The Blind$pot Intensive
Everyone in that room already knows. Nobody has said it.
Three working hours with your leadership team, built on data they gave me before I walked in.
For chief executives and founders with a leadership team of five or more. Delivered in person, anywhere in the United States.
If your team does not need this, I will tell you on the call.
Delivered by Hacia Atherton, Principal, MLE Advisory.
Certified Practising Accountant
Master of Applied Positive Psychology
Founder, Empowered Women in Trades
Former CEO
Three-time Amazon bestselling author
You will recognise at least three of these
If you recognise fewer than three, you do not need me and I will tell you so on the call.
The same issue keeps arriving back on your desk with a new name on it.
A decision gets made in the meeting and unmade in the corridor.
You have six leaders who each believe the team is aligned. You are no longer sure.
Someone good resigned and the reason they gave was not the reason.
Everybody is working hard and the business is not moving any faster.
You are the bottleneck, you know it, and you cannot see how to stop being one.
What it looks like when it is fixed
The issue gets named once, in front of everyone, and closed.
The decision made in the room is the decision that gets executed on Monday.
Ask your six leaders for the top three priorities separately and you get the same list.
You hear the real reason while it is still a conversation, not a resignation.
Effort turns into movement you can point at on a number.
The team makes the call without you in the room, and makes it well.
Twenty minutes. I will tell you if this is the wrong thing for your team.
Why I do this work
July 2017. A six hundred kilogram dressage mare came down on top of me in a training arena. Nine hours of surgery at the Alfred. Millimetres decided how that ended.
They told me I might not walk unaided again.
Months later I was in a hydrotherapy pool, going under, coming up, failing to stand, going under again. I had assumed the obstacle was my spine. It was not. What was actually holding me back was what I had decided about pain, about failure, and about what I was now allowed to expect of myself. None of that appeared on a scan.
I got back on my feet. I later ran a half marathon.
I had spent a career as an accountant reading balance sheets, and I had just learned, expensively, that the thing constraining performance is almost never the thing being measured. So I went back and did a Master of Applied Positive Psychology to understand why.
That is the whole of my work now. Every business I walk into has a number it cannot explain and a conversation it is not having. Those two facts are related, and almost nobody connects them.
Why you cannot see it from where you sit
Your read on your own leadership team is the least reliable data in the business.
Not because you are a poor judge of people. Because you are the one person in that building nobody tells the truth to. Every other person in that room hears a version of events you will never hear.
Organisational psychology calls the condition underneath it psychological safety, and it is measurable. What it looks like on a Tuesday is a senior person saying happy to go with that about a decision they believe is wrong.
Nobody logs that moment. It arrives on the P&L eighteen months later as a margin you cannot explain.
Prove it to yourself first
Twenty minutes, and it costs you nothing.
Ask each of your leaders, separately and in writing, for the three things this business must get right in the next ninety days.
Do not discuss it.
Do not let them compare notes.
Then put the answers side by side.
If the lists match, close this page. Your leadership team is aligned and you have a different problem to solve.
If they do not match, you have just found where the money is going, and you have done it without spending anything.
Inside the three hours
This is taught, not facilitated. Your leadership team learns three of the five Blind$pot frameworks in plain language, then applies each
one to the pattern their own assessment data has already surfaced.
The Silence Ledger is what that data shows, and it opens the session. They leave able to run all three frameworks without me in the room.
01
ABC · Autonomy, Belonging and Competence
What it is. Three psychological needs that Deci and Ryan established as the conditions for sustained motivation. Autonomy, having real choice in how the work gets done. Belonging, being genuinely part of something rather than adjacent to it. Competence, feeling capable at the thing you are being asked to do. Take one away and effort keeps going while discretionary effort quietly stops.
What it does here. Scored across your team beforehand. The missing letter explains behaviour that has been read as attitude. A leader who has stopped bringing ideas is usually short on autonomy. A leader who has gone quiet in meetings is usually short on competence in one specific area nobody has named. A leader who is technically present and actually gone is short on belonging. Three different problems, three different fixes, routinely mistaken for each other.
02
The Ladder of Inference · Where your decisions actually get made
What it is. Argyris mapped the seven rungs a person climbs in about a second, from the data in front of them, to the fraction they select, to the meaning they add, to the assumption, the belief and the action.
What it does here. This is where bias lives. Confirmation, affinity, halo, recency and anchoring are the five that cost leadership teams the most, and every one of them sits on a rung of this ladder. The team takes the decision they have argued about twice and walks both sides down it. The disagreement is almost never at the top.
