Deep conversations
People often judge visible behaviour before they understand the motive underneath it.
Helping an audience understand themselves, other people and what really happens when relationships go under pressure.
A Relationship Awareness Theory and SDI-based session at DO Lectures, giving people a practical way to understand motives, behaviour, overdone strengths and conflict without turning the room into a personality-type parlour game.
The DO Lectures is a gathering, learning platform and community built around useful ideas, human stories and the courage to do something with them.
The context
The audience needed a way into relationship intelligence that felt human, memorable and usable. The challenge was to make motivation, conflict and self-awareness feel practical rather than theoretical, and to help people see that understanding themselves is the starting point for understanding others.
The work
We created the space to think clearly, together.
Clear thinking
Kate built the session around two useful promises: get to know yourself and get to know others. Using Relationship Awareness Theory and Core Strengths SDI, she explored the difference between behaviour and motive, why strengths can become too much, how people protect different values under pressure, and why opposition can be productive while conflict usually signals a threat to something that matters.
Practical ways forward
Introduced the SDI lens of People, Performance, Process and Hub motives.
The outcome
Stronger foundations. Clearer direction. Better relationships.
- The audience had a clear framework for understanding motive beneath behaviour
- Different SDI motivational value systems became easier to recognise without labelling people
- Conflict was reframed as useful information about what people value and protect
- People left with a simple invitation: know yourself to grow yourself, and be yourself with more skill
“Know yourself to grow yourself. Be yourself, but with more skill.”
The impact
Clarity that changed how the work could move.
People are complex. Relationships do not need to be. The work is to tune in before deciding what someone else's behaviour means.
Delve deeper
Related resources for the pattern underneath this work.
01
Models
What is SDI and how does it help teams work better
Most team tools help people describe how they behave. SDI, the Strength Deployment Inventory developed by Tim Overman and now published by Core Strengths, does something more specific: it helps people understand why they behave as they do, what motivates them at a deeper level, and crucially, what happens to their strengths when they feel threatened or when conflict enters the room.
02
Relationships
What is SDI Core Strengths?
A practical guide to SDI Core Strengths, motivation, strengths, overdone strengths, conflict sequences and how relationship intelligence helps teams work better.
03
Psychology & Work
You can see exactly what's wrong. You've seen it for months. So why haven't you said anything?
The gap between knowing something is broken and actually naming it out loud is one of the least examined spaces in professional life. It is also, right now, getting wider.