Meeting Notes — 2026-04-02

Participants: Max, Reiner, Maha Duration: ~55 min Video: YouTube

Context

Light-news week. Max dialled in from outside on a sunny day; Maha and Reiner both recovering from illness. The call opened as a status round and then drifted into an extended brainstorm about what the actual product is, who pays, and how to get into motion while the slow pipeline sits. No new external contacts to report — mostly internal thinking.

Status round

Zurich. The project has not yet gone to the works-council equivalent for sign-off — they'll take it up after Easter. Management is behind it, so approval is effectively a formality, but the person driving it internally is on a five-week health leave. Reiner flagged, half-concerned, some doubt about her capacity to carry the pioneer role. For us this is a swallow-the-delay situation.

Zurich sister track. The champion is coming to Maha + Reiner for 4 days to co-design. She tried to frame it as an unpaid pilot because she's pushing it onto her own leaders; Reiner was clear — only if it's official and paid. She'll work on that.

Leadership-program lead. The third Zurich-adjacent lead — same model but for leaders — is currently in an existential wobble about whether to relocate. On hold.

Convector. Leadership assessment / 360 RFP still under review. They received three offers and appear to be following up on all three; a board member is championing our side. No movement this week.

Maha side-gig. A small consulting proposal for a student-run organisation — ~1.5 days' work, modest money into the company.

Max side-gig — digital-twin experiment. Built a digital twin of a partner plus twins of board members, simulated the board conversation, then ran a live brainstorm with real advisors. Some predictions landed, some missed (the twin can guess mindset/role-posture but has no access to the person's actual resources or commitments). Useful mostly as a forcing function for his own assumptions — "you expose own assumptions, test your assumptions with real cases." Also submitted two Ukraine grants for pplspark with a third in prep — he warned not to budget against these; highly uncertain.

Digital twins — is there a product here?

Reiner's pitch: could Maha have a digital twin that coachees talk to between sessions? Could other coaches buy into this? A "bank of twins" (historical figures, literature-based personas, plus custom ones people commission) as a consulting product.

Max was skeptical on two fronts:

• Emotional depth. AI is bad at the layer coaching actually operates on — "AI is really bad with emotions and with the deeper human connection." It simulates presence, it doesn't hold it.
• Willingness to pay. Coachees might use a digital-Maha as a free bonus; they won't pay extra for it. Not a standalone business.

Where Max does see value: as an assumption-surfacing tool. Writing a twin's spec forces you to articulate goals, constraints, style — and then reality tests it. Reiner picked that up via the Napoleon Hill "bank of advisors" reference: multi-agent councils (historical figures, literary characters, custom twins of people you know) as structured thinking support, not as a replacement for humans.

Max's structural caveat: this whole modelling space is crowded. Anyone can spin these up. For us to claim predictive value (political modelling, behavioural-economics modelling, etc.) we'd need a paper co-authored with a credible sociologist or economist first. Reiner offered a lead — a renowned German sociologist he's lightly connected to.

On research grants. Max proposed EU funding. Reiner pushed back hard: EU grant cycles are so slow the market moves on before you ship. Rather find a commercial client with budget.

Landing point: a "laboratory" frame — invite corporations to join, contribute funds and their challenges. Avoid multi-year research-without-outcome. Reiner wants the new rule to be: no more free experiments. Next engagement someone pays, even small money, just to change the relationship from "we do, they watch" to "they're in."

Maha's pain-point research — relational literacy

Maha spent two nights mapping organisational pain points. The one that stood out: seniors unable to connect with juniors. Mainstream research confirms it, it blocks knowledge transfer, it damages collaboration. Frame it as "relational intelligence" / "relational literacy" — our core terrain.

Worked example — a long-tenured senior moved into a new department where she can't connect despite being technically brilliant, and sent into coaching almost as a corrective. After two sessions she's already using Maha's vocabulary (dojo, present) — learning the relational layer for the first time because her prior environment never demanded it.

Offering: intergenerational relational-literacy training. Hook is the intergenerational friction (very felt, very researched); body of the work is the same methodology we already have. Target buyers: L&D / learning officers allocating coaching budgets, either for specific leaders with bad upward feedback or for the whole leadership cohort in more mature orgs.

Max's pushback

This is not a scalable IT product. It's a methodology-and-training sale. Valid, but different business, different unit economics, different moat. Maha agreed — "I agree 100%" — and reframed it as phases:

• Phase 1 — learn the literacy. Hand gestures, body awareness, core grammar. Human-led.
• Phase 2 — practice with AI. Individual reps on real conversation material.
• Phase 3 — real-life group conversations. Live dojo with others.

So the training is the onboarding, and the IT product lives in phases 2 and 3.

The "is it even sellable" question

Reiner pressed Max: you've been a user of Maha's work for two years — how would you describe its value, now, to someone who's never heard of it?

Max was honest. It's hard to grasp as an articulated body of knowledge. It's not a school of thought he could point to a book for. He got it subconsciously — "I kind of have the feeling of it" — but couldn't take an exam on it. And critically, in his framing:

"It's out of the business logic, saying, use this methodology and improve sales 25%. It's not about that at all. It's really more like, to the founders, to speak to their souls — how you are doing this life, how do you treat people."

That is a real diagnosis of why the sale is hard: the methodology feels spiritual, not effective, in the corporate-speak sense. Reiner absorbed it: "So, this is the evaluation. It is spiritual, not corporate, and thus not effective."

Reiner's counter: the effectiveness is real but long-horizon — trust, repeat customers, partners who stay. We found the language for Zurich (NPS, mobilising customer agents). We need to find it for the next use case too. Maha: we're probably teaching "relational literacy" (not "soft skills," which is a dated 1970s coinage). The dojo is the frame.

Max's community/lab frame

Max: anything he can build technologically applies to a social structure, not an individual. Dojo is not one person. What's the growth path from three people (us) to ten, to a hundred, all practising and carrying this vocabulary?

Maha lit up on this. She already sees it happening organically — one executive coachee posts on LinkedIn, another coachee sees it, they connect and want to run an art-of-dialogue conversation. The language and the hand gestures become carriers.

Reiner synthesised: "The spark is not from you alone anymore, the spark is between the people."

Operational move: gather the existing practitioners — people Maha has already worked with — into an advanced-practitioner group. Some become teachers for Phase 1. Their conversations feed AI training data for Phase 2. That's the lab.

"Just imagine you would not be there, and all the people that learned something from you would gather. And crowdsource Maha. What would they do together? And that is the lab."

Closing

Two research strands to carry:

1. How to build the hand-gesture / relational-literacy community and lab framework.
2. How to build a lab framework for digital twins as a collective sounding board — test with AI itself whether the parts form a business.

The Zurich delay is actually useful creative time. Max: let it sit, revisit with fresh ideas next week.

Action items