What often limits teams are their inherent dysfunctions—not their collective ability.

Hard can be tiny or monumental, ordinary or unusual. Putting together a puzzle is hard. Capturing the most dangerous snake on a continent to develop anti-venom is a different kind of hard. Adopting a child with special needs might be as unimaginable as climbing 14 of the world’s highest peaks in 92 days. All raise …

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Organizations have speed profiles, and people have speed profiles. We can learn how to go fast well.

You can become unrecognizable in a moment or stay the same over a lifetime, and do so enthusiastically or reluctantly. Everything you do can become a path of expansion if you make it so. For the intrepid, the movement into greater being is the ultimate, inexhaustible adventure.

The ExecuDeck was started in partnership with a CEO who wanted to facilitate the conversations that mattered most among their leaders. It is an ongoing and evolving body of work that we make freely available to anyone interested in a fresh, simple, and innovative way to develop people.

The ExecuDeck v2 is the second installment in a series of cards co-developed with a CEO to facilitate the conversations that matter most among leaders.

Context matters as much as content, and what’s around a thing makes as much difference as what’s in it. There are conditions where you can’t do what you’ve done a thousand times before, and there are conditions where hidden powers break through. Similarly, what looks obvious and reasonable in one context may be nonsensical in …

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Reboots have nothing to do with whether you stay or go, continue a relationship or conclude it. They mean you begin again with full power and no residual—absorb the learning, make internal shifts, and become unrecognizable.

This tool explores the most relevant themes showing up in the Alembic Coterie—such as the metaplot, embedded narratives, styles of dissent, implicit agreements, and wild alternative futures.

At times, reality bends. An immovable obstacle dissolves, or a missing piece arrives on cue. Things realign, defy the odds, and morph with shocking speed. The turn is unmistakable.

The most popular alchemy tool ever, this is an exploration of ten simple insights that will transform even your most difficult relationships. And enhance the ones that are already going well.

You live a tale—one of many possibilities, no more feasible or necessary than others. Within the tale, there are things that matter and don’t, interpretations that make actions imperative or all but impossible, and edges beyond which nothing is visible. Plotlines run through the scenes, characters take their place, and what’s going on is often …

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Conversation is the stuff of every relationship and interaction. Without it, we go nowhere. Yet, conversations unfold delicately, often pivoting on something almost imperceptible. Perhaps you reboot midstream when things take a bad turn or inject humor to dissipate tension. You may say something in a way that dispels the fog. Offer truth others would …

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In its highest form, calling someone out is an act of support—we extend the invitation for another person to look at something another way, better understand the consequences of their actions, take more into account, or step into a larger version of themselves. This is a combined tool exploring both Calling Out and Getting Called …

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Alchemists are many things—the transmuter, inner adept, quester, pursuer of good, mythmaker, and ally.

Two things—even outright oppositions—may fuse in brilliant partnership, work against each other, or join but never be more than a sum of their parts. They can forge a remarkable bond in an instant. Or never, no matter the resources.

Tough times often have themes—like transmutations, avoidings, releasings, threadings, and cheerings.

Resistance is part of the human experience. Understanding why you resist makes you more able to recognize these patterns in others—and know what approach is most likely to resolve the block.

How we end things is as important as how we begin them—they deserve a good birth and a good death. Often, we let situations atrophy until they become so toxic they painfully fracture. And we carry the qualities of the failed venture into our current and future ventures.

Teams should ask really big questions. What’s the shadow of loyalty, and where are we seeing it right now in the organization? What rubs are caused because we’ve assumed the value exchange motivating a person is something it’s not? What essential steps are we clear about that are also steps impossible to be certain about? …

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There are many elements of organizational ritual—awareness, raid entry, intensity, community, space, seeding, and identity.

Failure may be real and consequential. Or imaginary. It may relate to an absolute measure or happen only in your head. Much of what looks like failure is anything but. Yet it can sink into your heart and land in your gut. Then rise at any time to talk to you.

Everyone is trustworthy in the sense that how they act is the intersection of who they are and the contexts they occupy. You may get eaten by a hungry tiger if you get in its path, but it’s not because the tiger is untrustworthy. It’s because that’s the nature of the tiger.

This tool explores some of the tough rubs in relationships that have happened over the last year in the corporation we work with most. We think you will find many of them familiar too. This tool is an ongoing work and will expand over the next year.

Extremes accentuate polarities and make both the best and worst outcomes more likely. Most dynamics that show up in intensity were always in the background. They just didn’t manifest as strongly before. But disorientation and flux also make it easier to shift. Rather than doubling down on old behaviors, we want to explore the range …

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Some things are hard, unpleasant, and totally worth doing. Other things are hard, unpleasant, and completely unnecessary. Part of lightening our load is struggling with more of the things that matter and fewer of the things that don’t.

This tool applies the 13 elements of alchemy to teams. The corporation it was originally designed for is exploring 3-4 elements during each of their quarterly leadership development sessions this year.

Often the glitches that cause the most chaos outside of us stem from well-formed patterns inside of us. And these well-formed patterns have great potential to become our most spectacular gifts.

We are often aware of the orthodoxies that most limit us. What’s the first orthodoxy you challenged as a child? What orthodoxy is common with family or friends that you know to be untrue? What’s an orthodoxy that creates something of value, but when understood from a broader perspective, may occlude something of even greater …

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We often think of autonomy and collaboration in an inverse relationship—with more of the one comes less of the other. But collaboration without autonomy often creates cultures where nobody directs or assumes personal accountability. And autonomy without collaboration is stripped of the power of relationship and is starved of resource. In the healthiest cultures, everyone …

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13 tools exploring each element of alchemical transformation.