Calculated risk-taking practices
Significant achievement requires risk. Collective courage involves calculated risk-taking—risks that are proportionate to potential benefits, informed by analysis, and bounded.…
Acting A1
Courage
Standing up for fundamental values, making decisions, taking action, and, when needed, questioning and disrupting established structures and views.
Tools for this skill (10)
Courage Prompt
Sustainability work often requires courage—to speak up, to challenge unsustainable practices, to maintain commitments under pressure. This practice helps identify what responsib…
Creating permission for courageous voice
One of the most common failures of courage in teams is silence—not raising concerns, not voicing disagreement. Establish explicit norms that speaking up about concerns is expect…
Making Courageous Decisions
Participants practice recognizing fear in the moment of decision and acting on values anyway — informed by Theory U's letting-go and letting-come: releasing the safe option, all…
My Natural Next Step
A two-hour workshop for the values–behaviour gap: each participant identifies a small sustainability-related change they keep avoiding because it is uncomfortable, explores with…
Standing firm on principles under pressure
Teams regularly face pressure to compromise their principles—including pressure on environmental and social responsibility commitments. Clarify in advance what principles the te…
Step Up Your Courage
A scale-walking coaching format in triads: each person places their current courage level for a real challenge on a physical 1–10 line, walks the scale, visualises the journey u…
The Difficult Conversation Initiation
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Courage (VCoL collection): Identify a conversation you have been avoiding. Ask: 'What is the cost of continuing to avoid this?' Set a ti…
The Small Stand
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for courage: whenever an easier option would quietly compromise a value — staying silent, going along, softening the truth — pause, name the…
The Voice Despite Fear
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Courage (VCoL collection): When you notice yourself staying silent despite having something important to contribute, pause. Acknowledge…
Also develops it (19)
"How we work together" dialogues
To create space for explicit discussion of team dynamics. Periodically dedicate time to dialogue focused on how the team works together. Topics might include: • How do we typica…
Anticipating and addressing emerging issues
Many problems are easier to address when they are small than when they have grown into crises. Create regular practices for scanning the horizon: • What is coming that the team…
Building and maintaining psychological safety
To create an environment where team members feel safe to express themselves, take risks, and be vulnerable. Psychological safety is built through consistent behavior over time:…
Building norms that welcome constructive challenge
To create a team culture where questioning and challenging ideas is expected and valued. Deliberately cultivate norms: • Explicitly discuss and agree that constructive challenge…
Compassionate accountability
To address performance issues and concerns in ways that maintain care for the person while being honest about the problem. Compassion does not mean avoiding difficult conversati…
Constructive disagreement practices
Disagreement is inevitable and can be productive or destructive. Establish norms that make disagreement safe and productive: • Focus on issues rather than people—critique ideas,…
Creating permission for productive failure
To reduce the fear of failure that suppresses experimentation. Explicitly establish that thoughtful experiments that do not succeed are valued, not punished. Distinguish: • Prod…
Creative Destruction (aka TRIZ)
Serious fun with a subversive question: "what could we do to reliably achieve the WORST possible result?" Groups list that anti-recipe, then — the uncomfortable step — mark ever…
Dedicated exploration time
To protect time specifically for creative exploration. Allocate regular time where the team explores new ideas without the requirement to deliver immediate outcomes. During this…
Designated challenger role
To ensure important proposals receive genuine critical examination. When discussing significant decisions or plans, assign one team member the role of designated challenger. Thi…
Despair Ritual
A communal ritual in which sorrows for the world are spoken archetypally — moving between small groups and the whole circle, voices joined and witnessed — building emotional sol…
Empathy Walk
Choose a person significantly different from you — across a boundary of politics, faith, class, life experience — invite them for a walk, and practice holding space across that…
Periodic values-behavior alignment review
To examine whether actual behavior aligns with stated values. Review the team's stated values. For each value, discuss: 1. Where have we lived this value well recently? What are…
Pre-Mortem Analysis
Before finalizing a significant plan, the team imagines it is months later and the initiative has failed completely — then everyone writes down why. Causes are clustered and the…
Public Narrative (Self / Us / Now)
Marshall Ganz's leadership storytelling craft: build a Story of Self (a choice point that shows why you are called), a Story of Us (shared values and experience of the community…
Taking initiative without waiting for permission
In many teams, initiative is stifled by assumption that action requires explicit permission. Create explicit permission for initiative. Make clear that people are expected to ac…
Tonglen Meditation
The Tibetan practice of exchange: breathing IN the suffering of another — or one's own, or the world's — as heavy, hot darkness, and breathing OUT relief, spaciousness, and well…
Truth Mandala
A ritual structure for honoring pain for the world. The circle is divided into quadrants holding symbolic objects — a stone (fear), dead leaves (sorrow), a stick (anger), an emp…
What I Need From You (WINFY)
Functions or teams that depend on each other each formulate their top needs from the others as crisp requests. Spokespeople exchange them in a public circle — and answer only "y…