard one can stay with you until the day.
A decision the room cannot dodge, a read of the team that has to answer it, a day shaped around both, and a brief that landed before anyone travelled.