Why an inclusive culture is the key to accelerating your strategy

How do you create an inclusive organizational culture that will ignite your strategy and enable everyone to do their best work?
January 19, 2023
5
min read
Subscribe to the BTS newsletter
Follow us on Linkedin
Follow BTS on Linkedin
Share

Organizational culture has the power to be an incredible strategy accelerant – but when your culture isn’t inclusive, your organization won’t reach its potential because everyone isn’t committed to doing their best work. So, how do you create an inclusive organizational culture that will ignite your strategy?

To start, leaders need to understand how culture influences the well-being of their people. They need to be willing to hold up a mirror and welcome the opportunity to see the gap between their organization’s current culture and the aspirational culture they wish they had.

What does it take to understand your organization’s culture in its full complexity? How can you invite the truth about your culture so that you can address what is really getting in your way?

When addressing cultural challenges, most organizations turn to surveys as a “check the box” activity to collect data and evaluate their current state. Leaders often assume that people will feel safe being open and honest in their responses. Anonymous surveys are a well-intended approach that prompt employees to share their genuine experiences. Unfortunately, the results do not always tell the whole story.

Why surveys are missing the mark

  1. Psychological safety is requisite for any evaluation. You will not get an     accurate understanding of the state of your culture if employees believe that a survey isn’t confidential, or that there will be retribution for negatively-interpreted responses. Most employees are unlikely to report their true feelings if they fear there will be consequences for what they have shared.
  2. Surveys are subject to social desirability bias, which is the tendency for employees to overreport good behaviors and underreport less desirable ones. When employees face the potential for retribution or retaliation for unpopular responses, they are more likely to paint a positive picture of your organization that doesn’t get to the heart of what’s going on in your culture.
  3. “What have you done for us lately” is often the sentiment of survey     participants – if employees believe that their feedback isn’t taken seriously by the organization, they won’t participate honestly.Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
  • Have you communicated with participants since the last survey?
  • Have issues raised been acknowledged, addressed, or resolved?
  • What (if anything) has been done to mitigate reported problems?
  • Did you formally thank employees for taking the time to contribute to     improving the culture?

The bottom line is that employees need to see and believethat surveys are confidential and used to drive the change they care about, orthey will not bother reporting honestly and thoroughly.

Despite these drawbacks, many organizations will continue to utilize surveys to evaluate their culture. If this is the case for your organization, be sure to put guardrails in place so that privacy is protected and employees feel safe to provide insights. Share openly about how evaluations will be used, and who will have access to the results. Build the psychological safety necessary for employees to be honest, and your audit will be a success.Even with these guardrails in place, surveys are still an incomplete solution for better understanding your organizational culture. So, what else can you do to understand and transform your organizational culture?Don’t just evaluate your company culture: observe it.

How to observe your culture

  1. Gather unbiased perspectives from new employees.New employees aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid yet! They’ll come to the table without knowledge of the company’s history, cultural dynamics, and ways of working. They are great allies in the observation process, and may even share past experiences and ideas from other organizational cultures that will speed up necessary evolution.Ask new hires to spend their first month observing the culture. Do this without asking prompting questions (Do people work late? What is the feedback culture like?), or providing context. Give them license to explore without clouding their judgment with your own biases. This approach becomes a win-win – they add value immediately, and you reap the benefits.

    Gather feedback from people across functions, experience levels, and backgrounds. You want to be sure to get the most complete picture of the organization, so diversity of observers is key. The insights should reveal the day-to-day pain points and opportunities for cultural adjustments.
  2. Check your values.Company values also influence organizational culture. These values are typically established and (sometimes) modeled by senior leaders, which can be limiting. Authorship is ownership, so your values should reflect the culture you want and need to create, and guide your organization into a promising future.When entire swaths of the company are excluded from charting the organization’s guiding principles, it should come as no surprise that some values don’t resonate. Values make a difference when they are well defined, inclusive, and exemplified by how people engage with one another.
  1. Review your policies. Perhaps you’re seeking to have a more customer-centric organizational culture, and all customer-facing decisions must have a sign-off from a leader at the partner level. With this policy in place, junior employees cannot act without a partner’s consent.Those engaging most frequently with the customer are unable to innovate or experiment with solutions that might provide the best service. As you observe your culture, ensure your policies aren’t holding your organization back from achieving its strategic goals.

