Before We Could Think Together

The beginning of a school year is filled with good intentions. Curriculum maps wait to be refined. Professional learning calendars begin filling. Teams gather for the first time. New colleagues quietly learn names while long-standing teams slip comfortably back into familiar routines.

Before long, everyone is asking the same question:

“Where do we begin?”

Looking around the room that morning, I found myself asking a different one.

“Who are these teams becoming?”

The temptation was to begin with planning. There was certainly enough to plan.

The school had grown. Several teams welcomed new colleagues. Others had worked together for years but had quietly settled into patterns that no longer invited much challenge or fresh thinking. Meetings were productive. People were respectful. Expectations were clear.

Yet something felt unfinished.

The conversations were polite. Perhaps a little too polite. People listened carefully and agreed generously. They left meetings having completed the agenda, but not necessarily having changed one another’s thinking.

It would have been easy to mistake harmony for trust.

At the time, I couldn’t quite explain why that distinction mattered so much. Looking back, I think we were carrying an assumption we hadn’t recognised.

They weren’t the same thing.

If we wanted teams to challenge ideas, wrestle with complex questions and think courageously together throughout the year, asking them to begin with curriculum felt premature. Relationships had to come first.

Not because relationships were more important than the work.

Because relationships would determine the quality of the work.

So we made what, on the surface, looked like a rather unusual leadership decision. Instead of asking every team to spend the afternoon planning together, we gave them something much more valuable.

Agency.

Every team would design its own shared experience. There were no prescribed activities, no common itinerary and no expectation that every team should do the same thing. There was only one shared purpose: the experience needed to strengthen relationships within the team while helping people reflect on how learning happens.

Not just for children.

For people.

The afternoon wasn’t separate from our professional learning.

It was our professional learning.

Each experience needed to create opportunities for teams to think together, solve problems, communicate, navigate uncertainty, reflect, adapt and learn from one another — the very conditions we hoped they would later create for students in their own classrooms.

The activity itself wasn’t prescribed.

The learning was.

What happened next was wonderfully unpredictable.

One team headed for the mountains. Another booked an escape room. One group spent the afternoon volunteering together at a nearby orphanage. Another gathered around the dining table at a colleague’s home for a pot-luck lunch that unexpectedly became famous as “The Great Nacho-Off” after two teammates unknowingly arrived carrying homemade nachos. Nobody could quite remember who won. Everyone remembered the debate.

The principal confidently assembled a fishing team, cheerfully declaring himself the school’s self-appointed “fish whisperer.”

The fish, it seemed, had not been informed.

Another team visited a meerkat café. Others found themselves at screen golf. One adventurous group decided paragliding seemed like an excellent idea.

By lunchtime, the school looked wonderfully disorganised.

Exactly as intended.

None of the activities looked remotely alike. Yet every team was engaged in the same deeper work.

The following Monday, the stories arrived before anyone else did.

Not curriculum stories.

Relationship stories.

John — the calm, measured teacher who never seemed flustered by anything — had apparently screamed with such spectacular enthusiasm while paragliding that his teammates insisted it echoed across the valley. By Monday morning, almost everyone could imitate it.

John included.

Mike, the school’s marathon runner and unofficial mountain goat — the kind of person who climbed rock faces as though gravity was merely a suggestion — somehow became the only member of his hiking team who needed rescuing after rolling his ankle halfway through the walk. By the end of the afternoon, the strongest member of the team was relying on everyone else to get him back down the mountain.

Nobody planned that lesson.

Everybody remembered it.

The principal’s reputation as the fish whisperer lasted only marginally longer than his first cast into the water. The fish remained entirely unconvinced. Meanwhile, the team from the meerkat café couldn’t seem to finish a conversation without producing another photograph of curious little faces climbing across shoulders while everyone laughed as though, for a few hours at least, nobody was watching.

At first, they simply felt like funny moments — the sort of stories every school accumulates over time.

But the stories didn’t disappear.

They surfaced in corridors, over coffee and while people waited for the photocopier. Someone would ask whether the principal had managed to catch a fish yet. Someone else would remind Mike that the school’s marathon runner had somehow become the only member of his hiking team who needed carrying down the mountain. The Great Nacho-Off refused to disappear despite nobody being entirely sure who had won, and John’s paragliding scream seemed to become louder every time somebody retold the story.

