Many organisations invest heavily in teamwork, yet quietly tolerate teams that are polite, busy, and fragile under pressure.

In Team Mastery, Geoff Watts identified that effective teams don’t improve by accident. They progress through a small number of critical shifts — shifts in how they share responsibility, handle conflict, make decisions, and hold themselves accountable.

This talk introduces the SQUAD model — not as an aspirational framework, but as a map of real team development. Each element of SQUAD represents a milestone teams must genuinely cross, not just agree with intellectually.

Drawing on real examples from coaching teams in complex environments, Geoff shows:

• why teams often appear “functional” long before they are truly effective
• how skipping milestones creates hidden fragility
• and what leaders can do to support progress without forcing it or undermining trust

This is not a talk about doing agile better.

It’s a talk about becoming a team that can actually handle the work it’s been given.

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