HIGH VELOCITY LEARNING LAB: Interpersonal Skills LAB & Discovery of Nexus

Teams don't fail on the technical stuff. They fail on how they work together when it matters.

Aviation learned this in the 1980s. Healthcare is still learning. Fire services, offshore, defence, critical care — every high-risk domain eventually arrives at the same finding: the breakdown is almost never in the procedure. It's in the communication, the coordination, the decision under pressure, the leadership when it counted. This is what we train. With a tool built for it, and with the evidence base behind it.

Built for

Leaders, teams and instructors working in aviation, healthcare, emergency services, defence, offshore, diving, and any domain where getting it wrong hurts people.

Delivered by

Gareth Lock MSc — human factors specialist, author of Under Pressure, licensed InterLAB trainer and one of the few facilitators globally certified on Discovery of Nexus.

I. THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Most training doesn't stick.

Your people already know this.

Every HR director, safety lead and operations manager has bought leadership or teamwork training that produced no visible change six months later. They know it. You know it. The question isn't whether interpersonal skills matter — that argument is settled. The question is why almost every programme designed to develop them fails to shift behaviour in practice.

The research points in one direction. Training content is rarely the issue. The transfer environment is — blame culture, hierarchy, compliance orientation, weak psychological safety, absent supervisor support. A classroom day followed by a return to an unchanged system produces symbolic learning and no behaviour change. Most vendors will sell you the day and leave the system alone. We won't.

The Interpersonal Skills LAB and its Discovery of Nexus module are built differently. Real scenarios under time pressure. Behaviour measured, not guessed at. Structured debriefs. Repeated cycles. And — critically — an honest conversation about whether the conditions for change actually exist in your organisation before we start.

96%

Of 23 reviewed papers agree that leadership and culture-change initiatives fail due to internal organisational factors — not content.

SYSTEMATIC ACADEMIC REVIEW, 2026

47%

Of fatal medical accidents in a major Japanese review were attributed to non-technical skills failures — situational awareness, teamwork, communication.

URAMATSU ET AL., BMJ OPEN 2017

d=1.25

Meta-analytic effect size for well-designed team training on behavioural outcomes in healthcare — one of the largest intervention effects in organisational research.

HUGHES ET AL., J. APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY 2016

II. WHAT WE WORK WITH

Two tools.

One learning architecture.

The Interpersonal Skills LAB builds the foundation; Discovery of Nexus raises the pressure. Together they carry a team from the everyday work of communication and coordination through to leadership under genuine strain.

CORE SIMULATION

Interpersonal Skills LAB

A real-time team simulation originally developed for Lufthansa pilots and now licensed across aviation, firefighting, healthcare, emergency services and corporate leadership development.

It has been built over twenty-five years, and is used in training at the State Fire School of Baden-Württemberg, at Swiss International Airlines, and in undergraduate business education at FH Vorarlberg.

DURATION

2 hours to 3 days, configurable

PARTICIPANTS

6–12 per cohort, intact teams preferred

FOCUS AREAS

Communication, teamwork, leadership, decision-making, workload management

BEST FOR

Building foundational non-technical skills in mixed-experience teams

LEADERSHIP/TEAM of TEAMS ADD-ON

Discovery of Nexus

Three core mission team. Twelve supporting personnel. A simulated deep-space habitat. Three weeks of mission tasks compressed into a day or two of intense scenario work. Decisions made under ambiguity. Leadership that has to emerge rather than be appointed. Followership that has to be earned rather than assumed.

Nexus is where leadership gets uncomfortable — productively. The messiness of normal work is exposed for everyone to see, in a safe-to-fail environment where the cost of a bad call is learning rather than consequence. It is a pressure cooker for the behaviours most leadership programmes only talk about.

DURATION

1–2 days, high-intensity

PARTICIPANTS

Leaders, command-team members, high-potentials preparing for senior roles

FOCUS AREAS

Leadership under pressure, distributed decision-making, crisis response, followership, planning in constrained time

BEST FOR

Teams who already know the basics and need the hard test

When a team of German firefighters sat down to run a simulated space mission, some were sceptical. What did navigating a broken spaceship have to do with firefighting? Within an hour, they stopped asking. Distributed knowledge. Time pressure. Miscommunication under stress. A leader trying to brief ten people with limited comms channels. Debriefing what just went wrong without it collapsing into blame. It was all there — just in a different costume.

