The Practise of Development

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An experiential workshop for people practising development in real time

This workshop is for people already practising development in real time — coaches, facilitators, consultants, and leaders who help others grow, reflect, or reframe. They’ve spent time at their own developmental edge, and often support others in doing the same — even if they wouldn’t always call it that.

Adult developmental psychology has given us a powerful foundation. It helps us grow the capacity to lead — and make meaning — in the midst of complexity. Many people already draw on that foundation, consciously or not. They help people shift, grow, reframe.

But often, the most powerful moves are so close, so natural, they go unseen. Not hidden exactly — just not yet fully visible.

This workshop is about bringing that implicit knowing into the light — gently, precisely, and in ways that can be practised. Not to critique or replace what’s already working, but to surface the invisible architecture beneath it. To reveal the developmental frame already alive in the room — so that it can become more intentional, more transferable, and more impactful at scale.

And that matters. Because the organisations we’re part of — often overwhelmed, under-adaptive, and short on real human insight — won’t become more responsive or humane unless the people within them learn to practise development together, in real time, under real conditions.

We’ll be working with a small number of well-established, embodied practices — ones developed and adapted through work with the Polyvagal Institute and other reliable sources. These aren’t frameworks to study; they’re practices to experience — accessible even before they are fully understood. That’s part of what makes them developmental.

Each is offered with a developmental frame. Which means we’ll be attending not just to the practice itself, but to what it makes possible when held in a particular way. In that sense, attention becomes the active ingredient. What we attend to — moment by moment — shapes what becomes possible. It creates the future we then have to live in.

From that layered experience, another practice begins to emerge — one you may already know: asking developmental questions. Only now, they can see it for what it is — a meta-practice that weaves the others together. Something you may have been doing all along — now revealed as a form that can be held with greater elegance, discernment, and precision, because you can see the frame within which you’ve always been asking.

Throughout the session, we use heat intentionally — not through pressure, but by surfacing something central and implicit, and letting people feel their way into it. The shift is often subtle. But unmistakable.

“Something has changed,” they say. “And it’s also exactly the same.”

What you’ll leave with:

• A deeper felt understanding of what makes a practice developmental
• The ability to apply one practice in your own setting, along with the frame that makes it work
• Clearer insight into how attention, intention, and framing shape outcomes
• A refreshed understanding of developmental questions as an integrating move

This workshop is not just a one-off. It’s part of a broader ecosystemal shift — one in which developmental practice becomes shared, embodied, and alive across roles, functions, and teams. When practices like this become shared, they begin to create the conditions for more adaptive, more human, and more meaningful organising.

In a world that asks us to move faster, this is a practice of moving deeper — together.

DATES: 4 November, 10am-1pm

COST: £95 (+VAT where applicable)