where your
team meets
THEIR moment.

Three departments at Adidas Global HQ were building the brand's most visible projects, and they had stopped collaborating. Cross-functional delivery slowed, design decisions looped, and the cost of back-and-forth kept climbing. People had come to Adidas to touch these projects. Instead, they spent their time sorting out who owned what.

The three VPs met offsite first and aligned on a shared direction. Each leader then nominated team representatives, who helped shape the session through multiple working jams. Dwayne built the agenda around what the teams had said in a survey, so the day would feel relevant to people walking in.

On January 10, roughly a hundred people came together for the afternoon. The leaders opened by sharing one vision, twelve mutual commitments with their names on them, and their personal core values—in their own words, unedited. Then the whole room did the same values exercise the leaders had just done. Everyone left with two questions to use when values pull against each other: what's most important to you, and what can you commit to.

A moderated panel, an open Q&A, and a creation framework for how the three teams would work together followed. The leaders closed by putting three follow-up sessions in the calendar for the rest of the year.

This was one of the sessions where the New Ground framework was taking shape, years before it carried that name.

Six weeks later, Dwayne left the company. In July, the VP of Consumer Experience hired him back for a two-day summit, co-facilitated with Judy Goldberg of WonderShift. His team was ninety days into a decentralization that had already moved people to Portland and Shanghai. Senior leaders left with their five hardest problems named, an owner on each one, first action steps mapped, and a report-back date.

A 30-person startup began the year and this workshop with broken trust. A perceived lack of leadership accountability, transparency and an inconsistently applied return-to-office mandate hurt morale, with 65% of the team reporting a negative outlook for the year ahead.

We designed a full-day session that shifted blame to ownership, everyone could step up to own something. Leadership explained and owned past decisions, made public commitments with timelines, and the entire team co-created solutions. Real-time sentiment tracking measured how perspectives shifted throughout the day.

A global sports authority wanted to launch a collaboration platform for hundreds of professionals worldwide. The project owner and software owner had already predetermined the technical solution. Nobody had asked the membership what they needed.

We facilitated a two-day sprint with senior international experts, key stakeholders, and community members. When Day 1 interviews revealed gaps between the predetermined solution and what members needed, the project team began to lose faith. We held the container while we redirected around what the community was telling us, then shifted strategy from "build and launch" to "validate first, then justify a pilot."