What if your team had a clear, shared agreement about how you want to work together—an agreement you built together, not one handed down from above?
Think for a moment about your current team:
- How do you decide what’s acceptable and what’s not?
- When conflict arises, how do you handle it?
- Do unspoken expectations sometimes create tension?
If your answers feel a little uncertain, you’re not alone. Many teams operate on assumptions and habits rather than intentional agreements. That’s where the Designed Team Alliance (DTA)—a simple but powerful tool from ORSC (Organisation and Relationship Systems Coaching), taught in the Fundamentals course, changes the game.
What Is a Designed Team Alliance?
Every relationship—whether between colleagues, couples, or families—runs on both explicit and unspoken agreements. But often those agreements are accidental. The DTA brings them into the open and makes them intentional.
Here’s the essence:
- Culture first: the team talks about what kind of space they want to create together. Do they want it to feel collaborative, challenging, supportive, spacious? What values matter most?
- Shared responsibility: instead of focusing on how others should behave, each person asks: What can my team count on from me? What will I commit to for the sake of our shared success?
By having this conversation, the team creates a foundation they can return to when things get tough. It’s not about rules imposed from outside—it’s about co-responsibility and accountability.
For example:
- A project team may agree, “We’ll be candid when something isn’t working, but we’ll always assume positive intent.”
- A couple may agree, “When we disagree, we’ll pause before reacting and remind ourselves we’re on the same side.”
- A family may agree, “Over the holidays, we want the atmosphere to be relaxed and fun. Everyone commits to pitching in with meals so no one person carries the load.”
The beauty of a DTA is that it’s flexible. It can be used for an entire team culture, or for a specific moment—like preparing for a merger, planning a product launch, or even hosting a visiting relative.
And because it’s co-created, the ownership and accountability are shared.
Why It Works
Research backs this up. Teams that design their agreements and create clear conflict and decision-making protocols consistently outperform those that don’t (Guttman, 2008). When teams consciously wrestle with these questions, cohesion and alignment increase—and productivity often follows.
The Designed Team Alliance isn’t just an exercise at the start of a coaching engagement. It’s a living agreement. Teams can revisit it, update it, and use it as a touchstone whenever circumstances change.
As one ORSC Fundamentals participant told us:
“I will use DTA before our retrospective session in the team, and with my family. It’s so versatile—it helps boost energy and alignment anywhere people need to work together.”
Reflect for a Moment
- What atmosphere would you most like to create with your team—or your family—over the next few months?
- When conflict inevitably arises, how do you want to be together?
- If you could rely on your colleagues to commit to one thing, what would you ask of them?
These are exactly the kinds of questions a Designed Team Alliance surfaces. And often, just asking them out loud starts to shift the culture.
Experience It for Yourself
The Designed Team Alliance is one of the cornerstone tools you’ll experience in the ORSC Fundamentals course. And you don’t just learn about it—you practise it, seeing firsthand how quickly it brings clarity, connection, and alignment.
Our final Fundamentals course of 2025 runs virtually on 13–14 November.
This is your last chance this year to learn and practise the DTA (and many more tools) in a safe, engaging environment.