    Taking an objective perspective can be challenging, so it can be helpful to call on someone outside the company to aid in your observation. They may be able to spot issues that you have been unintentionally (or intentionally) avoiding that need to be addressed.

Throughout the process of understanding your culture, be sure you are conscious about inclusion. This will mold your new culture to truly reflect both the organization and the mindsets, behaviors, and ways of working employees need to move forward together.

After gaining a clear understanding of your organizational culture, make sure there is a plan to address any issues that were uncovered, especially if the culture has some toxic elements. While the CEO, Chairman of the Board, and Board of Directors need to take responsibility for initiating the change, all employees should be held responsible for repairing the culture.

Creating this culture of inclusion means gaining more buy-in from all employees – from the most senior levels to the frontlines, across regions and functions – which is the powerful strategy accelerant you’ve been seeking. You are sending a message to everyone in the organization that you need them and that they are vital to the organization’s success.

A culture of inclusion fortifies your organization with the collective commitment needed to navigate future shifts with greater ease and success. Imagine working for an organization where everyone invests in creating and sustaining a great culture – who wouldn’t want to be a part of workplace like that.

Learn how to design conversations that actually move decisions forward.
Download the report

Related content

Blog Posts
September 2, 2025
5
min read
Strategy isn’t set anymore. It’s adapted.
Discover why traditional strategy no longer works. Learn how leaders can adapt strategy with flexibility, clarity, and resilience to thrive.

Nearly every leader I talk to knows the old planning model doesn’t make sense anymore. Multi-month cycles. Layers upon layers of initiatives. Budgets that quietly replace strategy as the plan. By the time it’s all done, the competitive landscape has already shifted under their feet. And yet, many companies still do it this way. They can feel the mismatch as they strive to move fast. They just don’t know what to do instead. The old game was setting direction. Decide where to go. Communicate it. Cascade it down. It made sense when the future looked enough like the past that you could be certain of your choices. But certainty is gone. In its place: disruption, surprise, and acceleration. Which means the work of leaders has shifted. The new game is adapting direction.

What needs to be new and different

If strategy execution today is about improv, then strategy setting is no longer about choreography. It requires a more flexible approach. Here are four flaws of traditional strategy planning, and what leaders can do differently:

1. Stop pretending there’s only one future.

We know the future won’t unfold exactly as envisioned. Customer needs shift. Competitors surprise you. Economies wobble. So why do we plan for just one version of what’s next? When one “winning” idea emerges too fast, it often gets momentum without being stress-tested. A better approach:evaluate multiple distinct directions at the same time.  One executive team we worked with had five competing visions for doubling the business in three years. Instead of forcing consensus, we worked with them to think through the core choices for each, including customer focus, product bets, and geographic expansion. Once leaders saw the real implications, they quickly ruled one option out. The eventual plan blended elements of the others, with contingencies built in. Thinking through alternatives gave them confidence and resilience when the inevitable twists came.

2. Make choices real before you announce them

Too many strategic plans race to the declaration moment at the Town Hall: here’s the big idea, now go execute. The problem? Leaders rarely know what they’ve actually signed up for, or what needs to change in how the work gets done. If you believe that strategy execution requires improv, then even in setting strategy you need to imagine what comes next and rehearse moves, implications, and ripple effects across future time horizons, albeit in a simpler but realistic form.  One client we worked with knew that acquisitions were essential to their growth. They had several targets in sight and negotiations underway, but no imminent deal. Instead of waiting, we ran the extended leadership team through a series of acquisition scenarios with different strategic intent that examined variables such as deal size, level of integration, and adjacency of the added business. As they worked through each scenario, they not only got a view into the nature of potential targets but also what changes they, as the leaders of the organization, needed to make now. They were choosing what kind of organization they would become. Based on what they were learning, they were able to make key decisions to position themselves for future success. They agreed on new hiring profiles, streamlined decision processes, leadership shifts, so they’d be ready when the right deal came. Strategy shifted from a conceptual statement to a real, lived preparation for a different future.  

