Thinkware for Leadership Teams

Your management team has plenty of IQ. It just doesn't add up yet.

Thomas Bothe gives the CEO and management team of a mid-sized European company one shared set of thinking tools. Then the intelligence of each person starts to add up in the work of the whole team.

Since 2000Executive Sparring & Advisory
OODA Dynamic5-Grade Quality Framework
Thomas Bothe
Thomas Bothe
Transformation Space Janitor, THINKWARE DESIGN · Former CEO

Thinkware Kickoffs

Six short workshops for managers and leaders. Each opens one theme that runs through the interventions: feedback, trust, insightful conversations, meaning, brainstorming and managing effective skills acquisition.

Topics
Communication
Format
Four-hour workshop
Focus
YouPeople & Teams

Useful Feedback

Giving and receiving feedback that helps people understand what needs attention.

Even well-intentioned feedback can create upset instead of calm, or simply fall flat. The person shuts down, gets defensive, or nods while checking out. This workshop looks at human-to-human feedback as information for adjustment, and at ways of giving and receiving it that work for everyone involved.

Intended takeaway

Understand feedback as information for adjustment, and develop more useful ways of giving and receiving it.

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Topics
Trust
Format
Four-hour workshop
Focus
People & TeamsOrganisation

Trust in Leadership

Understanding how trust works across leadership and stakeholder relationships.

Trust is central to all human interaction, yet many leaders in small and medium-sized enterprises do not use it deliberately. This workshop looks at recognising trust opportunities, how trust operates differently with different stakeholders, and practical methods for working with it.

Intended takeaway

Understand how trust works across leadership and stakeholder relationships.

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Topics
CommunicationThinking
Format
Four-hour workshop
Focus
People & TeamsOrganisation

Insightful Discourse

Making conversations more clarifying, productive and useful.

Some conversations leave us energised and clearer; others leave us feeling less intelligent than before. The difference is rarely the other person. This workshop examines the hidden, manageable factor behind good and bad conversations, and how to steer a discussion back towards something useful when it drifts.

Intended takeaway

Develop an understanding of what makes conversations clarifying and productive, and ways to make them more useful.

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Topics
Meaning
Format
Four-hour workshop
Focus
YouPeople & TeamsOrganisationWider World

What Really Matters

The connection between meaningful work, motivation and people’s experience at work, including the social value the company creates.

When people believe their work is meaningless to the world around them, health, happiness and motivation suffer together. This workshop explores that common denominator, and how leaders can connect personal meaning with the contribution the company makes to people and society.

Intended takeaway

Explore how work can connect personal meaning and motivation with a company’s contribution to people and society.

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Topics
Thinking
Format
Four-hour workshop
Focus
People & TeamsOrganisation

Productive Brainstorming

Helping teams move between exploring possibilities and practical execution.

Brainstorming often goes in circles because a team stays in its execution mode, where every idea is blocked by another precondition. This workshop looks at how teams move out of that mode to explore, and then back into execution with a reworked plan.

Intended takeaway

Understand how teams can move between exploring possibilities and practical execution.

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Topics
Learning
Format
Four-hour workshop
Focus
People & TeamsOrganisation

Managing Lifelong Learners

Recognising different learning stages and responding appropriately as a leader.

Beginners, advancing learners and masters each come with their own mindset. Misreading the stage leads to discouraged newcomers, stalled learning and skilled people leaving at the least convenient moment. This workshop covers the stages of learning and how a leader can recognise and respond to each.

Intended takeaway

Recognise different learning stages and develop ways to respond appropriately as a leader.

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Four interventions, six workshops

Different problems, different tools. Shocking, we know.

Four interventions for CEOs and management teams, each for a different situation, from a CEO who needs someone to think with to a company that needs a new direction. At the top, six Kickoff workshops carry the same thinking tools into the rest of the organization. Select the point that sounds like your last quarter.

Underlying Methodology

Thomas Bothe has no idea how to run your company. That’s rather the point.

Thinkware means designed tools for thinking. A wrench doesn’t decide what you build; it helps you build it. Thinkware does the same for a team’s thinking. The Pareto principle is one. John Boyd’s OODA loop (Observe → Orient → Decide → Act) is another, and it runs through every intervention.

Thomas won’t pretend to be a better engineer, accountant or strategist than the people in your room. He would lose that contest. What he is good at is getting the best out of a team’s thinking: giving it shared thinkware, adapting to how each person thinks, and holding the space when the conversation gets difficult. The solutions stay yours, because they come from your own thinking.

Thinkware Interventions

Architectural Formats for Executive Reality

Choose the situation closest to yours. Each intervention is engineered for a distinct executive challenge.

  1. CEiL

    Communication Essentials in Leadership

    For executive teams whose difficult conversations become defensive, avoidant or unproductive.

    Duration2 days for 4 people, 3 days for 6
    Participants4 or 6 team leaders
  2. Thinkware Horizon

    Choosing a New Direction

    For a CEO and core team whose way of winning has stopped working and who must choose where to go next.

    Duration4–6 weeks
    ParticipantsCEO and core management team
  3. Thinkware Tuning

    Continuous Organizational Adaptation

    For leadership teams facing recurring bottlenecks and feedback that fails to change execution.

    DurationMonthly, about 4 hours a week
    ParticipantsThe management team with the CEO (4–12)
  4. CEO Sparring

    Confidential 1:1 Thinking Partner

    For a CEO who needs a confidential external partner to challenge consequential decisions.

    DurationMonthly retainer, about 10 hours
    Participants1:1, the CEO only
Thomas Bothe
About Thomas Bothe

A former CEO. Fully recovered.

Thomas Bothe was a CEO himself before he went independent in 2000. Since then he has worked as a facilitator and sparring partner for CEOs and management teams of mid-sized companies across Europe, on strategy and on how leaders communicate.

He wrote Create Trust in Your Leadership and Improve Your Impact (2013) and developed the 5-Grade Quality Framework, which grades a team’s thinking at each step of the OODA loop: how well, not how loudly.

In Their Words

What Leaders Say

Editorial Discourse

Recent Perspectives & Essays

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Direct Contact

You know your business. Thomas knows the questions.

A call to find out whether working together would be useful to both of you. The outcome is open from the start.