- OBSERVATIONS FROM A RECENT NEXUS WORKSHOP

III. THREE WAYS TO ENGAGE

The right model depends on

where you are, not what we sell.

Some organisations want a problem solved quickly by people who already know the tool. Others want to build this capability into something they already do. Others want to run it themselves, with their own trainers, embedded in their own programmes. All three are valid, and they map to different commercial relationships.

OPTION A

A

Do it for me

Bought-in training and consultancy

You have a team, a group of leaders, or a safety population who need developmental work on communication, teamwork, leadership or crisis response, and you would rather it was done well by people who already know the tool than build that capability yourself.

Gareth and his facilitators deliver the LAB or Nexus in-house, around your operational rhythms: a pre-programme diagnostic to confirm the conditions for transfer are in place, behavioural measurement during the simulation, a structured debrief, and a written report with recommendations you can act on. Optional 30- and 90-day sessions help the change hold. Most organisations start here, and many go on to build the capability internally through Option B or C.

BEST FIT FOR

Organisations who want a specific intervention done well, without taking on the internal build. Enterprise clients, safety-critical operators, leadership and talent programmes with a defined cohort.

WHAT'S INCLUDED

  • Pre-programme discovery call and transfer-readiness diagnostic

  • Tailored scenario selection from the LAB mission set or Discovery of Nexus

  • On-site or off-site delivery, 1–3 days

  • Behavioural measurement and team-level analysis

  • Structured debrief using DEBrIEF frameworks

  • Written outcome report with specific recommendations

  • Optional 30- and 90-day reinforcement sessions

OPTION B

B

Do it with me

Co-delivery and capability transfer

You have an internal L&D, safety or training function you want to extend, and you would rather embed the LAB or Nexus into something you already run than bolt on someone else's programme.

We co-design and co-deliver. Your facilitators sit alongside ours through real cohorts, learn the simulation architecture and the debrief method from the inside, and progressively take ownership — typically across two to four cohorts before stepping into independent delivery under licence. The relationship is a partnership, not a procurement.

BEST FIT FOR

Organisations with an existing training capability who want to internalise the methodology rather than rent it indefinitely.

WHAT'S INCLUDED

  • Joint scenario design with your subject-matter experts

  • Co-facilitation across an agreed number of cohorts

  • Debrief shadowing and structured handover

  • Access to the InterLAB scenario library under licence

  • Quality assurance and supervision once your facilitators lead

OPTION C

C

Do it myself

Trainer certification and licensing

You are an instructor, facilitator or training provider who wants to deliver the LAB or Discovery of Nexus under your own brand. You have the facilitation craft; you need the tool, the training and the licence.

Certification runs as a structured programme — foundation training, supervised delivery, assessment, and licensed access to the InterLAB platform — with annual recertification to keep the standard credible. It is the only route to deliver these tools independently, and we are deliberately selective about who we license: the tool is only as good as the facilitator using it, and the licence carries our name alongside yours.

BEST FIT FOR

Independent trainers and in-house facilitators with the credibility and craft to carry the programme on their own.

WHAT'S INCLUDED

  • Foundation certification (typically 5 days)

  • Supervised delivery and assessment

  • Licensed platform access and scenario library

  • Annual recertification and community of practice

  • Co-marketing where appropriate

IV. THE EVIDENCE WE STAND ON

What the research actually says.

We don't overclaim. The interpersonal skills evidence base is strong in some places, suggestive in others, and thin in a few. Here's the shape of it.

91%

Consensus across 16 studies that non-technical skills predict individual and team performance in knowledge-intensive and high-risk workplaces.

CONSENSUS.APP META-REVIEW, 2026

d=0.58

Medium effect size for team training interventions on performance, across multiple meta-analyses. Robust across sectors.

MCEWAN ET AL., 2017

24 mo.

Sustained behaviour change documented in trauma team leaders after a single 4-hour simulation-based session.

ROSENMAN ET AL., 2019

50%

Of ICU safety incidents underpinned by non-technical skills deficiencies. The cost of not training is already being paid.

PIMENTA ET AL., 2025

This positioning rests on a review of the systematic evidence, and we are open about where it is stronger than the pitch and where the pitch should be more cautious. The full evidence summary is available on request.

V. NEXT STEP

Start with a conversation,

not a proposal.

The first question isn't "which pathway do you want" — it's "what are you actually trying to solve, and are the conditions for solving it in place?" A 45-minute discovery call answers both. No pitch deck, no obligation, no upsell. If the LAB isn't right for what you need, we'll say so.