3. Work across time horizons.

People can change fast. Infrastructure and capital cannot. Budgets, board approvals, and physical assets move slowly. Leaders need to intentionally plan for what can change now, what will take time, and what’s locked in, while still identifying the opportunities at each stage.  Take a pharma company with a pipeline bursting with new drug development. If even half their drugs made it through approval, their manufacturing capacity would be insufficient. Together we built an adaptable manufacturing plan, anchored on essentials, with clear trigger points for future decisions. When 70% of the drugs cleared approval, they were ready. Without that horizon-based thinking, they would have been caught flat-footed.

4. Align at the right level of detail.

Here’s a trap: mistaking varied interpretation of the strategy for purposeful improvisation. They are not the same. Without clarity and alignment at the top, every leader fills in gaps differently. That isn’t agility, it’s chaos. Leaders must turn the conceptual strategy into something tangible and real, in order to be able to align and lead the organization in the same direction. Strategic modeling allows leaders to test choices at the right level of fidelity, so they know what they’re actually agreeing to. Growing “a lot” versus growing 37% are not the same thing. The detail that is uncovered in the modeling exercises provides enough clarity to shape coherent execution, while still leaving room for adaptive moves over time.

From map to compass

Old strategy setting was about certainty. New strategy setting is about clarity of intent and readiness to adapt. It’s less a map and more of a compass. If your strategy and planning process still looks like a marathon toward a finished plan, ask yourself: are you preparing for the world you wish you had, or the one you actually face? The trick is helping leadership teams shift from setting direction to adapting direction—so strategy setting and execution can adapt. The future won’t wait for your plans.

Blog Posts
August 22, 2025
5
min read
6 things you can do to shift your culture without a massive change effort
Six practical actions leaders can take to shift culture and align with strategy—without a major change initiative.

Most leaders focus on strategy—not because they undervalue culture, but because strategy feels concrete. It has structure, timelines, metrics, and deliverables. It’s visible and defensible. When pressure is high, strategy gives leaders something they can point to and steer. Culture doesn’t always feel that way. It’s harder to define, harder to measure, and often lands in the “important, but not urgent” pile. That’s not a leadership flaw. It’s a gap in how we’ve equipped leaders to lead.But if you want to change how your organization operates, you have to start with what people experience every day.

Below are six no-fluff actions from our recent event, , designed to help you leave your team stronger than you found it.

Culture Without the Fluff→ Don’t miss events like these! Sign up for our newsletter or visit our events page to see what’s coming.

1. Build shared habits

If strategy defines where you’re going, culture determines whether you’ll get there. Strategy can shift quickly, with a new market, goal, or CEO. Culture can’t. It’s shaped by the beliefs, habits, and norms that don’t pivot on command—and that’s where friction starts. The disconnect doesn’t usually show up in big moments. It shows up in how decisions get made, what’s prioritized under pressure, and whether feedback is honest or avoided. These daily behaviors signal what really matters, regardless of what the strategy says. That’s why high-performing organizations go beyond communicating direction. They turn strategy into clear expectations for how people should work, lead, and collaborate—and then reinforce those expectations through routines, incentives, and leadership behavior.

Try this:

Pick one strategic priority and ask: What should people be doing differently if this is truly our focus? If you’re not seeing those behaviors, there’s a gap. Ask yourself: Do our daily habits match the future we’re trying to build?

2. Use the levers you already own

Culture change doesn’t have to start with a massive initiative. It can start with the levers you already own. Culture lives in the mechanics of your team’s work: how meetings are run, how frontline decisions are made, how failure is treated, and what behaviors leaders model. These small signals shape big beliefs. That’s why abstract values and vision statements alone often fall flat. They’re not wrong, but without action behind them, they’re just words on a page. Real change starts by zooming in on specific moments that shape how work gets done, and making small, intentional shifts. Want a culture of accountability? Focus on what happens after meetings. Want more innovation? Look at how failure is handled during team reviews.

Start here:

Pick one lever (like how meetings are run) and ask:

  • What messages are we sending through how we meet?
  • Who speaks up? Who stays silent? What actually gets decided?

Then make small adjustments that reinforce the culture you want—not the one you’ve inherited.

