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Attributes of the t3 framework:
the right stuff

The "right stuff" is about ensuring the right people are in place and ready to deliver. They feel strongly that they are working with a group of people they respect and can get the job done. The foundation of any team are the people who comprise it. The needs of any team go far beyond ensuring they "can do" the job itself (competence) and extend to areas that allow the team, and its individual members, to work effectively together in delivering the desired outcomes.

These include, for example, possessing a growth mindset, allowing people to adapt more effectively to adversity and solve problems that lead to a breakthrough (‘can do’ attitude). Openness to other’s ideas (a true team player), grit and positivity are other examples of traits of people that are important on any team.

Simply put, members of the team "can do, can do".

clarity & alignment

People and teams are clear on what they need to do and why it is important. High-performing team feel strongly that the direction is clear, and line-of-sight exists between their work and that of the teams or organization on the whole.

There is clarity in the vision, mission and objectives of the team and clarity in how such objectives cascade down to each and every member within it.

Clarity is nothing without alignment, at least over the longer-term. People who know what to do can certainly deliver some good results, within their own sphere of influence; however, alignment is vital for sustained execution excellence. Alignment suggests that people are committed to their role and what they need to do to produce good results.

Simply put, members of the team "know what to do."

empowerment

Empowerment is all about ensuring people have the freedom, support, and tools to deliver on what is expected along with the systems and process to work effectively together.

The nature of the way organizations are designed and the likelihood that most are populated by human beings leads to a natural dysfunction that often is referred to as silo thinking or behavior. Left alone, silo behavior and potentially relational-based conflict WILL arise. This calls for organizations to install a ritual that ensure these are outlined, clarified, and negotiated so that people can work effectively together in driving value for their customers, and the business.

Additionally, we find many teams that have too many priorities that are crippling the team’s effectiveness and/or leading to burnout. Typically, ad hoc demands from the business may be the culprit, and without a priority reconciliation process, frustration emerges.

Simply put, members of the team are "allowed and enabled to".

belonging

Belonging suggests that people fit within your organizational context—they "belong" here and are connected to the organization.

Organizations cannot afford to have disengaged employees—and yet, many in the workforce report being actively disengaged. Others are passively disengagement manifesting in some form of "quiet quitting." This results in lost productivity and an unhappy workplace in general.

While there are many factors that may be at play here, the most important one is a sense of connection people have with their company, a belief that they (the company) are doing the right thing (beyond making money) and that they are operating in a way that is consistent with making a real contribution to society. For newer generations of workers this is of particular importance. It all starts with purpose and values.

Simply put, members of the team "believe it's right to do".

agile execution

Agile Execution is all about how the team works together to adapt to dynamic conditions. It is our belief that no initial plan will survive for very long, placing a burden on the team to pivot consistently in order to deliver upon their strategic outcomes.

In today’s VUCA world, planning is taking on new forms as organizations recognize that within weeks after initiating any plan, it can be rendered, at worst case, useless, or in best case, intentions remain on track but how one gets there changes rapidly. The environment is simply too dynamic to invest months preparing, planning, and budgeting for a reality that may not exist in six months.

In our view, get the strategic intent right, plan on how to get there, and instill agile execution rituals that allow the team to adapt to the realities of executing against the plan.

Simply put, members of the team "will do what it takes with integrity".

togetherness

A sense of togetherness results when the teams do the other five attributes well, leading to sustained high-performance and lots of enjoyment working with fellow colleagues. No matter how remote a team may operate, leaders need to work to secure this sense of "togetherness" and, ideally, bring people together every so often.

In such teams, not only do you have exemplary engagement and behaviors from all constituent members but that final piece of "social glue" -- individuals motivated also by the very company of their team colleagues. This is the zone where intra-relationships are defined by shared levels of high professional respect and, indeed, deep friendships.

Team members bearing this attribute scale even greater heights (sometimes literally!) because not only are they passionate about what they do (as built on all the preceding qualities) but it is this comradeship that sits at the very nexus of this passion. There is no place they would rather be than with the companionship of their comrades and, with this fellowship, a sense of collective invincibility. For such teams, there is a mindset of "anything together".

Simply put, members of the team "build a legacy".

organizational health

why even strong teams need a shared language

back to all insights organizational health

reflections from an insights discovery workshop

Last week, I had the privilege of facilitating an Insights Discovery workshop for a team of ten managers. They were part of a global rollout, the company they belong to has chosen to invest in this tool across all of its teams worldwide, treating self-awareness not as an off-the-shelf intervention but as an organisational discipline. Every team gets the time, the language, and the space to look at how it works.

I’m always grateful when I’m invited into work like this, it’s a dream scenario for a team dynamics facilitator. Most team development engagements arrive in moments of friction: something is misfiring and someone has decided it’s time to do something about it. This wasn’t the case here. The team I worked with was already strong: skilled, well-led, motivated, getting the work done. That’s actually what made the day so interesting. When a team is performing, the patterns by which it operates tend to stay invisible, unidentified. They don’t trip you up enough to notice. So the question becomes a different one — not what’s broken, but what would it look like to take a good team to a great level of common understanding?

That, in my experience, is exactly the kind of question Perpetual was designed to answer.

The premise of the tool

For anyone less familiar with it, and if you’ll indulge a nerding minute: Insights Discovery is a psychometric model rooted in Jungian psychology. It organises personality preferences around four colour energies: Fiery Red (decisive, direct, results-oriented), Sunshine Yellow (collaborative, ideation-led, expressive), Earth Green (values-led, relational, patient), and Cool Blue (analytical, precise, quality-focused).

