Our approach

Our approach: relationships and the real work, never one without the other

Many difficulties presented as problems with people are problems of system: what each person sees from where they stand, what they infer from it without checking, what they don’t dare say — and the way the work is organised around all of that.

Our craft consists in creating the conditions for those things to be said and to be heard, then in making them the material from which the collective can build new ways of working that outlast our intervention.

What we believe

The problem is rarely where it is pointed out

In any organisation several points of view coexist, all of them legitimate. As long as they stay implicit, they produce misunderstandings that everyone puts down to someone else’s character. So we don’t look for who is responsible for a situation, but for the way each person contributes to it — including whoever leads, and that is often where something shifts.

What this rules out: supporting a person their team has designated as the problem.

Changing relationships without changing the work doesn’t hold

Une équipe en difficulté cumule presque toujours deux choses : des relations abîmées et une organisation du travail qui ne tient plus. Agir sur l’une sans l’autre produit soit un bon moment sans effet tangible, soit un tableau que plus personne ne remplit sincèrement au bout de quelques semaines. Nous tenons les deux ensemble.

What this rules out: team-building offsites that touch nothing in how the work is actually organised. See how this plays out in team coaching →

You don’t change by listening alone

Understanding is not enough to change a practice. Trying, getting it wrong and adjusting is. Our work therefore gives theory the smallest possible place and experimentation the largest, on the situations participants bring themselves.

What this rules out: purely top-down input and textbook cases.

What doesn’t take root in the rituals disappears

Support that changes nothing in the way people interact has served no purpose. The practices adopted have to come back into the existing rituals — team meeting, incident review, one-to-one — otherwise they fade within weeks, however good the time spent together was.

What this rules out: delivering a report and leaving.

Where this approach comes from

Four frameworks and one experience. For each, what it brings concretely in a session — rather than a list of labels.

Clear Leadership®

Developed by Gervase Bushe, professor of organisation development, it is the most effective approach we know for getting a team out of the unspoken. It provides a language for describing your own experience without judging anyone else’s, and for checking your interpretations instead of taking them as fact. RE-LIER is one of the few certified providers in France, and Matthieu Bourgue co-translated the reference book published in 2022. In practice: it is what allows a retrospective, or a conversation, to be useful instead of turning into a courtroom. Clear Leadership training →

Gestalt

Certified practitioner (EFB). What it brings: attention to what is happening now, in the room, rather than to the account given of it afterwards. A disagreement that replays in front of us says more than its minutes. In practice: it is what sometimes makes us interrupt a discussion to ask what has just happened between two people.

Systemic practice

A difficulty belongs to no one: it circulates. What it brings: the question “how am I contributing to what I deplore?”, put to everyone, the leader included. In practice: it is what keeps one-to-one coaching connected to the team instead of becoming a place to complain. See coaching for executives →

Sociodynamics

Matthieu Bourgue leads the training activity of the Institut de la Sociodynamique, which works on power relations, alliances and stakeholder strategies within organisations. What it brings: a dialectical approach, and a lens that proves useful as soon as a transformation runs into something other than a skills problem. In practice: it is what makes it possible to tell an opponent from someone merely hesitant, and to adapt your management to the real balance of positions and forces.

Seventeen years in leadership

Before becoming a coach in 2014, Matthieu led teams and business units, in France and internationally. That allows him to know from the inside what a leadership team under pressure lives through, and what an outside practitioner does not always see.

What we don’t do

• Personality assessments and typologies: they classify people, they don’t change their relationships
• Ready-made diagnoses: an analysis the team has not built, it does not put into practice
• Spectacular offsites with no follow-through: the effect lasts three weeks
• Methods applied as they come: we take what serves your activity and leave the rest
• Work on a person the others have designated as the problem

And if your situation calls for an answer other than ours — a hire, an organisational decision, a call nobody wants to make — we tell you before we start rather than three months in.

Our values

Let’s talk about your situation

A first 30-minute conversation, with no commitment, to understand your context and see whether our way of working matches what you are looking for. If it does not, we will say so.