3. Avoid the tempting pitfalls

If you’ve ever rolled out a new set of values, launched a culture initiative, or shared a bold new vision, only to see behavior stay exactly the same, you’re not alone. Most culture efforts stall not because leaders don’t care, but because they start with what’s visible and familiar: messaging, posters, kickoff events. These feel like the right moves. But they rarely shift what people actually do, and rarely resonates in a meaningful and lasting way In our recent webinar, we shared six common traps that organizations fall into often with the best intentions. Here are three that come up again and again:

  1. Relying on values to do the heavy lifting. Most teams have clear values, but that’s not the problem. The challenge is turning those values into real habits. If the way you run meetings, make decisions, and give feedback doesn’t reflect what’s on the wall, people notice—and disconnect.
  2. Expecting HR or culture champions to lead the culture shift alone. HR and champions play a big role in culture, but they can’t do it without leaders. People take their cues from credible influencers in the business: what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, and how leaders show up under pressure. That’s where real culture change starts.
  3. Announcing culture change before actually changing anything. This is a classic case of show don’t tell. When leaders talk about change without shifting the day-to-day experience, people become skeptical. They’ve heard it before. What earns their belief and commitment is seeing leaders act differently in ways that directly affect their work.  

P.S. We’ve rounded up 3 more pitfalls worth avoiding. See them here.

Start here:

Surface the unspoken. Ask: What do people believe they’ll be rewarded for today? What would they have to believe to behave differently?Culture change requires shifting the mental models that shape behavior.

4. Shift the beliefs beneath the behaviors

You can’t shift behavior without understanding the beliefs behind it. If teams aren’t collaborating across silos, it’s probably not because they don’t want to—it’s because they’re rewarded for competing, not collaborating. If leaders aren’t taking smart risks, it might be because failure has been punished, not treated as a learning moment. These everyday behaviors are just the surface—what’s driving them are deeper, often invisible beliefs that probably outlast the tenure of some of your employees.

Start here:

Ask: What are the unspoken rules here? What would someone need to believe for this behavior to feel natural, safe, and worth it? Until you name and shift those beliefs, culture efforts will stay stuck at the surface.

5. Don’t let your culture fall behind your tech

Honestly, the real surprise would be if AI wasn’t reshaping your culture. Some organizations are going all-in on experimentation. Others are still figuring out what their approach will be. But wherever you are on the curve, one thing’s clear: this moment feels a lot like the wild west. And your talent is picking up on that. Leaders are signaling the need to adapt and innovate—but rewards and incentives often tell a different story. Without clear signals from the culture that it’s safe to try, valuable to learn, and worth the risk, even the smartest tools won’t be used to their full potential.

Ask yourself:

  • How are we capturing what’s working with AI—and making those insights visible and usable across the organization?
  • What are we taking off people’s plates to give them the time and space to learn, experiment, and adapt?  
  • Have we updated the priorities, deliverables and expectations to reflect the new reality—or are we layering AI on top of an already full workload?
  • Are leaders helping people see the personal value in this shift—so AI feels like a path to growth, not a threat to their role?

6. Start small, scale fast

Most leaders assume culture change has to be slow and sweeping. But it doesn’t.We’ve seen major progress start with one small shift—the kind that’s visible, repeatable, and high-impact. The key? Start where the energy already is: a team that's eager, a leader who's ready, a process that’s stuck. Then focus on one behavior that’s holding things back—and change it. From there, scale what works.

Start here:

Use this simple 3-step exercise to find a small, high-impact place to start:

  1. Pinpoint a stuck spot: Where is strategy getting delayed, deprioritized, or lost in translation? Common areas include:
    • Team meetings that always run long but lead to no decisions
    • A new tool or process people aren’t adopting
    • A frontline team disconnected from the broader strategy
    • An area with low engagement or slow execution
  2. Identify the blocker behavior:
    • What specific habit, mindset, or expectation is in the way? (e.g., defaulting to top-down decisions, rewarding speed over learning, fear of trying something new)
  3. Make one shift—and scale what works
    • Change that behavior in one team, one moment, or one process.
    • Capture the impact. Then share the story and replicate what worked.

Change spreads through stories. Show people what’s possible, and they’ll move with you.

Culture change is hard. Doing it alone? Even harder.

We work with teams around the world to:

  • Spot what’s working—and what’s getting in the way
  • Test small shifts that create big ripple effects
  • Keep momentum going as change starts to spread

Reach out to us to start a conversation!

Blog Posts
September 19, 2025
5
min read
All strategy execution is improv now
Rigid plans fail when disruption hits. Learn why strategy execution now depends on improvisation—built on trust, agility, and adaptability.

