The Pilot

If you’ve read The Possibility, you understand the case for a capacity-based approach. If you’ve read The Program, you understand what the True Leadership Intensive is and how it works.

This page answers the next question:

It covers how we partner to identify where increased leadership capacity could create the most value, design a focused pilot around it, and establish a clear line of sight from leadership growth to the business and team outcomes that matter.

Because ultimately, the strongest case for this work won’t be made by us. It will be made by your own leaders, working through real challenges and creating results you can actually see.

Who are we working with?

We begin with a focused pilot of four leaders - small enough for real depth and personal attention, and large enough to produce meaningful, visible evidence of what this work makes possible.

Two decisions shape who that group should be. The first is format: whether to develop individual leaders drawn from across the organization, or an intact team. The second is population: where, specifically, increased leadership capacity has the greatest potential to create organizational value. The two sections that follow take each in turn.

A pilot cohort can be formed in one of two ways, and the choice shapes what the pilot can lead to. In both, the pilot itself works the same way: every participant works through their own individual adaptive challenge during the Intensive. We always begin with individual work, because that is where awareness first takes root.

Individuals Pilot: Bring together a selection of emerging leaders, high-potentials, succession candidates, or leaders from a particular level of function. This provides evidence across a range of roles and situations, while developing leaders whose individual growth is consequential in its own right. It also allows you to be highly intentional about who participates, selecting leaders you believe would benefit most from the work or concentrating the opportunity within a particular leadership population.

Team Pilot: Run the pilot with a group that shares a meaningful working relationship, such as an intact leadership team, a cross-functional group, or a newly formed team. Each participant still works through their own individual adaptive challenge, while doing the work together naturally strengthens shared awareness, communication, trust, and ways of working.

A team pilot also creates a natural path to collective work. Once team members have developed greater awareness of their own blind spots, assumptions, and limits, the team can begin examining shared adaptive challenges: strategies that stall, silos that persist, or recurring patterns that resist process fixes. These challenges operate through the team’s shared lens, not just through any one individual. Extending the work to address a team or group’s collective adaptive challenges is available as an option for a team pilot.

Both approaches begin with individual adaptive growth. The right pilot simply depends on where you most want that growth to create value, which is what the questionnaire below is designed to help you determine.

What are we working on?

Once the pilot population is chosen, we are able to identify the focus of the intensive for each leader. This is where a general intention to “develop these leaders” becomes a specific, measurable line from a business outcome to the lack of leadership capacity that’s constraining it.

There are four stages, and they run in order.

The Big Potential is each participant’s focus in the True Leadership Intensive, and the anchor for everything in Step 3.

Cost, objectives, measures, and value - building ROI into the engagement from the start

Much leadership development is evaluated primarily at the level of participant experience. That makes sense when everyone is being trained on the same competency, but it also makes it difficult to connect what happened in the program to what changed in the work.

The True Leadership Intensive is structured differently. Each participant begins with a specific adaptive challenge that is relevant to them, connects that challenge to a Big Potential and defined organizational objectives, and establishes the basis for measurement before the work begins.

That creates a clear line from the challenge, to the intended growth, to the outcomes that matter, to the value of the movement that occurs.

The four steps below are how we do it.

We begin by looking at what the adaptive challenge is already costing, both individually and organizationally.

The specificity of the challenge is what makes this possible. Rather than measuring against a broad competency, we can look at the actual impact of one clearly defined challenge: the time it consumes, the decisions or outcomes it delays, the opportunities it limits, and the drag it creates for the people around the leader.

Where a financial estimate can reasonably be made, we make it conservatively. A defensible low estimate is far more useful than an impressive one.

Having identified a specific Adaptive Challenge and corresponding Big Potential as the focus for the Intensive, we can define the specific development objectives that would represent meaningful growth in that Big Potential.

The objectives describe what would change if the individual leader genuinely makes progress in the area of their Big Potential.

This gives us the next link in the chain:

Organizational Goal → Adaptive Challenge → Big Potential → Development Objectives

The organizational objective establishes why the growth matters. The individual development objectives define what that growth would actually look like in practice.

With the objectives defined, we establish the observable indicators that will demonstrate meaningful progress, including the relevant baseline and, where appropriate, specific targets.

This is where growth in the area of the Big Potential becomes measurable.These measures can be baselined at the beginning of the engagement and reviewed again as the work progresses.

This step requires some discipline. Meaningful ROI depends on agreeing in advance about what movement would look like and being willing to measure it. TLI provides a concrete challenge and a defined set of outcomes against which that measurement can occur.

While some measures will move within the five-week Intensive. Others may require a longer window for sustainable measurement and can be reviewed again at 30, 60, or 90 days.

Finally, we evaluate what the movement created.

We begin with the clearest, most defensible value connected to the participant’s Big Potential, then look outward. Because adaptive challenges rarely affect only the individual experiencing them, the value of growth tends to spread and compound.

We consider value in layers:

• One person, one challenge: Capture the value created by reducing the cost and impact of the specific adaptive challenge.
• Impact across others: Account for how the leader’s growth improves the effectiveness, ownership, and experience of the people around them.
• Organizational goal achievement: Measure the value created as that growth translates into stronger delivery against the business and team outcomes that matter.
• Across the cohort: Consider the compounding value created when several leaders make meaningful progress at the same time.
• Long-term capacity: Recognize the enduring value of leaders developing the ability to identify and grow through future adaptive challenges.

The deepest return is not simply a leader who performs better. It is a leader who keeps getting better. Where the impact can reasonably be translated into financial value, we calculate it. Where it cannot, we evaluate the relevant operational, behavioral, and organizational outcomes directly.

The goal is not to manufacture an impressive ROI number. It is to understand, as clearly and completely as possible, what changed, what that change made possible, and what it is worth.