We take leadership teams places they will never forget.

They had a new vision statement and a hard question underneath it. Whether a group carrying that much combined experience could still move like something new.

We opened in the bleachers before the park was awake. It took about four minutes and it told the room more about itself than two years of engagement surveys had.

From there the day belonged to the ballpark. Joe Maddon ran that clubhouse on a handful of phrases his players could recite cold. By late afternoon this team had their own, in their own words, argued over and landed on together. They were still using them months later, which is the only test that counts.

Theo Epstein rebuilt that team by knowing exactly what each player brought and how the pieces fit together. We spent the back half of the afternoon on the same question, and people learned things about colleagues they had sat beside for a decade.

The tour was the part nobody expected to matter. They sat out with the bleacher bums, stood in the press box and the dugout, and finished in the visiting clubhouse that has housed Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, and AC/DC. Every stop was doing something. None of it felt like work.

We closed the first day with something we have run dozens of times. It has never once gone the way it went that evening. Nobody sat down. They kept holding the floor with each other until the whole team was standing in a single circle, and we let it run.

Day two went at their actual work: their vision against the business unit mandate, and what empowerment has to look like on an ordinary Tuesday when nobody is watching.