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Team Conditions Diagnostic

The survey moved. The work didn't.

A two-to-four-week evidence engagement for capable teams whose output doesn't match their talent. It names the specific condition constraining the work, shows you the evidence, and hands you the one intervention worth running first — with a 30-day check that it worked.

Surveys measure sentiment. Your problem is a condition.

Something structural in how the team's work actually happens — which is why a team can feel fine and still be blocked, and why the score can climb while output stays flat. Sentiment tools aren't wrong; they're usually deployed before anyone has diagnosed what the problem actually is.

Three commitments run through the whole engagement: conditions, not sentiment · evidence before verdict — every finding traces to something you can inspect · one bottleneck at a time — teams don't fail from twelve problems, they fail from one or two the other ten are compensating for.

How it works

The work itself testifies

Interviews and questionnaires report what people say. Real meeting transcripts show what the team does — how decisions close (or don't), who gets interrupted, which questions keep coming back. When what's said and what's shown disagree, that disagreement is usually the finding.

1

Leader intake

Frame, never finding

Context, symptoms, prior attempts, what "better" would look like.

2

Confidential interviews

High

3–6 team members, 30 minutes each. What people know but don’t say in meetings. Quoted without attribution only.

3

Meeting transcripts

High — the differentiator

2–4 real meetings, recorded with the team’s consent and announced in advance. How decisions actually happen, what interrupts, which loops never close.

4

Team questionnaire

Triangulation

All members, ~15 minutes, async. Whole-team coverage — including where the leader’s read and the team’s diverge.

5

Work artifacts

Corroborating

Optional: planning docs, dashboards, a channel sample — whether systems exist versus get used.

AI reads the evidence base at depth — every transcript, interview, and response, against all twelve conditions — which is what makes this affordable for a team your size. The diagnosis, the argument, and every sentence of the report are the practitioner's.

The shape of the engagement

Four weeks, then proof at day 30

Week 0

Scoping call · team and meeting selection · consent one-pager to every participant · questionnaire out

Week 1

Evidence: leader intake, interviews, meeting recordings collected, questionnaire closes

Week 2

Synthesis: each stream read separately, then triangulated · report drafted, every finding carrying its evidence

Week 3

The debrief — 90 minutes with the whole team. Findings pressure-tested together; the intervention chosen with the team, not handed down. The 30-day indicator is agreed in the room

Day 30

Follow-through call: did the indicator move, and what’s honestly next — including "done"

The team knows everything that's collected

Before week one, every participant receives a plain-language consent one-pager. It isn't fine print — a team that trusts the process gives honest evidence, and honest evidence is the product.

  • Interviews are confidential; quotes appear without attribution, edited to remove identifying phrasing
  • No individual is scored, ranked, or named in any finding — the team is diagnosed, never its people
  • Meetings selected for recording are announced in advance; nobody is recorded unaware
  • Transcripts are processed on the practitioner’s own machine and deleted 30 days after the follow-through call — confirmed in writing
  • Anyone can ask for their words to be excluded, no reason needed, up to report delivery

What you receive

The whole diagnosis, on one page

The Team Conditions Map: all twelve conditions read under four plain layers, the bottleneck named, the first move and its 30-day indicator. This one below is from the sample engagement — fictional, and labeled that way on purpose.

Team Conditions Map

Fictional sample — “Relay”

People

how the humans are doing

Tuned Emotionsi.e., emotional bandwidthWorking · Confirmed
Focused Bodyi.e., energy, recovery, sustained focusNot read
Open Mindi.e., cognitive load, mental flexibilityNot read

Tools & Systems

what the work runs on

Intentional Spacei.e., focus protectionNot read
Optimized Toolsi.e., tool fit & frictionWorking · Confirmed
Feedback Systemsi.e., signal loopsBlocked · Confirmed — the bottleneck

Direction

where the work is pointed

Generative Storyi.e., the team narrativeStrained · downstream
Clear Missioni.e., mission clarityStrained · downstream
Empowered Rolei.e., role ownershipNot read

Values

what's underneath

Grounding Valuesi.e., values congruenceNot read
Ignited Curiosityi.e., real engagementWorking · Confirmed
Visualized Visioni.e., shared visionNot read
WorkingStrainedBlockedNot read — marked honestly, not guessed at

The first intervention

The closing loop: every decision leaves the weekly with an owner and a date; every shipment gets one adoption number, reviewed next week.

The 30-day indicator

Decisions closed in the room: from 1 in 5 to 4 in 5 — counted from the team's own notes. No tooling required.

Team Conditions Report

The full read across all twelve conditions, the bottleneck argued with its evidence, what to do first — and what not to do first.

The debrief

90 minutes with the whole team. A diagnosis the team helped confirm gets implemented; one handed down gets shelved.

30-day follow-through

One observable indicator, agreed in the room, checked together at day 30. So the engagement ends in an answer, not a binder.

No case studies yet. Here's the sample instead.

This offer is new, and we'd rather show you a labeled fictional sample than an invented success story. The full method was run on a synthetic engagement — a fictional 12-person product team called “Relay” — and the complete report is public: the evidence base, the twelve-condition read, the bottleneck argument, the intervention. Exactly what you'd receive, honestly labeled.

Read the full sample report

What this is not

Not a performance review, not conflict mediation, not a reorg proposal, not a culture program. Individuals are never scored — if the evidence surfaces something outside diagnostic scope, it goes to you privately as a flag, never into the report.

A lighter first step exists

The 90-minute Team Conditions Audit reads the same twelve conditions from your account of the team — one session, one most-likely condition, one first intervention. The Audit tells you what I can see from your description; the Diagnostic tells you what the team's own work says. Ask about either.

Teams of 5–252–4 weeks, mostly async for the teamRemote or on-site debrief

Pricing is scoped on the first call — team size and evidence depth — and you'll get a plain number, not a proposal deck.

Start the conversation

Want the finding to land person by person afterward? That's the Flow Map Session.