Learning
Essential Skills & Mindsets for Performance in Today’s
VUCAO World
‣ Complexity Handling
‣ Enabling Conversations
‣ Building Autonomous,
Self-Organized Teams
Evolving Organization Development for Real Value Creation in Change, Transformation & Innovation
We are an Expert Tribe of Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Design Thinkers, Lean Practitioners, and ICF (International Coach Federation) Professional Coaches
Social and digital technology is rapidly transforming the way we communicate and interact. Businesses and organizations are facing urgent pressure to innovate and transform to adapt to fundamentally changing customer behavior.
The exponentially expanding complexity of leaders, teams and organizations’ need for change renders no one tool or methodology effective for today’s Organization Development (“OD”).
OD today therefore is a multi-disciplinary and exploratory practice. The modern day OD professional is required to wear many hats as coach, trainer, facilitator, consultant and mentor, integrating a vast array of conventional and emerging people and process management tools, frameworks and mental models for delivering work. We are such professionals.
VUCAO Resilience & KSA Transfer
Our mission is to help leaders, teams and organizations build the capability to perform, function and operate in any volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and crucially, overwhelming (hence not just VUCA, but VUCAO) condition, situation and environment.
Our approach to achieving this is heavily learning oriented. KSA (Knowledge, Skill, Ability, Attitude and Aptitude) transferring the many learnings from Design Thinking, Agile Scrum and Lean with training and facilitation, and tapping into the individual and collective creativity and resourcefulness of people through coaching are both integral parts of our work.
We coach both organizations and individuals.
Themes & Programs
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Testimonials
Coach Takeshi’s Insights

Coach Takeshi’s coaching journal. Sharing the many mental models that Coach Takeshi actually uses for client sessions.

The Reflective Leader and Learning Organization Guide
Coach Takeshi’s collection of thoughts on helping leaders use the power of inquiry and introspection for building the mental facility needed in developing Learning Organizations.
Latest Posts
Agile Organization Development Practitioner’s Community: Why, How and What
Join us at: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13940775 Dear members of the Agile Organization Development Practitioner’s Community, thank you for joining and welcome to our place of mutual professional learning and growth. In the spirit of practicing what we... Read More
Curious Active Listening Mindset (CALM) as a Leadership Modality
Directional Talk, or Dialogue? Previously I shared CALM for receiving critical feedback. You can also have a Curious Active Listening Mindset for giving feedback. In fact, from directional conversations to dialogue, CALM can be a... Read More
How to Receive Critical Feedback in a Breeze: Try CALM – “Curious Active Listening Mindset”
Receiving critical feedback is dreadful. Our defensive routines get triggered and however we might understand that the feedback giver is speaking with good intention, it’s still difficult to listen. With a Curious Active Listening Mindset,... Read More
Welcome to Design Thinking
Download the deck in PDF | Watch on YouTube Transcript Read More
Learn Design Thinking in 30 minutes: Origami Gift Exercise
Here’s a rapid Design Thinking practice exercise that I do in my training sessions. It’s really simple. You pair up in buddies and by gifting each other an origami craft, you can go through the... Read More
Structured + Unstructured Learning, Vertical + Horizontal Learning, Shu-Ha-Ri (守破離)
I use three mental models to describe my pedagogy (theory and practice of education): Structured + Unstructured Learning Lecturing, teaching, textbook learning fall into the realm of structured learning. Coaching, mentoring, parental conversations are examples... Read More
Coach Takeshi’s 2020 Wrap Up and 2021 Wishes
310. Wow. This is how many people I coached in 2020. Now of course, I didn’t do this alone: I do predominantly organizational work so this was across 24 teams in 10 client organizations, delivered... Read More
Three types of Empathy: Cognitive, Emotional, Compassionate Empathy
There are three types of empathy: cognitive, emotional and compassionate empathy; each respectively the desire to understand, to feel and to help and support. EQ guru Daniel Goleman, in reference to psychologist Paul Ekman, elegantly... Read More
Feed-Forward Positive Feedback with the FFF Feed-Forward Formula
When we think of feedbacking, we tend to just do “corrective feedbacking”; i.e. feedbacking on things to improve. Don’t do this, do that better. We know from Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Psychology that “positive feedbacking”... Read More
Most Read
Lean, Lean Manufacturing, Lean Startup: Clarified
Lean: not just a hype word for efficiency Yah sure, we do “lean” here and we operate a tight ship with just a few of us doing everything – you know, everyone is multi-taskin’. “Lean”... Read More
Knowing to Stop – A Confucius Teaching
Confucius’ 7 spaces of learning Knowing to stop – is a simple notion but difficult to practice skill. In “Great Learning (大学)”, written around 2,500 years ago by one of his first disciples Zengzi (曾子),... Read More
Try Design Thinking + Scrum: A Powerful Hybrid Agile Approach
Classic Scrum’s Achilles’ heel One of the weak areas of classic Scrum, in my opinion, is the relative simplicity of the ideation phase. “What to build” is sometimes an arbitrary discussion during the Scrum Backlog... Read More
Radical Candor: My Go To Feedback Routine
In search of better feedbacking As a coach and mentor, challenging people is a natural part of my work, and sometimes they are in the form of tough messages. Not always though, the messages go... Read More
A Pretty Good Summary of Lean, Agile Scrum
Glossary: Lean, Agile, Scrum, Sprint, Kanban Consider Lean & Agile as pretty much the same thing, they are basically really good approaches to handling projects with a lot of uncertainties, which is why successful startups... Read More
How to Get Scrum Right on First Attempt
Pilot objective Within the Scrum community, there is abundant writing suggesting that the two main factors of Scrum implementation failure are: (1) sub-optimal team structure at the onset, and (2) the Scrum Team failing to... Read More
Strategy Session Facilitation with Design Thinking & Liberating Structures
Why brainstorming doesn’t work That was fun, but… Why do we get that slight, lingering feeling of doubt and dissatisfaction after brainstorming sessions? Here’s why: Group dynamics: 80/20 rule applies. Domination: The vocal minority dominate... Read More
Waterfall Agile: Addressing the Irony of Delivering Agile Transformation with Waterfall
The Irony of Delivering Agile Transformation with Waterfall Agile and digital transformation projects are abundant today. The irony is that too frequently, they are planned and delivered in essentially waterfall project management style. Waterfall is... Read More
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