In today’s business environment, strategy no longer unfolds neatly from vision to execution. Disruption is constant, complexity is accelerating, and expectations are shifting in real time. In this context, strategy that is overly scripted becomes brittle. The organizations that thrive today are the ones that have learned to improvise. Not reactively, but with intention, agility, and confidence. To many executives, the idea of “strategy improv” might sound risky or chaotic. In truth, great improvisation is neither. It is a learned discipline rooted in presence, trust, and adaptability. It is what enables teams to respond purposefully in the face of the unexpected. And it is quickly becoming a core leadership capability for our times.

Why strategy needs to shift

For decades, the dominant model of strategy has been based on control. A select few defined the vision, cascaded goals through layers of the business, and expected execution to follow. Success was measured by fidelity to the plan. The world no longer works that way. Markets are volatile. We are in a technology super cycle. Customer needs evolve faster than product roadmaps. And the economic, geopolitical, and environmental future is increasingly uncertain. Rigid strategies struggle to survive this level of flux. They become outdated before implementation begins. Worse, they force teams into patterns of execution that ignore emerging data, evolving context, or untapped insight. What is needed now is not more precision. What is needed is more adaptability.

Strategy as intention, not prescription

In improvisational terms, a strategic plan is no longer a fixed script. It is a shared intention. It is a direction, not a destination. It is a compass, not a map. The core strategic question is no longer, “What is our five year plan?” but instead: “How do we respond wisely, quickly, and collectively to whatever emerges in service of our purpose?” This does not mean abandoning structure or discipline. In fact, it demands more of both. But the emphasis shifts from defining every move in advance to cultivating the conditions where people can make smart decisions in the moment. Here is the distinction:

  • A goal says: “We will grow 17 percent in revenue.”
  • An intention says: “To grow 17 percent, we will delight our clients, grow our impact, and operate with excellence to unlock long term value.”

The first is measurable. The second is both meaningful and measurable. And it is meaning that enables action when the path becomes unclear.

What improv really means

Improv in business is ripe for misunderstanding. It is not winging it or hoping for the best. Great improv is highly disciplined. It is grounded in preparation, presence, and shared principles. Here are a few improv principles that matter most for leaders and teams:

  • Yes, And… Build on what is already in motion instead of shutting it down. That is how momentum grows.
  • Make Your Partner Look Good. Execution is collective. Leaders who elevate others create trust and shared ownership.
  • Be Present. You cannot rely on what worked yesterday or predict what comes tomorrow. Execution happens in this moment.
  • Listen for What Is New. Do not just confirm your beliefs. Notice weak signals, dissenting voices, and emerging shifts.
  • Commit to the Scene. Once you step in, go all in. Half-hearted execution drains energy and derails progress.

These are not stage tricks. They are everyday disciplines for how leaders and teams show up together when the path is not clear.

The boundary: What can and cannot be improvised

Not everything can or should be improvised. You cannot spin up a new factory in six weeks or redo a regulatory filing on the fly. Capital projects, infrastructure, hiring pipelines, and compliance require structure, discipline, and lead time. Within those guardrails, much of execution is improv. The actions and moves you make can and show flex with the need and the moment. Such moves might include:

  • How you respond to a customer this week
  • How you redeploy resources when a competitor surprises you
  • How you adjust product features in response to early user feedback

The art is knowing the difference. Improv lives inside the boundaries, not outside them. And that is where the advantage lies.

We know it works

We have already seen this in action. During COVID, strategy as improv was not optional. Plans dissolved overnight. Leaders had to pivot in real time, trust their teams, and reimagine value on the fly. Many succeeded, not because they had the perfect plan, but because they had the capacity to improvise. Consider two everyday situations:

  • Telecommunications company: With hardware and software tightly linked, this company faced constant tension between short-term changes in a release and the permanence of installed infrastructure. By learning to improvise in the short term with software while anchoring their long-term vision in hardware roadmaps, they delivered quick wins without derailing future value. To do so, leaders had to abandon siloed “hardware first” or “software first” thinking and live in both worlds at once.
  • Global manufacturer: Preparing for volatility in regulation and transportation, this company had shifted to thinking of its manufacturing footprint as a portfolio of capabilities rather than fixed plants. When sudden shifts hit sooner than expected, they could improvise quickly, rebalancing capacity across countries, not because they were ready but because they had already rehearsed some of the moves. The adjustments were urgent, but they felt planful.