Looking back, I can barely remember why each team chose the activity it did.

I remember the stories.

Because over time, those stories became shared history.

People had experienced one another outside the meeting room, outside the classroom and outside the carefully constructed professional identities workplaces can encourage. The experienced teacher was also the man who screamed while paragliding. The principal was also the self-proclaimed fish whisperer who couldn’t catch a fish. The school’s fittest teacher had discovered that even the strongest person sometimes needs everyone else.

People had become more fully human to one another.

And gradually, that seemed to change the way they worked together. New teachers began asking questions they might previously have kept to themselves. Experienced teachers became more willing to admit they didn’t have all the answers. Teams tested ideas, explored different perspectives and disagreed without automatically treating disagreement as a threat to the relationship.

The conversations weren’t simply more honest.

They were more intellectually alive.

I’ll never forget one meeting later that year. A teacher quietly looked around the table before saying:

“I’m not convinced that’s our best idea.”

For a brief moment, the room fell silent.

Then someone else smiled.

“Tell me more.”

There was no defensiveness. No awkwardness. No need to protect anyone’s position.

The conversation simply became better.

It struck me afterwards that nobody had taught that team how to have that particular conversation.

They had built relationships strong enough to hold it.

I had always assumed strong relationships made collaboration easier. Looking back now, I think they make something much more important possible: they create the confidence to challenge one another’s thinking without damaging one another’s relationships.

Without that confidence, teams can work together remarkably well while leaving their most important thinking largely untouched. Meetings can be organised, responsibilities shared and deadlines met. People can genuinely like and respect one another. From the outside, collaboration may appear strong.

Yet underneath it sits another question:

Do people trust one another enough to genuinely influence one another’s thinking?

That kind of trust cannot be demanded. Nor can it be manufactured through a protocol or created because a meeting agenda contains time for discussion.

It develops through experience.

People discover strengths in one another they hadn’t noticed before. They encounter vulnerability where they expected certainty. They become more willing to admit what they don’t know, test an unfinished idea or allow someone else’s thinking to change their own.

For a long time, I thought the success of those afternoons lay in the activities themselves: the mountain hike, the escape room, the fishing trip, the volunteering, the meerkats.

It didn’t.

The activities created experiences. The experiences became stories. Over time, those stories became shared history.

And somewhere within that shared history, relationships became strong enough to carry something they hadn’t always been able to carry before:

professional challenge.

That was the lesson I completely missed at the time. I thought we were investing in team building. In reality, we were creating relational conditions that would influence the quality of professional learning throughout the year.

Only years later did I finally have language for what I had been witnessing. It wasn’t simply trust, teamwork or collaboration.

It was the quiet emergence of Relational Efficacy™.

For years, I thought schools improved because people became better at working together. Now I think something quieter happens first.

People become willing to think together.

Those two ideas sound remarkably similar.

They are not.

And perhaps that is why I still return to that assumption we hadn’t realised we were making. We saw people working well together and assumed the conditions for deep professional thinking already existed.

What became possible only after we questioned that assumption was something much richer.

People stopped protecting themselves from one another’s thinking.

They began trusting one another enough to be changed by it.

Organisational Truth

Visible collaboration does not necessarily mean people feel safe enough to challenge one another’s thinking.

Schools rarely struggle because people don’t care about one another. Many teams are collegial, generous and highly functional.

But collegiality and professional trust are not quite the same thing.

Teams can cooperate successfully while still avoiding the conversations that might unsettle existing thinking. Meetings can be efficient while important questions remain unasked. People can protect strong relationships by deciding, often unconsciously, that some disagreements are simply not worth the interpersonal risk.

The assumptions beneath those patterns are easy to miss.

We may assume that harmony signals trust. That effective teamwork means people are ready for professional challenge. That because nobody is voicing concern, everyone feels sufficiently safe to do so.

Sometimes those assumptions are accurate.

Sometimes they are not.

Making them visible creates an opportunity to understand the relational conditions beneath collaboration rather than relying only on what collaboration looks like from the outside.

Where We Chose to Begin

Every organisation enters improvement through a different doorway.