03
PERMA · The five conditions performance runs on
What it is. Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment. Seligman's model, and the most heavily researched framework in positive psychology.
What it does here. Scored across the team beforehand. The lowest condition is where your attrition is coming from and usually where your slowest decisions are coming from. Most executive teams run strong on Accomplishment and weak on Meaning, which is the profile that looks excellent for two years and then loses three people in a quarter.
The three hours, block by block
No icebreaker and no scene setting. The aggregate goes on the wall inside the first five minutes, because the diagnosis is finished before I arrive.
0:00
0:20
0:50
2:10
1:00
1:35
2:40
The Silence Ledger, on the wall
Your team's aggregate in the first five minutes. The four silences and which one is loudest. The contract stated: individual answers stay private, patterns get discussed, nobody gets named. Each leader writes one anonymous example from the last ninety days.
What made it rational
The examples go up unattributed. The room does not debate whether they are fair. It answers one question about each: what made staying quiet the sensible choice. This is where the hardest thing gets said.
BREAK
ABC
Autonomy, Belonging and Competence
With your team's scores on all three. This is where the silences get explained. People go quiet when one of the three is missing, and which one it is changes the fix entirely.
The Ladder of Inference
Seven rungs and the five biases that live on them. Then the decision this team has argued about twice, walked down both sides until the rung where they diverged is visible.
PERMA
The five conditions and your team's scores. Which one is missing, for whom, and the single change that would move it.
The one thing
One behaviour the team commits to changing, and one named owner for whatever in the system made the silence rational. Written down before anybody leaves.
Close
What happens next, and what does not.
The exit test. The team can name one specific thing that made one specific silence rational. Not more trust. Something that happened, that somebody did, that changes on Monday.
How it runs
Before the day
Up to six leaders complete the Blind$pot instrument privately, about twenty minutes each. Each receives a one page personal read nobody else sees. I read the aggregated team pattern before I travel and build the session around what it says.
On the day
Three hours in your building. The three frameworks taught in plain language, then applied live to your team's own data. One deep diagnostic on whatever the data says is actually in the way.
What you leave with
The thing the team named,
in writing. A permanent
measured baseline. A personal
read for every leader. Three
frameworks they can run
themselves. Clarity on whether
the problem is one person
or the system.
What happens next
Nothing, unless you want it.
Most teams re-measure at ninety
days to see whether it held. Some
go further. I will tell you plainly if I
think you do not need to.
What is in it for you
You stop being the only person in the building who can see the whole picture.
You get a straight answer on whether the team you have is the team you need for the next stage.
You find out whether it is one person or the system, and those cost very different amounts to fix.
You get out of the position of being the one who has to say the hard thing.
Your leadership team leaves with a shared language, so the next difficult conversation starts further along.
You walk into your next board meeting with a number instead of a feeling.
This is what you get out of it personally, as the one carrying it.
Work out your own number first
Before you look at the price, do this arithmetic. It takes two minutes and it is the only comparison that matters.
Take the fully loaded cost of your six leaders.
Divide it down to an hourly figure. Multiply by the hours a week they sit in meetings where a decision is made and then quietly unmade.
Then add the cost of replacing the last senior person who left for a reason that was not the reason they gave.
I do not know your number. You do.
This session gets measured against that number, not against a day rate. If your number is small, do not book.
If it made you stop reading for a second, keep going.
The Investment
$15,000
Blind$pot Team Assessment, six leaders at $1,200
$7,200
Individual written read for each leader
Aggregated team report and analysis
Three hour session, three frameworks taught and applied
Additional leaders beyond six
Included
Included
Included
$1,200 each
Roughly half of what you pay is measurement you keep permanently. The rest is the three hours where your team learns to read it themselves.
Four a month. I read every team report myself, so that number does not move.
up to six leaders · travel billed at cost
What people say afterwards
Hacia Atherton is the kind of operator you want in your corner. She brings genuine thinking to work that most companies treat as purely strategic, and she delivers. In an industry full of people who talk about impact, Hacia actually creates it.
Alexandra Senter, Chief Executive, Sentral Media Group
Time in the room
The Blind$pot Intensive
$15,000
The Leadership Accelerator
$35,000
Full day
Leaders included
Frameworks taught
Team assessment beforehand
Written 90 day commitments
Measurement included at list value
Three hours
Up to 6
Three of the five
Yes
No
$7,200
All five
Yes, from every leader
There is a longer version
Most teams start with the Intensive, because three hours is easy to justify and the measurement underneath it is identical. Take the full day when you already know the team needs to leave with written commitments rather than with clarity.
