A reading group for your leadership team.
A reading-group bundle for a leadership team that shares a real problem. Your directors read the same book, then sit down with the author to work on a real problem your team is carrying, such as a change that keeps stalling or a restructure that is fighting the work. It is a working session on your own situation, not a lecture.
What your team gets
Copies for the group
Enough copies for everyone in the room, so the whole team reads the same book and arrives with the same questions.
A session with the author
Chris sits with your team and works on one real situation you bring, such as a change that keeps stalling or a plan your people are grinding against. You leave with clear next steps to take back to the work.
The Five Passes between meetings
The Five Passes is the solo practice from the book. Your people use it on their own situations between sessions, so the reading turns into action at work.
Who it suits
A leadership team that has watched a change programme underdeliver, an operating model bought in from elsewhere quietly stall, or good people grind against a plan that looked tidy on paper. Delivery directors, heads of change, senior managers responsible for structure. The kind of team that wants rigour without jargon, has sat through enough off-the-shelf courses, and wants to test an idea against its own organisation.
It suits a team with a shared problem more than a room of strangers. The book carries the argument, the session puts it to work on your situation, and the Five Passes keep it going after the author has left. The Five Passes are not sequential steps, and there is nothing to score.
What a session looks like
A session runs about ninety minutes. Your team is in the room, everyone has read the book, and you bring one live situation to work on. Say it is a change programme that keeps stalling, on its third relaunch. Chris starts by getting it stated plainly, in the room's own words, until everyone recognises the problem they are carrying. That can take longer than you would expect, and it is where the work begins. There are no slides. The point is to get the situation clear enough that the team can work on it.
The group then works the situation through questions rather than advice. The questions are practical ones: who actually gets to decide, how far they sit from the people who can see the work, which rule is getting in the way, and whether this room can change that rule or only report it. The questions come from the book, so nobody arrives cold, and Chris keeps them anchored to the situation in the room.
About an hour in, things often start to move. A director sees the rule she keeps enforcing is not hers to change, and names the person who could. The programme was stalling because the decision lives two floors up from the work. That is what the session is built to reach: the situation stops being a vague frustration and becomes a set of specific things people can act on.
It ends with each person taking away one clear next step that is theirs to make that week, on the situation they came in with.
Why a group rather than a course
A course teaches you the material. A group works on your actual situation, which is the harder thing to buy off the shelf. A team that reads the same book arrives with the same words for the same problem. Most rooms cannot work a stuck situation because everyone is describing a different version of it. Shared reading fixes that before the session starts, so the ninety minutes go on the problem and not on agreeing what it is.
A course also leaves when the trainer does. A group keeps running, because the people in it carry it. Your team uses the Five Passes on their own situations between sessions, so the reading turns into a habit that outlasts the room. The team gets better at seeing its own organisation, and keeps getting better after the author has left. An off-the-shelf course is the same for everyone who buys it. A reading group is not, because the session is built around your own situation.
Chris Preece has spent decades leading change in emergency services, national programmes and UK central government. Of his years in the fire and rescue market he says: “We helped take the product from a sixth of the UK market to a third, against the established suppliers.” He was part of the team that took Registers of Scotland from paper to digital, end to end, in three weeks through the first weeks of the pandemic, work that ten years of plans had written off as too expensive and too risky. A reading group brings that same attention to your team's own situation.
Tell us about your team
Tell us who is in the room and the situation you are carrying, and we will come back with how a group would work for you. A free reading-group kit is on the way too, four sheets for running the book together with the Five Passes card as Sheet 4, and we will send it to you when it ships. The kit is yours to copy and hand on; one email is the only gate it will ever have. No obligation, and nothing you do not ask for.