The Talent Readiness Accelerator
Your talent designs solutions to pressing business challenges, launches pilots, runs them, and then pitches the result to your executives. All in six months.
Below is the spine every Talent Readiness Accelerator is built on. The problems change, the immersions change, the speakers change. The spine does not – because just a few key principles determine the success of the teams and the programme.
The Succession Readiness System has five stages – Define, Assess, Accelerate, Land, Prove. The spine below shows the accelerator in the order it happens: scoping and the baseline first, then six months of work, then the evidence.
Succession Readiness System · Stage 03
The spine: six months, month by month
Six months, from scope to the Dragons’ Den. Every phase leaves your ExCo something it can act on.
Scope the accelerator
What happens
- Scope, framework and stakeholder onboarding agreed with the sponsor
- Challenges selected by ExCo, and the immersion designed around them
- 360 and psychometrics – the baseline
What your ExCo gets
Baseline and success measures agreed, before you invest in the accelerator.
Understand the problem
What happens
- Welcome workshops: Principles of High Performing Teams
- Decision making with data, and innovating with technology
- Hypothesis refinement – teams use first principles to understand the challenge they’ll solve
What your ExCo gets
Talent applying the principles of high performance in their consulting groups.
Immersion
What happens
- Talent immersed in their challenge
- Expert resources to help them understand and solve it
- Industry and technology experts support the challenge in play
What your ExCo gets
Not an expensive site visit to other companies, but a tailored experience designed to unlock ROI in your business.
Design the pilot
What happens
- The immersion’s output worked up and stress-tested
- Roadblock support – we unstick, your teams deliver
- One-to-one integrative skills coaching against the gaps the 360 found
What your ExCo gets
Talent working with sponsors, proposing new ways to solve real problems and unlock tangible ROI.
Launch the pilot
What happens
- Teams launch their pilots with implementation support
- Masterclass on presenting to ExCo with data-driven storytelling – because a strong result, badly told, doesn’t get funded
- Roadblock support as the pilot meets the real business
What your ExCo gets
Real solutions to pressing problems, generated by the business itself.
Run the pilot and prepare the pitch
What happens
- The pilot runs in the business, with teams gathering evidence
- Mid-pilot measurement: what to fix, scale or stop
- Presentation dry-run coaching
What your ExCo gets
Early evidence from a live pilot: what’s working, what isn’t, and what it’s worth.
Dragons’ Den, then measure
What happens
- The Dragons’ Den pitch to your executives
- Post-accelerator: ROI measured independently
- Succession readiness report for ExCo
What your ExCo gets
Proof of impact in capability and in currency, and a plan to embed the pilot as business as usual.
Six months, not a year-plus journey.
The category norm is a twelve to eighteen month programme with a budget to match and a result nobody can point to, with talent fatigued and dropping out in between. Six months ends in a pitch to your ExCo on real results – before your talent burns out, before the best of them leave, and while your executives still care.
“I have not learnt so much in such a short time as the time spent with David.”
Richard Daneel
Engineering Manager · Glencore
Your teams implement. We do not.
Capability is built by doing the work – so your talent designs it, launches it and runs it in your business. We are there for what surrounds that: the immersion, the coaching, the roadblock support when a team is stuck, and the measurement. We guide, support and unstick. They design and deliver.
It’s action learning with the stakes left in: a real problem, a real sponsor, and a pitch to your executives at the end.
It ends with a pitch, to a panel, on a real problem.
Every leadership programme claims to be practical. This one finishes with your talent standing in front of your executives presenting the outcomes of a pilot they designed, launched and had independently measured, on a problem your executives assigned them. For many of them it’s the first time they’ve presented in a career-defining room, so we set them up for success. And your executives get insight into how their own bench handles real pressure, on real work. An assessment centre can only simulate that.
“The SCL Accelerator was a life-changing experience for me, both in my personal and professional life, giving me a different mindset and the confidence to present the best version of myself to the world. I highly recommend David; he will not stop until you come out this journey a hero.”
Natalie Magosha
Marketing Manager · Fidelity
Buy the whole journey, or the parts you need.
Run as one journey, or offered as building blocks within your own architecture.
- The Talent Readiness Diagnostic
- Ninety minutes with your ExCo, run by David, that produces the capability mandate. The usual first purchase.
- Principles of High Performing Teams
- The welcome workshop inside an accelerator, setting newly formed teams of consultants up for success.
- Power, Presence & Influence
- High-impact communication for senior leaders. Inside the spine it is the masterclass on presenting to ExCo with data-driven storytelling.
- The Readiness Engine
- Criterion-referenced 360, potential and derailer modules, manager-readiness interview. Can be run alone where an organisation wants measurement before committing to development.
- The Integrated Leader
- The golden thread. It’s what stops six months of varied work feeling like six unrelated modules – every capability the accelerator builds sits on the same frame: Head, Heart, Hands and Horizon, creating a shared language for how a leader leads.
- Repair and Re-contract
- Rebuilding a team after restructure, merger, or a leader who broke trust. Sits at Land in the system, and is frequently bought alone because the need arrives suddenly.
- Leader Landing
- The first hundred days of a senior hire designed rather than improvised, with the sponsor aligned before day one.
- Keynote or masterclass
- Ninety minutes on leadership or succession to a conference, an offsite or an ExCo.
“David delivered one of the most impactful leadership development experiences I have attended... he has an exceptional talent for translating complex concepts into simple, actionable techniques that immediately build confidence.”
Bree Hadley
Head of Learning & Development · SBV Services
Start with a conversation.
Twenty minutes on what your leadership bench looks like, what your strategy is about to ask of it, and how you want to prepare your talent to close the gap.
No deck and no pitch. Just a clear view of where your bench is today, and what succession readiness looks like from here.
