Team Vision: Claiming the Space Your Team Already Has
A free micro-course on building toward something you can recognize
Recently I took some quiet time to turn an ongoing observation about team performance into something usable. I built a short Team Vision course that captures how teams step into a higher level of ownership—and how they drift away from it over time.
In every team there is a space that often goes unclaimed—not because it is forbidden or withheld, but because no one explicitly asks for it and few people think to step into it. When teams do claim this space, we label them “high-performing” and act surprised by the outcome, largely because it is uncommon outside of early-stage startups, even though it does occasionally emerge inside large organizations as well.
I’ve been fascinated by this pattern for years. Why do people placed in nearly identical situations end up with such different results? Again and again, the answer wasn’t talent, intelligence, or even effort, but structure. Robert Fritz’s work on structural dynamics gave me language for what I was seeing: behavior follows the path of least resistance. If you want different behavior, you don’t motivate harder or push through—you change the structure so the desired path becomes easier than the default.
I’ve applied this perspective in my work as an executive coach at Groove Management, partnering with technical leaders at companies like Databricks, Reltio, and LucidLink. I’ve also lived it firsthand in my own startup, Traction5, where I learned—often the hard way—what happens when you build from problems instead of from a clear vision of what you’re trying to create.
Along the way, I wrote about these ideas—why “fall in love with the problem” is often bad startup advice, and why some teams seem to grind endlessly while others steadily build. Those pieces resonated, not because they were novel, but because people recognized themselves in them.
Part of the challenge is that we’re surrounded by bad advice. We learn from survivor narratives—stories where success is explained using the language our culture rewards, like hustle, grit, and relentless problem-solving, even when an entirely different structure was what actually drove the outcome. What people say they did and what truly produced results are often not the same thing.
So I built the methodology into a product.
Team Vision Course. Free. Everything included.
The core idea is simple: great teams build toward something they can recognize, not just away from what’s broken. They hold a vision concrete enough to point to, alongside a clear and honest view of current reality, without judgment or spin. The gap between the two becomes a source of pull, not pressure.
Where many frameworks rely on pushing—hit the goal, close the gap, try harder—this one creates pull instead. When a team can hold both vision and reality at the same time, the distance between them generates momentum rather than stress.
What’s inside:
Videos that walk through the model and three detailed case studies (IBM Watson Health, Figma, and Convoy).
Canvas you can work through with your team.
Facilitation guide that captures the traps I most often see teams fall into.
Practice exercises designed to sharpen recognition before you ever try to run it live.
I’m hoping for the course to be used on its own with colleagues, startups, or side projects. If you run it, I'd like to hear what happened. Some teams will want a facilitator, rather than wearing both the builder and facilitator hats. If that kind of support is useful, I’m available.
The space between what’s required and what’s forbidden is far larger than most teams realize. This course is about learning to see it, and then claim it.