10+ years making new ways of working stick. Here's what we've learned, and what we've proven.
A close look at August's model in action at McCain Foods, plus a decade of proof at PepsiCo (published by Harvard Business Review), Colgate-Palmolive, and more.
The strategy rarely fails. The way of working does.
There is the future a leadership team commits to on stage, and there is the work that actually happens on Monday morning. The distance between them is the say-do gap. After more than a decade of this work inside large, complex, global organizations, the pattern is almost boringly consistent: the strategy is rarely the thing that fails. The work itself is. The meetings that produce only more meetings, the decisions that die in a matrix, the experiments a leader asks for and then punishes. That is not a people problem. It is a design problem.
So we make one specific bet about where change happens: the team. Not the individual, not the org chart. The team is the atomic unit of change, because the team is where the work actually gets done and where culture is real. Change how a team decides, coordinates, and ships, and you change the thing people actually experience. That is the work on this page, shown rather than asserted, starting with the most recent and closest to what we would propose to you.
Three movements, every engagement.
Custom Practice Stack
Every engagement starts with a diagnosis: not what the survey says, but how decisions really get made, where trust breaks down, and which coordination points are encoding the wrong behaviors. From that qualitative depth, we design a custom set of practices tailored to the team's actual work — not a generic playbook.
Seed and Scale Adoption
A coach joins the team's real work — not as a trainer running workshops, but as an active partner introducing practices at actual decision points, meetings, and handoffs. Weekly cadence. 12-week sprints tied to real deliverables. What seeds in one team spreads: we identify and train internal coaches to scale adoption across the organization.
Hand Off
Every practice is co-designed with the team, so the client owns it from day one. August builds internal coaching capability, facilitator networks, and playbooks, then steps back. The goal is independence, not a retainer.
The unit of change is the team, not the individual. We coach teams and their leaders as systems. The practices are about how people coordinate, not personal development plans.
Independent research quantifies what these outcomes are worth.
Before the proof, the stakes. When teams actually work this way, here is what the outside research says it is worth, in the language a CFO uses.
Imagine your org has ~5,000 employees·$2 billion in annual revenue.
That is what the research says it is worth. Here is what it looked like inside one company.
A $12B company with the right principles and the wrong speed.
This is the most recent of our deep cases, and the closest to what we would propose to you. McCain Foods is a roughly $12B global food company with strong leadership principles and a 2030 strategy that demanded one thing the organization could not yet do reliably: move with cross-functional speed. The principles were right. The speed was not.
We started in the fall of 2024 with four cross-functional pilot teams, each sponsor-backed and chartered against a real 2030 priority, from a regional export playbook to a global operating model. What happened next is the part that matters: demand outran supply.
Four pilot teams. Real missions. Sponsors with skin in the game.
We do not start by convincing the skeptics. We start where the energy is. Four teams, each chartered against a mission that genuinely mattered to the business, each backed by a senior sponsor who owned the outcome, each running a 12-week sprint. McCain named the model PACE, and the name is theirs on purpose: the client owns the language, and that is part of what makes it stick.
One 14-week sprint. Tens of millions in CAPEX savings.
One PACE team, chartered to rethink how McCain designs and builds new plants, identified tens of millions in potential CAPEX savings in a single 14-week sprint. Across the program, before-and-after surveys showed the biggest jumps in exactly the behaviors PACE is built for: responsiveness to change, valuing diverse views in decisions, and sharing failures openly. And the proof spread faster than we could supply it. Teams nearby asked to be next. The CEO asked us to bring the decision-making work to his whole C-suite.
"Teams nearby got a little jealous, asked what was going on, and asked to be next."
The pattern at McCain · spread by pull, not pushFrom four pilot teams to a movement.
How four chartered teams became the way McCain runs its priority missions across five regions, carried by a growing bench of internal coaches.
