Face the Truth Workshop
Three hours on the gap between what leadership intends and how it lands.
A facilitated session for a leadership team that needs concentrated attention on one thing. The team sees the gap together, practices the question that surfaces it, and leaves with a rhythm for keeping the truth in the room.
Start with a conversationThirty minutes on what the team is carrying, and whether one session is the right shape.
Explore the session- IntendedWhat the leadership team means, agreed and written down
- ExperiencedWhat people hear, from the habits around the words
- FacedThe team sees both at once, in one room
The room is where the team learns how it lands.
One afternoon, not a program.
Some challenges need concentrated attention rather than ongoing coaching. A leadership team usually knows it in one of four moments.
A decision landed differently than intendedThe leadership team agreed on the message. The organization heard something else, and nobody can say where it turned.
The room has gone quietMeetings run on time and the work gets done. The hard thing goes unsaid, and everyone in the room knows it.
A new team needs a shared way of hearingNew members, a new manager, or a new council, and no common practice yet for receiving what is true.
A retreat needs a working session inside itAn afternoon inside the retreat with an outcome the team keeps.
For a sitting city or county manager and the leadership team.
A retreat, a budget season, a new term, or the week after a hard meeting can anchor the session, and none of them is required. The manager’s sense that the team needs to hear something together is the starting point.
Intentions leave the room.
Something else arrives.
Every leadership team means well. What the organization experiences is a different question.
The gap between what leadership intends and how it lands is ordinary. It opens in habits: the meeting that runs long, the question answered before it is finished, the update nobody pushes back on. Each one teaches the organization something the leadership team never meant to teach.
The workshop puts that gap in the room, with the leadership team, in a form it can act on. Not a verdict. A shared picture, and one practice for keeping it in view.
- One question
- A diagnostic question that surfaces the gap, practiced twice in the room with different partners.
- One practice
- Receiving the answer without defending it. The part that takes practice, and the part the room spends its time on.
- One rhythm
- A when-then commitment tied to a moment already on the calendar, so the question gets asked again after the afternoon ends.
A habit that outlasts the afternoon
Three hours, three moves.
The session runs as one arc, in a room the team already knows, with the team’s own examples.
The Frame
The team names the gap between what it intends and how it lands, using examples scoped in the planning conversation. Shared ground before anyone is asked to practice.
Face the Truth
Each person practices one diagnostic question, twice, with different partners, and practices receiving the answer without defending it. The group then names the habits that teach the opposite of what the team intends.
Land the Rhythm
Each person makes one when-then commitment tied to a moment already on the calendar. No public declarations. A rhythm the team can keep after the afternoon ends.
A planning conversation comes first. It scopes the examples the room will work with, so the session starts from the team’s own situation and not from a case study.
Explore What ChangedAsking is the easy part.
Receiving is the practice.
Nothing here assumes the team is broken.
Most of what a leadership team does is worth keeping. The work is one habit: hearing what is true before deciding what to do about it. The question is easy to learn. Receiving the answer is what takes practice, and it is where the room spends its time.
Done well, people remember the moment a colleague answered the question honestly and nobody explained it away.
An outside facilitator
for the inside conversation.
Imagine That Performance’s experience is in municipal leadership rooms: the gap between what a leadership team intends and what the organization experiences, worked on with the team that owns it. The value of an outside facilitator is that the question can be asked of everyone at once, and nobody in the room has to hold it alone.
Rob Duncan, who founded Imagine That Performance, facilitates the session and takes the first conversation himself.
Meet Rob DuncanScoped in a conversation, not sold as a package.
The session is built around the team’s own examples. A planning conversation settles the scope, and a scope document and timeline follow it. The investment is agreed before anything begins.
One afternoon. One team. The scope comes first.
What is included?
A planning conversation, a short pre-workshop survey, three hours of facilitation, materials, and a post-workshop reflection tool for each participant. Travel outside the Tampa Bay area is additional.
Who takes part?
The manager and the leadership team, up to twenty-five people. The session works best when everyone who shapes how decisions land is in the room, including the people who usually stay quiet.
What is left behind?
A one-page tool each person keeps: the question, the receiving practice, and a personal rhythm for using both. And one when-then commitment per person, already on the calendar.
What does it cost?
An investment shaped by the scope, agreed after the planning conversation. It falls under most government discretionary procurement thresholds.
Every leader deserves clarity about what matters.
Every engagement builds a capability the organization keeps, measured by what it can do after the work ends, not during it.
Put the gap in the room, with the team that can close it.
Thirty minutes on what the team is carrying, and whether one session is the right shape.
Open the conversation