Importantly, no one is just one colour. Everyone carries all four energies. Each person has a dominant energy, then a set of preferred energies in different proportions, and a less-preferred energy that is still part of how they show up. The richness of the tool lives in the combinations, not the labels. To say “she’s a Blue” or “he’s a Red” is to miss the entire point, it flattens a profile that is, by design, a unique blend.

What the model offers a team is a shared, non-judgmental vocabulary for those blends — for how each person tends to show up, what they need from others, and how they can flex their style to land more effectively.

That shared vocabulary, more than any individual profile, is what changes teams. The profile is interesting, the team wheel is fascinating. But the real actionable product is language.

What we walked into

When the team’s profiles came back together, two patterns stood out.

The first was a quiet tendency, across many of the individual profiles, toward opposite energies sitting in the Cool Blue and Sunshine Yellow zones: analytical rigour on one side, collaborative ideation on the other. The team wheel was showing a blend of combinations of the four energies, but the team’s centre of gravity, taken collectively, leaned in those directions.

The second pattern was the more interesting one to me, and I suspect to them. Earth Green appeared as a preferred energy, often a strong secondary or tertiary preference, for a majority of the team. That matters. Earth Green energy is values-led, relational, attentive to what’s important to the people in the room. It draws strongly on a shared sense of values to operate at its best.

This particular company is a certified B-Corp. The alignment between the values the organisation is built around and the values-led energy showing up in the room as a preferred way of working was, to me, striking. You could feel it in how they spoke to each other : a careful attentiveness to what was being said and what was being meant. That kind of culture is hard to legislate. Either it is in the room, or it isn’t. Here it was, sitting quietly inside almost every profile on the wall.

It’s one of those moments where the tool stops feeling like a mere personality assessment and starts feeling like a mirror for the organisation, not just the individual.

The ‘aha’ moment

Workshops live or die on a single thing: whether participants stop talking about the framework and start talking about themselves. About a third of the way in, that shift happened.

We were running a simple exercise: reflecting on how the team operates at its best, under stress, how it makes decisions. One manager mentioned: “We’re really good at exploring things together. I’m not always sure we know how we land them together.”

Everyone silently nodded. Some flipped back to their personal charts to see how their red energy was ranked in their profile, reflecting on how they could activate it more in the future.

People whose profiles drew strongly on Fiery Red described wanting cleaner closure on decisions, and how they sometimes held back from pushing for it because the conversations were genuinely good. Those leaning more on Earth Green named the patterns they’d been quietly noticing, how a colleague was feeling, whether commitment in the room was real, and reflected on when to bring those observations forward. Profiles weighted toward Cool Blue acknowledged that the instinct to keep refining had a cost in pace. Those with strong Sunshine Yellow saw how the energy they were generating was sometimes filling a space where a decision could have lived.

Crucially, no one was being typed. Every person in the room carried all four energies. The conversation was about which energies each person tended to lead with and what each of those tendencies meant for the team as a whole. The team’s habits, as a collective, were under the lens.

Nothing about that conversation was new information. The team had been navigating all of it intuitively, and well. What was new was the language. Suddenly there was a non-judgmental way to say we explore brilliantly, and we have a chance to land more deliberately. The pattern was visible. And patterns, once visible, can be worked with.

From shared language to a shared commitment

Awareness is necessary, but it isn’t sufficient. The risk of any well-run workshop is that everyone leaves the room feeling closer to each other and then defaults back to old behaviour by Wednesday. So we used the second half of the day to land what they wanted to do with what they’d seen, as a team.

The commitment they took was, to me, the most generous one a team can take.

Each manager committed to bringing the key findings of their own Insights profile back to their respective team: the energies they tend to lead with, the blind spots to be aware of, the way feedback lands best for them, what people can expect when working closely with them. And they would use that openness as a tool for their teams: a starting point for conversations about how decisions get made, how disagreement is handled, how feedback is given, how meetings actually work in practice.

In other words, the conversation wasn’t going to stay inside the room of ten. The shared vocabulary they’d built together would ripple outward into the rest of the organisation. Each manager became a translator. Every team they led got the benefit of a more self-aware leader and an explicit invitation to talk about how the work happens between people, not just what the work is.

That’s the kind of commitment that leverages the tool to its full potential. Not a one-time event. A way of working that gets shared, deliberately, across the organisation.

What I’m taking away as a practitioner

A few reflections from my side of the room.

First, when the willingness and the openness to others is there, the insights shared in a workshop like this land more accurately. The link between knowing myself and operating better as a team becomes immediate. With this group, that was unmistakable from the first hour. The work the tool can do is bounded by the openness of the people doing it; with this team, that ceiling sat very high.

Second, the most underused part of any team-development tool is the shared vocabulary it creates. It isn’t the profile that changes a team. It’s having a way to talk about the dynamic without anyone being labelled as the issue. The vocabulary is the gift. Everything else is scaffolding.

Third, awareness needs follow-through. For this team, the follow-through wasn’t a document they signed in the room. It was a commitment each manager made to take what they’d learned home to the people they lead, and use the language they’d built in the workshop to make their own teams’ patterns visible too. That kind of distributed follow-through is, I suspect, why this company is rolling the tool out everywhere: the value compounds the more of the organisation speaks the same language.

That’s the work I find most rewarding. Not the model. What people do with it.

If you lead a team that is already strong, the temptation is to spend your development budget on the parts of the organisation that look like they need it more. But there’s a particular leverage in investing in a team that’s already working, giving it the time, the language, and the space to look at itself. The shift from good to great rarely comes from fixing something that’s broken. It usually comes from naming, deliberately, what already works, and choosing to do more of it on purpose.

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