The Story
We did not set out to build an assessment. We were trying to save a company.
A company losing altitude
In 2008, our incubator had five young companies. One of them was in trouble. It was losing money every month. Investors were polite and uninterested. You could feel it in the office before you saw it in the numbers: long meetings, short tempers, decisions that kept getting postponed.
I had been coaching its CEO for a while. One evening he asked me something I had no answer to: “Can you coach my team the way you coach me?”
Coaching one person, I could do. But a team is not a person. It is a set of relationships, and I had no method for that.
The oldest map I knew
So I asked myself what I actually did when I coached someone. The honest answer was that, quietly, I was reading their energy. Where did their work come from? From clarity? From ambition? Or from habit, from simply getting through the day?
That way of seeing people came from the Bhagavad Gita, which describes three qualities present in every human action. I had carried it with me for years. That night I turned it into a single sheet: thirteen everyday qualities, each with three possible answers. White, Grey or Black.
Then I asked the six people at the top of the company to rate each other, and themselves. Not on performance. On energy.
What the mirror showed
When the sheets came back, the picture was startlingly clear. Most of the team carried a healthy mix of White and Grey energy. Two people leaned heavily towards Grey and Black. Without anyone saying it aloud, they had been weighing the whole team down.
I did not recommend anything. I simply showed the team the picture.
A few weeks later, both of those people chose to leave. I want to be careful here: the analysis did not push anyone out. It made visible something the team had been feeling for months, and once it was visible, people made their own decisions.
What happened next still moves me. The company became buoyant again. Decisions got made. The mood lifted. Within a year it had found an investor, and it went on to become the biggest success our incubator ever had.
One sheet of paper, an old idea, and a team willing to look at itself. That was the beginning.
Four more lenses
Over the next few years, I kept adding to that sheet. A lens for how people think: left brain or right brain. A lens for emotional intelligence. A lens for who leads and who manages. And a fifth, deeper lens that reads twenty inner emotions, from equanimity and courage to fear and attachment.
Each one added colour. But the three energies stayed at the centre. They were always the question beneath all the others.
Seeing the pattern
Encouraged by that first company, I began offering the analysis to other CEOs I was coaching. An architecture practice. A design studio run by three partners. Then more.
Slowly, a pattern appeared. The teams that were growing had a good mix: White and Grey energy, left-brain and right-brain thinkers, leaders and managers, and real emotional intelligence. The design studio was like that, and it was growing.
The architecture practice was different. It had a great deal of White energy and very little Grey. It was full of right-brain thinkers, its emotional intelligence was low, and almost everyone saw themselves as a leader. Nobody was the manager. Beautiful ideas, and no engine to carry them. Eventually, that practice had to close.
That was when I understood what the analysis was really for. Not to rank people. To show a team whether its mix matches the work in front of it.
When difference became strength
Some of the most important moments were not about imbalance at all.
At a wellness brand, the two co-founders had been fighting for months. The analysis showed why. One was a right-brain thinker with strong White energy; the other was a left-brain thinker with strong Grey energy. They were not disagreeing about the business. They were wired differently. When they saw it on paper, something softened. “So we are different,” one of them said, “and together we are stronger.”
At a fashion design house, the leadership team felt they were constantly pulling against each other. The picture showed that every person held a distinct role, and that the friction came from exactly that distinctness. Once they could see it, they stopped trying to make each other the same.
This is the heart of Withya. The analysis is not a judgement. It shows people who think very differently that, together, they make a strong team.
A pause, and a return
Between those first years and 2018, I ran the analysis with around twenty leadership teams: staffing firms, agencies, design studios, healthcare companies, technology businesses. Then I stopped. I needed a break from corporate work, and I took one.
In 2026, I came back to it with an education technology company. Fifteen years had passed, and the mirror still worked exactly as it always had. Every member of that team rated themselves more of a leader than his colleagues did. The gap became the most honest conversation the team had had in years.
What fifteen years taught me
- No team is all one energy, and no person is either.
- Balance beats brilliance. A team of five visionaries rarely ships anything.
- Difference is information, not a threat.
- The mirror only works when nobody is on trial.