Repairing Relationship - a webinar series with Bob Dick

A Question: Why does this keep getting harder?

Many experienced practitioners — coaches, consultants, OD professionals, facilitators, leaders — carry this question quietly. Not because they lack commitment or skill. But because the dynamics of trust, defensiveness and repair, especially under pressure, resist even the most well-intentioned efforts. And sometimes those efforts make things worse.

This program offers something rare: a precise, learnable, and deeply human answer. Grounded in Chris Argyris’s action science and more than fifty years of reflective practice, it gives you tools you can bring into your very next conversation.

What you take away

A new quality of perception.  You begin to see, in real time, what is actually happening in a relationship or a group — not just what is being said, but what is being protected, and what untested assumption is quietly driving the dynamic. This is immediately transferable to any coaching conversation, team session, or change process.

A precise conversational practice.  You learn to voice assumptions as assumptions — tentatively, with an invitation to be corrected — in a way that opens dialogue rather than triggering defensiveness. Small enough to practise tomorrow. Deep enough to spend a career refining.

A systemic reading of groups and organisations.  You develop the capacity to understand why a team keeps having the same argument, why a change initiative keeps dying at the same point, or why a relationship both parties want to repair seems to resist it. That reading changes the quality of patience and precision you bring to your work over time.

What the program addresses

Three interlocking dynamics that most experienced practitioners recognise but few have the precise tools to work with:

• The gap between the values we espouse and how we actually behave under stress — and why we are largely blind to it
• The self-sealing cycle of untested assumptions that drives relationships into downward spirals
• Why well-intentioned interventions sometimes trigger the very defensiveness they are designed to dissolve — and what to do instead

The program begins with pair relationships and extends to teams, groups and organisations. It draws on Argyris’s action science and the approaches developed by his colleagues and followers to work with these dynamics without raising defensiveness.

Who this is for

This program is for practitioners who are somewhere in the middle — not newcomers to the idea that relationships matter, and not yet satisfied that they fully understand why the work keeps being hard. People who have been in the room long enough to feel the friction, and who are honest enough to keep asking why.

That includes coaches and mentors working with leadership or organisational change. OD and HR practitioners moving beyond transactional work toward genuine systemic understanding. Independent consultants and facilitators navigating conflict, culture, or transformation. Senior leaders who carry responsibility for the relational health of their teams and organisations. And practitioner-researchers who want to ground their intellectual engagement in precise, tested tools.

If you invest in your own practice — not just in certifications, but in the quality of understanding you bring to the room — this program was designed with you in mind.

Format

Sessions:  Four weekly sessions of two hours each

Dates:  July 7, 14, 21 and 28, 2026 

Platform:  Zoom (link provided upon registration)

Group size:  Minimum 6 — Maximum 15 participants

Language:  English

Orientation sessions: Two free 45-minute orientation sessions are offered before the program begins — one on June 9th at 8am CET and another on June 16th at 10am CET. 

Investment

Early-bird fee:  €399 including VAT 

Standard fee:  €499 including VAT

Invoicing:  Bank transfer in Euro 

Team attendance: Attending as part of a team from a single organisation or community significantly improves learning transfer. Contact us to discuss further group arrangements.

Cancellation policy

• 14 or more days before the first session: full refund
• 7–13 days before the first session: 50% refund
• Fewer than 7 days before the first session: no refund

If you miss a session, you will have exclusive access to the recording. Recordings capture only the facilitators’ contributions — not participant interventions — and are shared solely with registered participants.

The facilitators

Bob Dick is a Brisbane-based educator, consultant, mentor, and coach with more than five decades of experience in action science, facilitation, and organisational learning. His work draws directly on Chris Argyris’s research and practice, refined through a lifetime of application across widely different settings. His style is warm, participative, and rigorously practical.

Sebastian Wolf Siebzehnrübl is a Berlin-based Systemic Inquiry Practitioner working at the intersection of systems thinking, evaluative inquiry, and relational practice. He brings a European framing and a background in second-order cybernetics, organisational learning, and the philosophy of inquiry to the program’s design and context.

To receive orientation session dates, early-bird details, and registration information, contact:

Sebastian Wolf Siebzehnrübl I context collective, Berlin  

sebastian@antepostnow.com  •  www.antepostnow.com • https://www.linkedin.com/in/siebzehnruebl/