After a merger, a reorg or fast growth, your teams do not perform together. Everyone defends their own turf, decisions slow down, the collective stays an intention. Team cohesion is one of the five topics in the keynote by Domitille Kiger, skydiving world champion, who has managed more than 200 people at 185 mph, where performing together is the very condition of the result.
After a reorg or a merger, everyone defends their own turf. Silos are not an org chart problem, they are a team with no shared frame for what it is allowed to attempt together. It protects itself instead of building. As long as that frame is missing, the best individual intentions do not add up to a collective, they add up to a stack of cautious individuals.
With no clarity on what actually matters, people do their part without carrying the shared goal. Cohesion stays on the surface, performance stays individual. Boxes get ticked, everyone delivers their piece, but nobody feels responsible for the result as a whole. That is the sign of missing shared ownership, not of one more team building activity.
Until a team can tell the risks that destroy from the risks that propel, it cannot perform together.
It either protects itself or it charges ahead. Neither one builds anything. A fatal risk endangers the structure, the reputation, the people: it gets eliminated. A vital risk is the one without which you do not innovate, you do not progress: it gets taken. A tight team is first of all a team that sorts the two together, in the same language.
This is the heart of risk taking in business as Domitille sees it: cohesion is not declared, it gets built at the moment of decision, when a team can name what it refuses and what it dares.
Domitille brings across her field method, built over more than 10 years of large formation world records. Three pillars. For cohesion, two of them carry most of the weight.
A shared language and micro steps. On a 108 skydiver record, each person has to hit their figure in the right place, inside the allotted time. One person off their slot, even while gripping, and the jump does not count. Cohesion is born there: everyone carries shared ownership of everyone else's success.
Psychological safety, feedback, the right to say what is not working before it gets expensive. Without that trust, shared ownership stays a word. With it, problems surface, ideas circulate, and the team dares together.
Pride of belonging and collective intent. Reconnecting a team to what is bigger than it, to the reason to be proud of its work, does more for cohesion than one more offsite. It is a performance lever, not a decoration.
You do not start at 200. You build in steps: a jump with ten, then twenty, then forty. A team learns to perform together in stages, not by decree. Domitille tested that gradual approach selecting and preparing her formations, where the common interest comes first without ever crushing the individual one.
Domitille does not talk about her medals. “I actually talk very little about my competition years,” she says, “I really talk about the collective: how you get a group to give its best in a short window, under enormous pressure, with joy and good humor, to pull off a difficult objective.”
She also owns a reality few speakers say out loud: the bigger a group, the more cohesion gets built by subdividing it, so that smaller units coordinate the whole. What holds for a 200 person record holds for a division of several hundred people. It is a rare laboratory of collective performance, not a stage metaphor.
In front of 1,000 women entrepreneurs, on the collective and on working together, she gave us an extraordinary team building moment, with concrete and useful keys, and a deeply moving finish. One of the finest moments in the history of Bouge ta Boîte.
In front of 1,500 people worldwide, a real collective click. What makes her unique: her energy and her ability to carry the whole room with her.
Domitille develops this account of the collective in several of her podcast conversations, where she describes how a group learns to coordinate under pressure.
After a merger, each team defends its own turf by reflex. Bringing people back together starts with a shared frame: knowing together which risks to eliminate and which ones to dare. A cohesion keynote lays down that shared language, then the RECORD Protocol gives the method so that shared ownership replaces the defense of silos.
A stack of experts is not a collective. What makes a team is a shared intent and the certainty that each person carries everyone's result. Domitille Kiger illustrates it through her large formation records, where one person off their slot invalidates the jump. Collective performance gets built in stages, not by decree.
A team building day creates a good memory. A cohesion keynote leaves behind a decision frame that lasts. Teams walk out with a shared language for telling what destroys from what propels, and a method for daring together. The emotion creates the click, the method anchors the change.
A tight team is not a cautious team, it is a team that knows which risks to take together. Cohesion plays out at the moment of decision: telling a fatal risk, to be eliminated, from a vital risk, to be dared. Without that shared triage, cohesion stays a poster on the wall.
Cohesion is one of the five facets of a single keynote. Every topic opens onto the same mechanism, telling the risks that destroy from the risks that propel, and onto the same method, the RECORD Protocol.
An in depth brief to understand your cohesion challenges and to build a tailored session that leaves your teams a decision frame that lasts.
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