These are not exotic cases. They are reminders that when strategy execution meets reality, it is the organizations that can improvise with purpose that thrive.

From plans to response

The core strategic question has changed. It is no longer, “What is our five year plan?” but instead: “How do we respond wisely, quickly, and collectively to whatever emerges?” Capacity, creativity, and commitment to the purpose and intention of the strategy, not certainty, are now the keys to competitive advantage. Those attributes are built through people: their judgment, their alignment, and their ability to act in service of shared priorities.

How to build strategic improv into your organization

Improv is not just an individual skill. It is an organizational capacity. Here are five practical ways to embed it into how your teams work:

  1. Ground the organization in purpose and priorities. Make sure everyone knows the “why” behind your strategy. Not just the outcomes you are chasing, but the value you aim to create. Purpose creates the throughline that allows teams to improvise without drifting.
  1. Build enterprise perspective at all levels. Give people visibility into how their choices affect the whole. When teams understand upstream and downstream impacts, they act with greater confidence and coordination.
  1. Normalize adaptation, not perfection. Shift the narrative from flawless execution to responsive evolution. Celebrate learning, reward and highlight intelligent risk taking, and treat change as a constant, not a crisis.
  1. Practice collective sensemaking. Create space for cross functional conversation, reflection, and signal sensing. Encourage teams to bring forward what they are noticing, not just what they are reporting.
  1. Train for improvisation. Just as improv actors practice, so can your leaders. Build their capacity to navigate ambiguity, connect dots, and co-create solutions in real time. The payoff is not just agility. It is resilience.

Final thought

Strategy execution today is less about control and more about capability. It is less about knowing the answers and more about creating the conditions where your people can discover the right answers for now, together. Companies that thrive in uncertainty will not be the ones with the tightest plans. They will be the ones that can improvise with purpose, with confidence, and with each other. When the world will not wait, improv is not optional. It is the new strategic advantage.

Related content

Three business professionals collaborating over a laptop at a modern office table.
Insights
April 20, 2026
5
min read
The myth of more: Why coaching needs structure
This blog explores why intentional design, built on consistency, continuity, and completion, is what turns scalable coaching into lasting leadership development.

Organizations have long wanted to scale coaching, but have been limited by cost and capacity. With AI, that's beginning to change as new platforms make coaching more accessible, flexible, and available on demand, extending support beyond a select group of leaders to entire populations.

For talent leaders, this shift creates both opportunity and complexity. With greater reach comes a new set of trade-offs: how to balance access with depth, flexibility with accountability, and efficiency with meaningful development.

The limits of unlimited (coaching).

Unlimited coaching sounds like the obvious answer. Remove the barriers, give everyone access, let people engage on their own terms. What's not to like?

In practice, quite a bit.

When coaching has no defined structure or cadence, engagement tends to become episodic - people show up when something feels urgent and step back when it doesn't. The coaching relationship never quite deepens. Conversations cover ground but don't build on it. And the development that was supposed to happen keeps getting pushed to the next session, and the next.

Three patterns emerge:

  1.  Sporadic engagement over sustained development. Without a rhythm to anchor the work, coaching becomes reactive. Clients bring whatever is most pressing that week rather than working toward something larger. Progress happens in bursts, if at all.
  2. Insights that don't compound. Great coaching reveals patterns over time - things a client can't see in one session but can't unsee after several. Without continuity, and without a consistent coaching relationship to hold the thread, each conversation starts close to zero.
  3. Outcomes that are hard to measure. No milestones. No defined endpoint. No clear way for the organization, or the client, to know whether it's working. Activity fills the gap where impact should be.

The result is a model that's easy to scale and hard to defend. Which is exactly the problem talent leaders are navigating right now.

The relationship is the lever.

Decades of research into what makes coaching work keeps arriving at the same answer: it's the relationship. Not the platform, not the methodology. The relationship.

When a coach and client build trust over time, developing shared language, and returning to the same themes with increasing depth, something shifts. Conversations get more honest. Insights stick. The client starts doing the work between sessions, not just during them. That's when coaching becomes genuinely transformative, and it can't be rushed or replicated in a one-off session.

The ICF and EMCC are clear on this: continuity is what dives outcomes. The coaching engagements that produce lasting change are the ones where each session builds on the last, not the ones that simply offer more access.

