Four durable
skills. One
result: Work.
We teach the skills behind the skill — so the work that comes out the other side is sharper, kinder, and a hell of a lot faster.
Four tracks.
The skills behind
the skills.
Twelve years and 1,000+ trainees later — across microelectronics, network technology, and sales — these four tracks are how we build teams that thrive in any environment.
Sharper Thinking
Slow down 10% on the decisions that matter.
Almost every expensive mistake is a mistake of speed, not knowledge. We install one trainable reflex — the 10% pause — and the cognitive infrastructure that makes pausing possible: externalised systems, multi-variable mental models, pattern-versus-trigger discrimination. The real work people are already doing becomes the lab.
Making Better Decisions
Calibrated judgement for operators who get paid to be right.
Outcomes are noisy — the same call can look brilliant or stupid on a coin flip. We teach Tetlock-style calibration applied to the predictions and decisions teams actually make: pricing, partnerships, sprint estimates, customer-behaviour forecasts. Put a number on it, track the numbers, get better at the number — not the post-hoc story.
Finding the "I" in Team
Become the person high-performing teams are built around.
Great teams are made of people who know how to work in them — and that's a skill set you can learn. You'll get sharper at reading trust and accountability, giving and taking candid feedback, and using a shared language that keeps a group aligned under pressure. The real work you're already doing becomes the practice ground, so you walk away a more effective teammate and a stronger candidate for what's next.
Working with AI
Adopt AI without losing the judgement that makes your business work.
Built explicitly against the dominant model of corporate AI training — a prompt-writing module and a feeling of having done something. We teach the strategic and practical layer: where AI earns its keep, where it structurally fails, why data quality is the binding constraint, and how to preserve the human 20% that decides whether any of it works.
Three people
who’ll know you
by name.
We’re a small team — not a marketplace of contractors. You’ll work with these three for the entire program. They’ll read what you write, remember it next week, and push back when you’re being lazy.
James Perly
James has been mentoring, lecturing and teaching since 1998. He designs most of our curriculums and was, until recently, a part-time professor at Canadore College. He's taught at Queen's, U of T, and run workshops for some of Canada's biggest employers.
Dave Beck
Dave designs our LMS, builds our learning experiences, and trains teams in AI. He co-founded a degree program at the University of Warwick and shipped a digital literacy certificate to over 2,000 students and businesses.
Natasha Nesrine
Natasha is a co-active coach who's been helping people apply design thinking in their own lives since 2013. She's taught learning strategy and positive psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson).
A short list
of opinions.
None of this is novel. We just take it seriously.
One employer per cohort.
We don't mix your team with strangers. Every cohort is built for one employer (or a group choosing to learn together) — and we agree on the dates with you.
The skills behind the skills.
Sharp thinking, decision-making, working with others, and knowing which tool to use when. Hard skills get the headlines; these are what actually move the needle.
You leave with a thing you made.
Every program ends with a deliverable that's yours — a plan, a model, a system your team will actually use on Monday. We track it with data so you can prove the lift.
How we actually run it.
Real work is the lab. No exercises, no hypotheticals. The five hours a week of homework is the actual decisions, hires, predictions, and audits participants are already on the hook for, run through the week's method. Two people in wildly different jobs get assessed against the same discipline, not the same task. Most training avoids this because it's hard to grade — we lean in because anything else is theatre.
One trainable reflex per course. Each course is built around a single move — the 10% pause, put a number on it, mind the 20%, hire up trust down — named to outlive us. We want participants invoking it five years on, when they've forgotten everything else. A one-page protocol card sits on the desk where the decision actually happens.
Pre-test before any teaching. A diagnostic on material we haven't taught yet, given on day one. The discomfort is the point — it primes attention and gives us an honest baseline to measure learning gain against, not pass/fail performance.
Reciprocal teaching. Every cohort has at least one session where participants teach the room — the canonical-book module in Sharper Thinking, capstone presentations everywhere else. Teaching back to a peer group is the single strongest retention mechanism we know of, and almost no SMB training uses it.
Method, not outcome. A decision that resolved well can still be a bad decision; a 30% prediction that didn't fire can still be well-calibrated. We grade the move, not the luck — and explicitly train against the polished post-hoc story that most training rewards.
$1,050 per person,
per week.
Our standard intensive runs 11 weeks — $11,550 per participant. Groups of 10 or more get 10% off. Length can flex to your team’s actual needs.
- Two hours in-person.
- Four hours of guided activities to embed the method between sessions.
- Up to an hour of one-to-one or practice-group support.
Plus phone and email support throughout, and access to our online materials for as long as the course exists.
We don’t commit to training you until we’ve done a short diagnostic with your team. That conversation shapes both the length of the program and what we focus on — an 11-week intensive is the default, not the only shape. If a tighter program fits better, we’ll say so.