Case study · Startup & Growth
You Believe Together. You See Differently.
Odele · A clean haircare brand · 2026
A Precondition engagement
- 7/7Leaders took part
- 66Reality Index baseline · Partial
- 3Tensions taken into stewardship
- Day 1From insight to action
In brief
The situation
A strong, connected leadership team at a brand of about forty people, heading into strategic planning. Belief in the company was high in every seat. What each leader saw of it was not the same.
What we did
The Reality Index and seven one-on-one conversations, then a day together to build one picture of how the company works and name the tensions at its center.
What changed
Three tensions taken on for stewardship, each with early-warning signs the team chose itself, and a shared language the team began using in strategy discussions right away.
The moment
Odele is a clean haircare brand of about forty people. Its seven-person leadership team was heading into strategic planning: a strong, connected team that loves the company and believes in what’s possible.
The question wasn’t whether they believed in the same future. It was whether they were looking at the same company.
Step 01 · Reality Index
Measure the ground before you build on it.
All seven leaders took the Reality Index, scoring six conditions for progress: Shared Reality, Transparent Power, Tension Capacity, Inquiry Depth, Belief in Possibility and Vertical Coherence. Seven one-on-one conversations followed.
The baseline landed at 66, Partial: real shared ground, real soft spots. Belief in Possibility was the rock at 79, the tightest agreement on the page, with every leader at 70 or above.
The spread was in what they saw. Shared Reality ran from 45 to 90: the same events, read from seven different seats, had become seven different pictures. That friction wasn’t interpersonal. It was architectural: how decisions convene, how work becomes visible across functions, how tension gets held.
You Believe Together.Belief in possibility
You See Differently.Shared reality
Step 02 · Tension Landscape
One shared picture of how Odele actually works.
The scores and conversations became the Tension Landscape: one picture of the company, built from the team’s own numbers and words, and refined together in the room on July 20.
Asked for the strategy in one sentence, seven leaders gave seven different answers. It was the clearest the strategy had ever been as a filter, but not yet common as a sentence. And each function was trading off speed, quality, cost and inclusion its own way, invisibly and alone.
At the center sat four tensions where both poles are goods. The team voted three onto the table for the afternoon.
Step 03 · Tension Stewardship
Both poles are goods. Steward the tension, don’t solve it.
For each tension, the leaders honored both poles, located today’s lean, priced a year of drift and proposed how to hold both. All three reached the same honest call: a tension to steward, not a problem to solve.
- Collaboration and Autonomy: swings between the two.
- Scrappy and Repeatable: leans toward scrappy.
- Rumbling and Harmony: leans toward harmony.
The Steward’s Charge
One page per tension, turning it into behaviors everyone can operate from.
The Dial
Each leader places a dot; together they draw one ring: where the team will deliberately operate this cycle.
The Common Sentence
One sentence anyone can say, in the room and beyond it.
The Charge
A named steward keeps watch. Any of us can call it; when called, we pause and rebalance before deciding.
The Tripwires
Three observable signs of drift that everyone watches for.
Signed by the whole team, so no one person has to arbitrate it.
What became possible
A measured baseline
Six conditions scored, and a baseline of 66 to re-test against.
A common language
Tensions named as pairs of goods, in use in strategy discussions right away.
Three stewardship commitments
Each with a proposal for holding both poles and early-warning signs the team named itself.
In their words
“The Precondition was awesome. We loved it. The feedback was universally positive — everybody felt like it was really time well spent.”
“We were immediately driving impact from it during the workshop itself — and then in subsequent interactions I had with individuals in the few days following the session.”
“I didn’t really expect it to be that quick — taking the language we developed in the workshop on the first day and applying it within strategic discussions immediately. There are very few programs I’ve been through that are that quick from insight to action. There’s something really powerful in that.”
“What I appreciated most about Dipanjan’s approach was that the workshop wasn’t about forcing everyone into the same way of thinking or working. It was about building empathy for different perspectives and understanding how those differences can make the team more effective.
That led to much more productive, honest conversations. What makes The Precondition approach unique is that he doesn’t give you the answers to the test—he gives you a framework to find the right balance for your team. And as the team and business evolve, that framework evolves with you.”