A new platform. A long-held conviction.

To inspire leaders to be the best they can be.

Footdown was founded in Bath in 2001: a leadership mentoring company, set up by business leaders for business leaders. It offered mentoring groups, one-to-one coaching and leadership events.

Its members ran businesses, corporate divisions, professional firms and public services. A few were sports people and musicians.

“None of us is as smart as all of us.”

In 2003 Footdown started the Bath Fifteen: a mentoring group of no more than fifteen senior leaders. It met ten times a year, and every member had a one-to-one coaching session with the group’s leader between meetings.

More groups followed, in Bristol, Ascot, the Thames Valley, Surrey, Scotland and Soho. Every member signed a confidentiality agreement, so leaders could raise what they couldn’t say anywhere else.

A map for every leader.

Conversation alone wasn’t enough. Footdown’s members needed a way to see their whole organisation at once, so Footdown built one: Footdown Insight, the framework, tools and materials at the heart of every Fifteen.

It looked like a board game, but the issues on the table were real. A leadership team laid clue cards on a board divided into four areas: external events, leadership, execution and results. Each card described something they might recognise in their own organisation. Cards were played anonymously, so issues surfaced that nobody would have raised out loud. Then the team agreed the two or three most important issues to tackle in the next 90 days.

One intensive day with a leadership team.

Through its consultancy arm, Footdown took Footdown Insight workshops to leadership teams all around the world. A facilitator guided the team through the board, but the leaders made every decision: they set the priorities, wrote the task statements and owned the action plans.

Some organisations used it because they wanted a closer look at their problems. Others used it while they were healthy, to stay that way.

Footdown Insight was Footdown’s own tool, not to be confused with Insights Discovery.

From the board to the browser.

By 2011 Footdown was planning to take the cards, boards and guides online.

iFootdown put the clues on screen, with a simple agree or disagree for each one. Then F1.1 took the idea further. Its High Performance Workplace diagnostic used 64 clues, read through four lenses (Culture, Performance, Engagement and Change) and compared team by team and location by location.

The Organisational Intelligence Platform.

Tensense asks 16 fixed prompts, takes 90 seconds on average, and analyses the responses through four lenses (Performance Energy, Motivation, Team Attributes and Culture Climate), with rapid reporting at the end of each cycle. The science

The conviction behind it hasn’t changed since the first Fifteen: the people closest to the work know what is really happening, and leaders do their best work when they can see it too.

Some of the people haven’t changed either. Mike Roe, our Chief Executive Officer, and Dr Mike Carter, our Chief Scientific Officer, were both part of Footdown’s leadership team.

From one consultancy to many.

For years, Footdown’s consultants brought Footdown Insight into their own client work. Today, business consultancies and Insights Discovery practitioners bring Tensense into theirs.

Through our partner programme, they bring it to the leaders they already advise: a baseline at the start of an engagement, and a view of what’s shifting during and after their work.