One goal. Ten weeks. An end date.
For when something specific has to change this quarter — six sessions against one written goal, with the goal written down before the first session and measured at the last.
Both are useful. What is not useful is a series of pleasant conversations with no delta.
Coaching is not disguised consulting. If I solve it for you, it will not survive my leaving.
Ten weeks. Open-ended arrangements drift into comfortable and stop producing change.
Who it is for
- Adopting a way of working — Shape Up in a company that is not Basecamp, or a process that fits your constraints rather than a book's.
- Making delivery predictable without adding process nobody wanted.
- Building a metric tree that survives an executive review.
- Preparing a promotion case, a leadership interview loop, or a board conversation.
- Repairing a product–engineering–data relationship after a bad quarter.
The shape of it
- Format
- 6 sessions over 10 weeks
- Session
- 60 minutes, remote
- Anchor
- One written goal
I hold a CTO seat day to day. That is the point: you are not being taught by someone describing a job they left, and the material is drawn from a job I am still doing.
What actually happens
Six sessions across ten weeks against one goal you name at the start, with the goal written down before the first session and checked at the last.
- Write the goal
Before session one, in one paragraph, with a way to tell whether it happened. Most of the work is here.
- Six sessions
Roughly fortnightly. Each one ends with something you will do before the next.
- Work between
The sessions are checkpoints, not the sprint. The change happens in the gaps.
- The closing session
Against the written goal. Met, partly met, or missed — and in every case, why.
What you leave with
- The goal met, or a genuine understanding of what stopped it.
- A working practice you built yourself, which is why it survives.
- Written notes from every session.
- A clean ending rather than an indefinite arrangement.
What it costs
€2,000 including VAT for the whole sprint — the number you pay if you are buying it yourself. A flat fee for one person, covering all six sessions.
Partly, yes — and you should. Most of what I teach has been written down well by somebody. If a book solves your problem I would rather tell you which one than sell you an hour; the reading list goes out either way, and it is the cheapest thing I give anybody.
Here is what a book cannot do, and it is the whole of the difference:
- It cannot answer the follow-up. The value is almost never in the principle. It is in the second question — yes, but mine reports to the CFO — and a book has no answer to that because it was written for everyone.
- It has not read your situation. Bring the actual estimate, the actual architecture decision, the actual person who used to be your peer. Generic advice is easy to agree with and almost impossible to apply, which is why so much of it gets read and nothing changes.
- It will not disagree with you. You can finish a book with your original plan intact and a warm feeling of confirmation. That is the failure mode nobody notices. A conversation can push back, and most of the value is in the place where it does.
- It cannot tell you which of three plausible options survives your organisation. Books are good at what holds in general. They are bad at what is true of your company on a Tuesday, and that is usually the decision you are actually stuck on.
- You have already read the book. Most people who arrive here have. The gap is rarely knowledge. It is the confidence to act on it against someone more senior who disagrees.
If the first session tells you the answer was in a book after all, that is a good outcome and a cheap one. I will say so.
Is this the right thing for you?
Thirty minutes. You describe what is going wrong; I tell you which of these actually fits, including when the answer is none of them.