- Oct 2024 · The BetFour pilots, real priorities
Four cross-functional PACE teams launch, each sponsor-backed and running a 12-week sprint against a real 2030 priority, from a regional export playbook to a global operating model. About 42 people in the first cohort.
4pilot teams, ~42 people - Early 2025 · The PullDemand outran supply
The pilots demo to leadership and the proof of concept holds. Teams nearby ask to be next. The CEO asks us to bring the decision-making work to his whole C-suite. The model spreads by pull, not push.
- Sep 2025 · Triple the ScalePACE goes global
F26 opens with twelve new teams launching at once across North America, Europe, and APMEA, bringing the program to 16 teams and roughly 120 people.
16teams, ~120 people - Jan 2026 · The Community22 teams, every region
Six more teams join. The community now spans every major region and nearly every function, with 200+ people who have run a PACE mission. PACE is becoming infrastructure.
22teams, 200+ participants - 2026 · One Way of Working556+ McCainers, one vocabulary
Beyond the PACE teams, the wider organization is practicing the same toolkit. 556+ McCainers across five regions now work this way, supported by 35+ facilitators and 6+ internal coaches. Senior leaders name their PACE missions in their own annual plans.
556+practicing across 5 regions
Real capital impact, measurable behavior change, and a language that became theirs.
We expected to spend the engagement selling the new way of working. Instead, teams nearby watched the pilots move, got curious, and asked to join. The CEO went further: he asked us to bring the decision-making work to his whole C-suite. Spread by pull, not push.
PACE has become shared vocabulary. Senior leaders name their PACE missions for the year inside their own annual plans, supported by a growing bench of internal coaches. The way of working is no longer something we run. It is how McCain runs its priorities.
Three things the McCain work made plain.
Start where the energy is, and let it pull.
We did not roll out PACE. We chartered two teams on real missions with real sponsors and let the results do the convincing. Demand outran supply because the model proved useful, not because anyone mandated it.
The coach is the difference, and then the bench is.
A coach in the flow of real work is what turns practices into habits. So from early on the goal was a McCain bench: 35+ facilitators and 6+ certified internal coaches, so the capability outlives us. McCain now has its own Ways of Working team carrying it forward.
It sticks when the language becomes theirs.
PACE is McCain's word, not ours, and that is why it lasts. When senior leaders started naming their PACE missions in their own annual plans, the new way of working stopped being a program and became how priority work gets done.
The same model, proven across industries.
McCain is the most recent arc. It is also a repeatable pattern. Two of the deepest, most defensible references: PepsiCo, where this began and where Harvard wrote it up, and Colgate-Palmolive, where the capability now runs without us.
Where It Started
A team of three grew a movement to every professional employee in 12 months.
Published by Harvard. An HBS teaching case and Amy Edmondson's HBR article "Agility Hacks" both document how a tiny August team seeded PepsiCo's way of working, precisely because that kind of organic, grassroots adoption is so rare.
The centerpiece was the SLAM team: self-organizing, lean, autonomous, multidisciplinary. As one PepsiCo leader put it: "It's strange that it's actually the structure that provides the freedom to be agile."
Proof of Handoff
A 15-person internal Center of Excellence, running without us.
Founded in 1806, with 34,000+ people serving 200+ countries, Colgate-Palmolive co-created FEED with us: four principles, sixteen behaviors, an operator's manual rather than a values poster. One team, chartered to reach a younger beauty consumer, produced CO. by Colgate at Ulta Beauty.
What made it stick was ownership. A 15-person internal CoE now carries the work, and the gains held up to outside measurement: +32% risk-taking, +26% quick to respond, and 97.3% no longer block ideas that are safe to try.
A decade of teams that practice their way to change.
August doesn't sell a framework. We embed with your teams, coach them through the transition, build the internal capability to sustain it, and leave you with a system you own.
The model works because it changes what people do on Monday morning, not what they say they believe in on Friday afternoon.
If you're evaluating partners for team effectiveness work, we'd welcome the chance to show you what this looks like in practice.