Don’t Transform, Calibrate.
A new family schedule keeps everyone on track for about a month; a piece of software organises your work properly for a few weeks, and then you stop opening it; a meal plan with an automated shopping list makes things easier right up until the day you don't fancy what it's decided you’re eating, and you never go back to it.
We all try new approaches to make our lives easier, better, or more effective. Some of them work and some of them don’t — or they do; for a couple of weeks.
When we have early ‘success’ and late ‘failure’, it’s easy to see the problem as us: “the system worked, so it must just be me who can’t sustain it”. However, in all likelihood, the things that we try and don’t stick with are not always because we lack willpower to follow through — I bet you have loads of examples of things you’ve stuck with, committed to, and maintained despite challenges. Instead I think there are approaches that failed because they were never built from anything to do with who you are or how you actually work.
That doesn’t mean those approaches are wrong. It’s just that they were built to work for someone else, and you thought your job was to become the person they worked for.
That’s the wrong job.
I don’t want you to transform; I want you to calibrate who you already are.
An Individual Adaptive Partnership exists to support you to pick the right tool, for the right job, and for the assignment that best aligns with who you are right now and who you’re working on becoming in the future.
“I’m not the person you come to to ‘power through’, I’m the person you come to when you’ve already tried that”
Who this is for.
Honestly? Anyone who wants to go deeper understanding their patterns, problems and relationships - with themself and others.
However, an Individual Adaptive Partnership was built for the people accused of over-thinking; the problem-solvers, who everyone else comes to solve their problems; the ‘noticers’ who feel like they spot things that others don’t; the people who can readily see patterns in other situations but sometimes struggle to identify their own and find that annoying. (It’s not you; it’s hard to spot them from inside the situations we are in). It’s for people in contexts where expectations, responsibility or visibility can make openness feel complicated — especially when you know there is value in having somewhere to think without having to perform certainty.
You’ve possibly tried coaching before but only had partial success. You might have struggled with typical goal-setting-and-accountability models. You’ve probably found at least one personality profiling exercise exasperating, because everything feels more complicated than the selection of answers they gave you. You might already have a lot of personal insight and are frustrated that you keep solving the same problems, or engaging in the same pattern, or you just don’t seem to be able to think your way out of the situation, challenge or phase you’re in. If these types of experiences feel familiar, this approach is for you.
What it is.
The Individual Adaptive Partnership is a six-month period of sustained developmental inquiry: making sense of patterns, context, relationships, and choices; with practical application but without a predetermined model of change.
Partnerships last six months because the work doesn't only happen when we're talking. Insight needs time to encounter reality, and TheBetweenSpace allows patterns to emerge, possibilities to be tested and new information to shape what we do next. You're therefore not buying a bundle of sessions, but a period of partnership designed around repeated cycles of insight, experience, noticing, and recalibration. Plus, it can be helpful to encounter lots of aspects of your reality! Six months usually gives us time to encounter a major event or holiday; something with family or friendship groups; stressful times and episodes when you’re bored or lacking in motivation; changes in work demands; and all manner of life being life!
People often describe the work as somewhere between coaching, reflective development, practical problem-solving and therapeutic in style.
What that looks like in practice: many times, what presents as several separate problems is organised by an underlying pattern — I refer to this as our ‘hidden choreography’ that produces the same dance, even when the songs we’re dancing to sound different. It doesn't always feel that way from the inside — each version arrives in its own context, asks for its own fix, and the fix might genuinely work, for that instance. What it won't do is stop the pattern recurring, because the thing producing it was never what anyone was looking at.
So the work isn't just resolving each thing as it comes up (although we’ll explore that too). It's finding what each challenge or experience is an instance of, then asking a different question: not what's the answer, but what actually fits.
That starts from what's already there. We build from who you are and the way you operate — including whichever parts you might have internally flagged as ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’ (or probably both, at the same time).
You are not a problem to be fixed and your patterns, habits and ways of doing things are not obstacles that need clearing out of the way. Some things do need to change; that's not in question. What's in question is whether you're rebuilding from your own capacities, or trying to run someone else's system — which you've likely tried, and it probably worked… for about six weeks.
Some of this work is getting a clearer read on a situation. Some of it is trusting a read you'd already got right, but talked yourself out of. Either way, what's building isn't a fixed way of solving things — it's a steadier relationship with your own judgement. And judgement that's actually yours, tested and trusted, tends to point somewhere: back toward what you were actually trying to do in the first place, not just what the situation seemed to demand of you at the time.
What we do.
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Twenty to thirty minutes, and a genuine two-way conversation about whether this is useful, not a screening exercise and not a sales call. If it makes sense, you book, and we begin from wherever you are, with no mandatory pre-work.
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Every conversation starts here. Before anything changes, I need to understand what's organising a situation — not just the presenting problem, but the pattern underneath it. The terrain gets mapped before anyone tries to move through it. These conversations last about 60-90 minutes; we’ll typically have 6-8 over the partnership. When the conversations occur will depend on you and what’s happening in your life; you book them when it’s appropriate for you to take the next step.
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‘Becoming’ is always in process, so change is never complete. Some things, when changed, unlock more than others do. The FirstNextThing is whichever of those unlocks the most and is available right now. We never work through a list of everything that could change.
Named this way because it is always the first next thing and never the only thing: unlock something and a new first next thing appears, so it never becomes a second next thing. It is identified from the map of where you are and the destination you want to get to — it’s part of a process, not an item on a ‘to-do’ list.
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The ‘prescriptive’ part of the work. I’ll give you something to try, something to design, and something to notice. A calibration experiment is based on what we discover about who you are and how you work - they’ll be feasible enough to attempt and specific enough to learn something from them when you do.
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This is where insight meets reality. TheBetweenSpace is not only a feature of the work but a condition of the world — it’s NH Adaptive's version of the ‘messy middle’, without the implication that change runs in a line or ever finishes.
In our partnership TheBetweenSpace is designed intervention rather than downtime. The session creates a lens; life provides the data; noticing creates learning.
During TheBetweenSpace there is unlimited opportunity for email, message or voice-note contact for observations, sense-checking and matters worth returning to.
What it costs.
The six-month partnership costs £5,000, which can be paid in full or in instalments.
If you think your organisation might contribute towards this I have created an Executive & Leadership Development Business Case for Organisational Funding to pass to the person in your organisation who co-ordinates learning & development spending.
There’s no pre-work and it’s not a sales call; it’s just a conversation to explore whether working together is the right fit for us.