Programs
Capability your leaders keep.
Build your leaders’ ability to see clearly before they act.
Bring us in when you're seeing:
The same pattern can have different causes. Our work helps leaders investigate what's driving it and choose a response that fits.
- Fast agreement followed by slow execution.
- More evidence without a decision.
- Clear plans that repeatedly lose momentum.
- Important concerns raised after the meeting.
- Decisions reopened without a clear reason.
The Read Lab
Strengthen the judgment that puts your leadership skills to work
A leader can know how to have a difficult conversation and still misread why the conversation is difficult. They can know how to lead change and misunderstand what people are responding to.
The Read Lab builds the diagnostic capability behind those choices.
Built on a decade of Coaching Metaskills delivery, the Lab develops self-awareness, observation, diagnosis, and intervention. The underlying workshop has maintained a Net Promoter Score of at least 95 across ten years of delivery.
Participants draw on more than 50 realistic scenarios, rotating through leading, observing, and experiencing the team’s response. They test interpretations, choose interventions, review what happened, and practice again. Three days provide concentrated cycles of application and feedback.
The questions stay simple: What do I see? What is driving it? What does this moment need? Leaders learn to recognize their own defaults and make more deliberate use of their existing skills.
What the engagement includes
- Three days of facilitated capability building for a leadership team or cohort.
- Self-awareness, bias recognition, observation, differential diagnosis, and intervention practice.
- Facilitated labs using realistic scenarios and participant leadership situations.
- Repeated practice, peer and facilitator feedback, and a focused development mission.
What leaders leave with
- Greater awareness of personal defaults and how they shape a read.
- Practice separating observation from interpretation and testing competing explanations.
- An intervention repertoire and experience choosing when to act or hold back.
- A shared diagnostic language and a focused mission for applying it at work.
Who it serves
Intact leadership teams and manager cohorts responsible for people, decisions, and team performance. Especially relevant when leaders keep revisiting the same problems, jump to advice, or apply familiar tools without understanding why those tools are not working.
The Read in Practice
Build the capability inside the work itself
Diagnostic Leadership becomes valuable when leaders use it under pressure—in a meeting, a difficult conversation, or a decision where the situation is still unfolding.
The Read in Practice is a three-month coaching and capability-building engagement for one leadership team or defined manager cohort.
Using the established Coaching Metaskills development process, each leader selects a growth edge, designs a practical mission, and applies it in real meetings and conversations. Structured observation and coaching help them see where new capability is emerging and where habit still takes over.
The cycle is specific: assess, plan a mission, observe application, and integrate what was learned. Participants use the Growth Canvas to decide whether to continue, adapt, or complete their mission. The focus is observable practice in the situations they already face.
The work helps leaders choose more deliberately among coaching, feedback, facilitation, and direction. The team builds a shared practice of asking: What do I see? What is driving it? What does this moment need?
What the engagement includes
- Three months of development for one leadership team or defined cohort.
- A focused growth edge, development mission, and Growth Canvas for each participant.
- Structured observation and feedback using agreed live, recorded, or self-observed work.
- Coaching and integration reviews to examine evidence, adjust practice, and choose the next step.
What leaders develop
- A more reliable practice of noticing defaults before choosing a response.
- Evidence of application through mission records and structured observation.
- Experience adapting interventions in response to what actually happens.
- A repeatable method for continued capability development beyond the engagement.
Who it serves
Leadership teams and cohorts with a current challenge and opportunities to practice in their work. Available after The Read Lab or as a standalone engagement with an introductory foundation. Participant numbers, coaching cadence, and observation access are agreed in the proposal.
The Read Keynote
The Leadership Skill We Should Have Learned First
Your team may not be broken. Your read may be.
In cave diving, there’s a layer called the halocline, where fresh water meets salt. Swim into it and the world blurs. The walls shimmer. Move a few feet, and it’s crystal clear again. Nothing in the cave changed. Only the water you were looking through.
Leaders live in that layer. The quiet meeting looks like disengagement. The fast yes looks like alignment. We trust what we see. We act on what we see. And the problem keeps coming back.
In this keynote, Jeremiah Gardner introduces Diagnostic Leadership — the discipline of seeing what’s really happening in a room before you respond. Leadership has an enormous response industry: coaching, feedback, facilitation. Almost none of it teaches the step that comes first.
Drawing on cave diving and two decades advising Nike, Disney, and GE, Jeremiah gives audiences three questions for their next meeting: What do I see? What is driving it? What does this moment need?
This is the step that makes your leadership skills work. A bad read makes a good response a matter of luck.
The Audience Will Leave With:
- A three-question practice for reading any room before responding: What do I see? What is driving it? What does this moment need?
- A sharper eye for what’s actually driving what they see — because the same sign can have very different sources
- A way to catch their default and choose what the moment needs
This Keynote Serves Leaders & Teams Who:
- Lead teams that feel stuck and have already tried the usual fixes
- Have plenty of leadership tools but keep reaching for the wrong one
- Face silence, friction, or fast agreement they can’t quite explain
- Want managers who read the room before they try to fix it
What supports the practice
The Read.
Every participant gets a copy. It's the intellectual foundation the programs build on.
Beyond programs
For larger organizational work under uncertainty, we also offer advisory engagements.
We design the engagement around your team
We'll discuss the situations your leaders face, who should participate, and the depth of practice they need. From there, we'll recommend a starting point, define the scope together, and send a clear proposal.
Participant numbers, cadence, and format are agreed in the proposal.