Two people, one idea,
and the world’s greatest management thinker.

Our story

In 2007, Henry Mintzberg had a problem. He’d spent decades studying management and knew that traditional training — lectures, case studies, executive MBA programs — wasn’t changing how managers actually managed.

The real learning, he observed, happened in the hallways. In the conversations between sessions. When managers shared their real challenges with peers who understood.

So he asked: what if we built the whole program around that conversation? What if the discussion was the learning?

There was a second idea underneath the first one, and it took longer to become obvious. Writing in OD Practitioner in 2011, Mintzberg put it this way: you should never send a changed person back to an unchanged organization — and in management development programs, we always do. What was needed instead was learning “connected to the collective experiences in the workplace, so that we can develop better organizations in the process of developing better managers.” That is why the unit here is a group of colleagues rather than an individual sent away and returned. More on how organizations use this for culture and change work.

Phil LeNir, a software engineer turned management consultant, took that idea and turned it into a platform. Expert-authored guidebooks that structure 90-minute conversations. No instructor. No lecture. The guidebook provides the framework; the participants do the hard work of reflecting on their own experiences and articulating them to peers — and it’s that process of structured reflection and forced articulation that creates the real learning.