The doorway illuminated by this story is Belief.

The school already had strategic direction. People cared about the organisation, their colleagues and the learners they served.

What became important was the relational confidence through which people could contribute honestly to collective thinking.

But before that could be strengthened, something else had to become visible.

An assumption.

We had assumed that because people worked well together, they were already ready to think deeply together.

Recognising that assumption changed what leadership paid attention to.

The question was no longer simply:

“How do we strengthen collaboration?”

It became:

“What relational conditions allow people to challenge one another’s thinking without threatening the relationship?”

That distinction opened a different doorway into improvement.

Creating the Conditions

Professional trust develops differently in every organisation because every organisation carries its own histories, relationships and experiences of collaboration.

In this story, the starting point was not another meeting structure or collaboration protocol.

It was shared experience.

Teams were given genuine agency to design experiences through which they would encounter one another differently while exploring the very processes of communication, reflection, problem-solving, uncertainty and learning that sat beneath their professional work.

The activities were deliberately varied because the activity itself was never the intervention.

What mattered was what people experienced together and what those experiences subsequently made possible between them.

Over time, shared experiences became shared memories. Shared memories created different ways of knowing one another. And those relationships became increasingly capable of holding curiosity, uncertainty and professional disagreement.

This thinking now informs the Relational Efficacy Lab™, which helps leadership teams intentionally strengthen the relational trust, collaborative inquiry and professional culture through which people become more capable of influencing one another’s thinking.

The work is not about making teams friendlier.

It is about creating relational conditions strong enough for better thinking to emerge.

What Changed

The first changes were difficult to measure because they appeared in conversations long before they appeared anywhere else.

People asked questions they might previously have withheld. New staff contributed more confidently. Experienced colleagues became more willing to reconsider long-held assumptions. Uncertainty became easier to admit.

Professional disagreement also began to mean something different.

Rather than automatically signalling conflict, it increasingly became evidence that the relationship was strong enough to carry challenge.

That did not make the culture more harmonious.

It made it more intellectually courageous.

Perhaps the most significant change was not what people began saying.

It was what they were no longer afraid to say.

Framework

Relational Efficacy™

Relationships are often treated as something that develops naturally around the “real” work of organisational improvement.

Relational Efficacy™ recognises that relationships can themselves become an organisational capability.

Professional relationships become especially powerful when people develop confidence that they can question, challenge and influence one another’s thinking without diminishing trust.

That is different from collegiality.

Teams may enjoy working together, cooperate effectively and care deeply about one another while still avoiding the conversations improvement requires.

Relational efficacy develops as people repeatedly experience that uncertainty can be admitted, different perspectives can be explored and disagreement can strengthen collective understanding rather than threaten personal connection.

As that confidence grows, organisations become more capable of questioning assumptions, learning together and allowing better ideas to emerge.

The framework did not create the observation at the heart of this story.

It gave language to relational conditions that experience had already made visible.

School Improvement Pathway™

Entry Point: Belief

This story enters the School Improvement Pathway™ through Belief.

Direction already existed.

The next stage of improvement required strengthening the relational conditions through which people could develop professional trust, collective confidence and greater willingness to influence one another’s thinking.

As those conditions strengthen, belief becomes increasingly collective rather than individually held. People become more willing to contribute, question, challenge and learn together.

That prepares the organisation for the next movement in the pathway, where shared belief begins shaping how leadership is experienced throughout the organisation.

If This Feels Familiar...

You may recognise something of your organisation in this story if:

• teams work well together but difficult questions are still rarely asked;
• meetings feel respectful and productive, yet people’s thinking is seldom genuinely challenged;
• disagreement is treated cautiously because people worry about damaging relationships;
• harmony is sometimes taken as evidence that trust already exists;
• people are comfortable contributing polished ideas but less comfortable sharing uncertainty;
• new or alternative perspectives are often expressed outside meetings rather than within them;
• collaboration structures are strong, but the quality of professional dialogue varies considerably; or
• leadership senses that people care deeply about one another but isn’t sure whether relationships are strong enough to hold genuine professional challenge.

These patterns do not necessarily mean trust is absent.

They may simply suggest that an assumption about what existing relationships can already hold deserves closer attention.