Three principles make that possible: Consistency, Continuity, and Completion.

1. Consistency

The foundation everything else is built on.

The temptation when designing a coaching program is to treat flexibility as a feature - let people book when they want, swap coaches freely, engage on their own schedule. But frequent coach changes reset the clock. Every new coach has to earn trust, learn context, and find their footing with the client. That's time spent getting started, not getting somewhere.

A stable coaching relationship works differently:

  • The coach starts to see around corners, uncovering patterns the client can't see on their own
  • The client stops performing and starts being honest
  • The relationship itself becomes a source of accountability, not just the sessions

Consistency doesn't constrain the work. It's what makes the deeper work possible.

2. Continuity

What turns a series of sessions into genuine development.

Without continuity, coaching tends to be additive at best- each session offers something useful, but nothing compounds. With it, the work builds on itself in ways that can't happen in isolated conversations.

What continuity makes possible:

  • A limiting belief surfaced in session three becomes a thread that runs through the rest of the engagement
  • A behavioral pattern the client couldn't see at the start becomes impossible to ignore by the end
  • Space opens up for the harder work - the kind that requires sitting with discomfort across multiple sessions, not resolving it quickly and moving on

That slower, deeper work is where lasting change actually happens. It doesn't come from more sessions. It comes from the right sessions, in the right order, with the same person.

3. Completion

The most underrated principle of the three.

In a world of unlimited access, there's no finish line, and without one, it's surprisingly hard to know what you're working toward, or whether you've gotten there. A defined endpoint changes the entire shape of an engagement.

A clear endpoint creates urgency and focuses every session on what matters most.

  • Shifts the question from "what should we talk about this week?" to "what do we need to accomplish before we're done?"
  • Gives both coach and client a body of work to look back on, not just a log of conversations

For talent leaders, this is also what makes coaching legible as an investment. Sessions logged is an activity metric. A cohort of leaders who completed a structured engagement and can articulate what changed, that's a result.

Don't just scale it, design it (here’s how) 

The opportunity in front of talent leaders right now is significant. The organizations that will get the most from this moment are the ones that treat coaching design as seriously as coaching delivery.

Practical design decisions:

  • Define the arc before you launch: set the number of sessions, the cadence, and the goals upfront, not after people have already started booking
  • Protect the coaching relationship: Make coach switching the exception, not the default, and design your program to discourage unnecessary re-matches
  • Build in milestones: create structured check-ins at the midpoint and end of each engagement so progress is visible to both the coach and the organization
  • Separate on-demand support from developmental coaching: Use AI-enabled tools for in-the-moment guidance, and reserve structured engagements for the deeper work
  • Measure completion, not just activation: Track how many people finish an engagement, not just how many start one

Questions to pressure-test your design:

  • Does every participant know what they're working toward before their first session?
  • Can your coaches see enough context about a client's journey to pick up where they left off?
  • Would you be able to show, at the end of a cohort, what changed, and for whom?

Access opened the door. Intention is what makes it worth walking through.

Colored pins connected by white strings on corkboard, illustrating a network or interconnection concept.
Insights
April 29, 2026
5
min read
Why we didn't wait: A CEO's field notes from two years of applied AI
AI value is compounding, not linear. BTS CEO Jessica Skon shares how experimentation fuels flywheels, and how breakthrough “AI diamonds” emerge and scale.

Three decisions that changed everything.

Two years ago, we made three deliberate decisions about how BTS would move with Applied AI.

We would become our own Customer Zero.

While others were building strategies, defining governance, and waiting for clarity, we made a different call: we decided not to wait. Not because the stakes were low, but because they were high. And because in a space evolving this quickly, clarity wouldn’t come from planning. It would come from movement.

So instead of starting with a roadmap, we started with three principles:

  1. No top-down mandate. The people closest to the work figure it out.
  2. IT must evolve from gatekeeper to enabler - leading AI trials and fast experimentation.
  3. Don’t wait for certainty.

We set the organization in motion, and once we did, things started to move quickly.

What if we started this company today?

Waiting for certainty is itself a choice, and it’s costing companies more than they realize.

We started where we knew the work best: our simulations. No perfect plan, just teams moving, trying, and iterating.

Simulations are core to who we are at BTS. Companies that simulate don’t just make better decisions; they execute faster and build more engaged cultures.

