ORGANISATIONS
Open culture.
Encounter helps organisations create open cultures grounded in authenticity and openness, conditions for improved performance, fulfilment, and actualising individual and organisational potential.
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THE LABORATORY
Open culture is a live group experience designed specifically for teams and organisations. A carefully facilitated relational laboratory in which the conditions for psychological safety, authentic communication, and genuine human contact are deliberately created, and directly experienced.
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WHY IT MATTERS
In 2012 Google launched Project Aristotle, a two-year study of 180 teams designed to identify what made teams high performing. The single most important factor distinguishing high-performing teams from low-performing ones was not talent, technical skill, or team composition. It was psychological safety, the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. That it is safe to speak up, disagree, admit uncertainty, and be honest without fear of humiliation or reprisal.
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, whose three decades of research established psychological safety as the foundation of team performance, found that teams with high psychological safety learn faster, innovate more effectively, make fewer errors, and perform better on virtually every measurable outcome. Most organisations systematically undermine it. Hierarchy, performance management, political culture, and the chronic pressure to appear competent all work directly against the conditions psychological safety requires.
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THE PATTERN
Every human being carries an innate drive toward growth, learning and evolution. Carl Rogers called this the self-actualising tendency, and he spent his life understanding why, for so many people, it gets blocked.
In modern culture many have been judged and criticised for being authentic, for speaking up, for sharing feelings, for admitting mistakes, for being real. It hasn’t been safe. This pattern gets shaped in childhood through family dynamics, and then systemically reinforced in the wider cultural context through media, friendship groups, school, workplaces, and our personal group dynamics. In adapting, humans mask and pretend, presenting an image to the world, while covering up our true feelings and thoughts in order to stay safe, avoid conflict and judgement and survive. This is survival intelligence; it’s an adaptive response to environments where being authentic has consequences.
This adaptation has fundamental impacts to both our personal lives, relationships, and organisational performance. These include anxiety, low confidence, lack of connection to others, problems that stay hidden, slow reporting of mistakes, problematic relational issues, secrecy and increased dysfunctional power dynamics. On a more general level it fundamentally impacts our ability to align with our values and fulfil our potential.
This archaic system is founded on adaptive survival intelligence rooted in fear.
In contrast open cultures are founded on relational intelligence facilitating potential. Based on decades of psychology, social science and group dynamic research we’ve designed a multi-faceted approach to group learning and transformation. Designed to create authentic, non-judgemental open environments unlocking organisational performance.
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WHAT HAPPENS
Open culture is a group experience designed for teams & groups. It is a blend of core principles designed to create optimum environment for authentic communication, and group enquiry designed to uncover key team dynamics blocking performance. We also introduce embodied practicals that amplify connection, creativity and team coherence.
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FORMATS
FOUNDATIONS — HALF DAY
Introduction to the approach, suitable for a single team or as a taster for a wider programme. This includes education around philosophy, key principles, small break out groups, skills training.
OPEN CULTURE LAB — FULL DAY
The core offering. One intact team or group, up to 24 people. The day workshop involves foundations material, coupled with experiential embodied training.
ONGOING — MONTHLY HALF-DAY SESSIONS
Across three to six months. As the new philosophy is embodied in the system, challenges, ruptures and developments show up.
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WHAT CHANGES
Benefits include improved energy, work satisfaction, relational connection, authentic communication, improved performance, honesty, aliveness, spontaneity, creativity.
For teams and organisations: measurably increased psychological safety, greater trust between team members and leadership, more honest and effective communication. Reduced interpersonal friction and conflict, stronger team cohesion and collective performance. In general, open cultures perform better. Problems surface while they’re still small, mistakes get reported instead of hidden and avoided
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ABOUT TOM
Tom van Berckel is the creator of Encounter, CBT therapist (BABCP), integrative psychotherapist (UKCP), and leadership coach (ICF). He’s designed self-development apps, worked for the NHS and run programs for brands including Warner Bros and Soho House.
We believe the group experience is one of the most powerful and underused tools for human transformation. Our work is grounded in over 80 years of therapeutic wisdom, blending Gestalt therapy, psychodrama, radical honesty, somatic awareness, and systemic field dynamics into a single living experience.
Encounter group experiences consistently produce greater self-awareness, more authentic communication, deeper human connection, and greater aliveness, the lived experience of becoming more fully yourself.
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CONTACT
A conversation, not a pitch.
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