Keynote
An engaging introduction designed to create recognition, curiosity, and shared language. Best for conferences, leadership gatherings, and larger audiences. Interaction and practice are necessarily limited.
In-house experiences
Every team has a way of moving under pressure.
Relationship Rumble is a customized, facilitator-led workshop experience that helps teams recognize how their relationships move under pressure and practise responses that create more room for regulation, curiosity, and constructive engagement.
By building shared language and relational skills, the experience is designed to support stronger working relationships, better collaboration, and more productive conversations across the team.
What happens between people
Most teams can name the issue. Fewer can see the movement around it.
The subject being discussed is only part of the relational environment. Capacity may be falling. Protection may be increasing. Perspectives may be narrowing. Each group may be developing a different explanation of the other—all while people believe they are responding reasonably to the situation.
Relationship Rumble gives teams a way to notice those movements earlier and practise what they might do next.
These are recognizable situations, not a diagnostic checklist.
- The same conversation goes well one day and badly the next.
- A cross-functional relationship becomes defensive or transactional under pressure.
- People stop being curious as soon as perspectives differ.
- Feedback is delayed, softened beyond usefulness, or received as threat.
- Teams recover from tension slowly—or never quite address what happened.
- Capable people struggle to access their relational skills when current load is high.
- A transformation, merger, restructuring, or leadership change is testing important relationships.
What changes when people can recognize the movement while they are still inside it?
What the experience builds
Shared language. Practised responses. More choice in the moment.
Relationship Rumble is not a promise that a single workshop will eliminate conflict or transform a culture. It creates an opportunity for people to understand familiar patterns, practise relational skills, and become more intentional about the environments they create together.
Participants practise how to:
- recognize movement between Resonance, Expansion and Integration, Edge of Self, and Repair
- notice changes in their own relational capacity
- remain curious for longer when perspectives differ
- recognize protective responses with less immediate blame or judgment
- distinguish intent, impact, interpretation, and visible behaviour
- choose when to continue, pause, regulate, seek clarity, or repair
Teams may develop:
- shared, non-blaming language for relational dynamics
- earlier recognition of tension and declining capacity
- more constructive conversations across roles and perspectives
- stronger habits of reflection, feedback, recovery, and repair
- greater awareness of how load, history, and expectations shape an interaction
- a framework that remains available after the facilitated session
More than a presentation
People recognize the model—and then practise within it.
A typical Relationship Rumble experience begins with facilitator storytelling and a clear introduction to Resonance and Edge of Self. Participants quickly connect the model to situations they already recognize.
Depending on the length and purpose of the session, the experience may then include:
- teaching the Resonance Model
- private reflection
- pair or small-group conversation
- recognizable scenarios and case studies
- experiential role play or simulation
- examination of relationships relevant to participants’ work or lives
- practice involving regulation, curiosity, perspective-taking, communication, or repair
- full-group discussion and integration
Insight changes what you understand. Experience can change what becomes available to you in the moment.
Ways to Rumble
Choose the depth that fits the opportunity.
90-minute introduction
An accessible entry into the core model with recognizable situations, reflection, and limited practice. Useful when time is constrained or as the beginning of deeper work.
Half-day experience
More substantive learning with contextual scenarios, conversation, reflection, and initial practice. Participants begin working with the model rather than only hearing about it.
Full-day experience
Deeper experiential learning with targeted cases or simulations, more practice, and time for reflection and integration. This format offers the greatest opportunity to connect the model to relationships that matter to the group.
Small-group formats create the most room for conversation and practice. Approximately 12 participants is often an effective size for a highly experiential session. Larger groups and virtual delivery are possible, but the design and depth must be adapted accordingly. In-person delivery is preferred for the fullest experience.
Shaped around your context
The model remains consistent. The experience becomes specific.
We begin by learning what is prompting the conversation, which relationships or interfaces matter most, what tends to happen under pressure, and what you hope participants will be able to notice or practise.
We then shape the emphasis, stories, scenarios, and level of challenge around the group. A dedicated session might explore cross-functional tension, leadership relationships, feedback, change, competing expectations, accumulated strain, or another recurring dynamic.
Customization does not mean placing unresolved organizational conflict onstage or pressuring participants to disclose personal experiences.
Challenge with choice
Experiential does not mean exposed.
Participants may be invited to reflect, converse, observe, interpret, or practise. Private reflection can remain private, disclosure is never forced, and scenarios can be fictionalized or generalized.
The level of emotional intensity is considered during design. Participants retain choice about how they engage, and expectations for respectful participation are established at the beginning.
Relationship Rumble is a facilitated learning experience. It is not therapy, diagnosis, formal mediation, crisis response, or a substitute for action required to address unsafe working conditions.
Developed through practice
Relationship learning should be experienced, not only explained.
Relationship Rumble brings together lived relational experience and professional work involving emotional intelligence, regulation, co-regulation, Business Relationship Management, experiential learning, and organizational culture.
The model continues to be examined and developed. We aim to be clear about what informs it, what participants experience, and what still needs to be learned.
Relationship Rumble experiences are delivered through Value Shepherd, whose work is grounded in the belief that organizational health depends on the health of organizational relationships.
A Relationship Rumble can serve as a team-building workshop or part of a wider experiential leadership development effort, holding relationship skills, communication, and collaboration together in shared practice.
Begin with a conversation
You do not need a finished workshop brief.
Start with what is prompting the interest, who might be in the room, and what you hope could become possible. We will ask questions about the relationships involved, the recurring dynamics, the appropriate level of challenge, format, timing, and whether Relationship Rumble is a useful fit.