The team asked a simple question:

"What if we were to start our company today?”

That question started the flywheel.

They asked IT for a few licenses and started building - vibe-coding, writing agents, and testing tools - moving at a pace that would make any VC-backed start-up smile.

The messy middle.

At first, the team was underwhelmed.

The early reports were blunt:

“Not good with math.”

“Poor graph capabilities.”

The team wasn't discouraged. They kept tinkering - jumping between tools, staying on top of new releases, experimenting constantly.

This was a small team, across 24 countries, building off each other’s ideas. Laughing at crazy creations. Breaking things. Iterating in a sandbox alongside real clientwork.

Each cycle produced something:

  • A sharper scenario
  • A faster build
  • A more powerful simulation

The flywheel was turning, and it was generating something real.

When the diamond appeared.

Then something shifted.

The team moved into client trials across five countries. They figured out ISO compliance and built the architecture to handle the complexity, the “spaghetti.”

And what emerged wasn’t incremental:

  • What used to take weeks started happening in days.
  • Limited creativity started to feel like unlimited innovation.
  • Clients became self-serving.
  • Agentic simulations were built directly into client systems for real-time updates and preparation.

This was our first AI diamond - a high-impact outcome created by many cycles of experimentation compounding into real value.

It only appeared because we kept the flywheel turning, each cycle increasing the odds that something would break through.

95% adoption in eight weeks.

Then it was time to take the AI diamond global.

BTS is decentralized and highly entrepreneurial. We operate across 24 countries and 38 offices, where local teams have real autonomy.

And historically? That’s meant a low appetite for adopting something built somewhere else and pushed from the center.

So we expected resistance.

Instead, something surprising happened.

In the first eight weeks, we saw 95% adoption across our global footprint.

It felt completely different from our own digital initiatives, ERP implementations, top-down rollouts of the past.

This moved on its own. Why? 

We realized it didn’t start with a framework or a model, it started with a feeling.

The feeling of being at the leading edge of one’s craft and profession.

  • Joy
  • Excitement
  • Pride

As we watched this play out across teams it stopped feeling like isolated wins.

There was a pattern to it. A repeatable, organic, innovation motion.

And the flywheel didn’t stop with simulations.

It spread across finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Some cycles led to small improvements, and others revealed new diamonds.

Not becausewe planned for them, but because we built the conditions for people to find them.

The question I'd ask any CEO right now: Is your flywheel turning, or are you still waiting for the perfect plan?

In part 2, I’ll share the key success factors behind the breakthrough, and what we’re now seeing across more than 120 global clients.

Person using a smartphone with a laptop on the table, overlaid with digital AI and chat interface graphics.
Insights
March 17, 2026
5
min read
Conversazioni incentrate sul cliente abilitate dall’IA
Perché la maggior parte delle riunioni di vendita non riesce a creare valore e come costruire intenzionalmente urgenza, fiducia e slancio in ogni conversazione.

La maggior parte delle riunioni di vendita non fallisce.
Semplicemente non porta a una decisione.

Ed è lì che si perde valore.

I clienti di oggi sono più informati, più selettivi e hanno meno tempo.
Non hanno bisogno di altre presentazioni di prodotto.

Hanno bisogno di conversazioni che li aiutino a stabilire le priorità, decidere e andare avanti.

Eppure, il 58% delle riunioni di vendita non riesce a creare valore reale.
Non perché i venditori manchino di capacità, ma perché le conversazioni non sono progettate per far avanzare le decisioni.

“I clienti non agiscono su ogni esigenza che riconoscono.
Agiscono quando qualcosa diventa una priorità.”

In questo breve executive brief scoprirai:

  • Perché la maggior parte delle conversazioni informa… ma non porta all’azione
  • Cosa spinge davvero i clienti a stabilire priorità e muoversi
  • Come creare urgenza senza compromettere la fiducia
  • Il passaggio dal presentare soluzioni al facilitare decisioni
  • Cosa distingue le conversazioni che si bloccano da quelle che accelerano il progresso

Se i tuoi team stanno affrontando trattative bloccate, decisioni ritardate o un pipeline lento, questo brief ti aiuterà a capire il perché e cosa fare in modo diverso.

Scarica l’executive brief e scopri come progettare conversazioni che portano davvero a decisioni.