90 day re-measure
No
Up to 10
Yes
Yes
$16,500
If you are not sure which one your team needs, book the conversation and I will tell you. It is usually the Intensive.
READ ABOUT THE LEADERSHIP ACCELLERATOR
How you know before you commit
I do not offer a money back guarantee, because an outcome that depends on what your team is willing to say in a room is not mine alone to promise, and a guarantee I could wriggle out of is worth less than none.
Here is what I do instead. Four checkpoints, and you can stop at any of them:
The free test. Run the priorities exercise above this week. If the lists come back matching, you have your answer and it cost you twenty minutes.
The call. Twenty minutes. If your situation calls for something other than this, I will say so and tell you what I think it is, including when that is nothing.
The data, before the day. The instrument runs a week ahead. If it comes back showing an aligned team with nothing significant underneath, I will tell you before I travel rather than after.
One engagement at a time. No retainer, no minimum term, nothing to cancel. If you never speak to me again after the session, the baseline and the report are still yours.
Book it even if
Your team says everything is fine. Especially then. A team that reports no friction is either exceptional or quiet, and those look identical from your chair.
You have run assessments before and nothing changed. Ask what happened to the data afterwards. That is usually the whole answer.
You already know what the problem is. Knowing it and having the room say it out loud are different events, and only the second one changes anything.
What waiting costs
The risk of leaving it is not that the problem gets worse. The risk is that it becomes normal.
A team that spends another year not saying the thing stops noticing that it is not being said. New people learn the silence inside a fortnight, and by then you are not fixing a conversation, you are fixing a culture.
This is not for you if
You want a motivational session. Nobody will feel especially good at the ninety minute mark.
You want your own message delivered to the team by an outsider. The data says what the data says.
You cannot get the whole leadership team in one room on one day. Six people who decide, not six people who attend.
You are not prepared to hear what your team reported about your leadership. Your name is in that report too.
Who is running it
Hacia Atherton. Certified Practising Accountant, Master of Applied Positive Psychology, former chief executive, and three-time Amazon bestselling author of The Billion Dollar Blind$pot.
I advise boards and founders across construction, manufacturing, mining, finance, private equity and family business on the behavioural systems driving business outcomes.
I founded Empowered Women in Trades to move women's representation in skilled trades from three per cent to thirty by 2030. That work happens on construction sites, in manufacturing plants and in mining. They are the least sentimental rooms in business, and they are the reason none of what I teach is theoretical.
Telstra Best of Business Award, Victoria, 2024. Named among the Top 100 Women in Construction. Co-author with Joe Foster of Reebok in the How to Survive and Thrive series, and an advisory board member to university business schools and to government on workforce reform.
I deliver every Intensive personally. Four a month is the ceiling, because I read every team report myself.
Is this a workshop or a diagnostic?
Both, in that order. The diagnostic runs before the day. The three hours teach three frameworks that your team then applies to their own results. They leave able to run all three without me.
Three hours seems short
It is short because the diagnosis is already done. Most of an offsite gets spent getting to honesty and working out what the problem is. Both of those are finished before I arrive, so the three hours go on teaching and applying.
Questions people ask
We have done this sort of thing before
Then you already know what happens when a facilitator walks in cold and asks the room to be open. Ask whoever ran it what they measured, and what happened to the data afterwards. That is usually the whole answer.
Who needs to be in the room
Up to six people, and they must be the ones who actually decide. Not the ones who are pleasant in meetings.
Is what my team says confidential?
Individual responses are never shown to you or to each other. You see the aggregate pattern. Each leader gets their own personal read. That condition is what makes people answer honestly.
What if the data says the problem is me?
Then you will have found that out for $15,000 in three hours rather than over the next two years. That is the cheapest version of that discovery available to you.
Where do you travel?
Anywhere in the United States. Flights and accommodation are billed at cost with receipts, never marked up.
What happens afterwards?
Nothing, unless you want it to. You keep the baseline, the report and the frameworks. If the team wants to go further there are longer programmes, and I will tell you plainly if I think you do not need one.
Request a conversation
MLE Advisory operates by introduction. Tell us who you are and what the business is contending with, and you will hear back within one working day.
Read and answered personally. No sequence, no follow up from anybody else.
Or write directly. enquiries@mleadvisory.com