Get to know 23plusone: Mastery School
Twenty-four cards go down on a table. Someone picks one up, reads it, and places it in front of them without waiting for instructions.
This is more or less how 23plusone starts.
Each card carries a fundamental human drive, something people are moved by whether or not they would ever put it into words. The cards sit in five clusters, and each one is called a drivogram (a drivogram is simply the card and the drive it holds).
Behind the deck sits research covering more than 80,000 respondents and over 300 brands.
But the research is not the part you notice first. What you notice is that the question underneath every card is one nobody needs training to answer. What do I find important?
If you have ever sat through a values meeting where everyone agrees and nothing gets decided, then you probably already see why this helps.
Where you would use 23plusone
Culture is the most common starting point. You bring a team together and ask them to show you, with the cards, how the culture feels to them right now. Then you go through the deck again and ask where they would take it over the next few months. The gap between those two answers is usually the conversation the team has been moving towards for a while, and cards on a table make it easier to have.
The same two passes work for a brand. How does it feel now, and where could it go next?
You can also use it in smaller ways. A team meeting where people introduce themselves as something more than a job title. A hiring conversation. Organisational development work, where practitioners have built their own ways of using the deck.
It works on your own, too. Robert Essenstam, a brand and communications strategist who has used the method for years, often ends up with several concepts in front of him, each built separately by a different group. To bring them together he sits down with the cards alone and runs the same process again, one person instead of twelve.
There is a much smaller version you can try this Friday afternoon. Pull out the cards that describe the week you have just had. Was there enough play in it? Was there any competition? (Five minutes, and it tends to tell you more than your calendar does.)
What happens in a 23plusone session?
Robert has run enough sessions to have seen most reactions, and one group has stayed with him.
Participants arrived having been sent, not having chosen. These were busy people, fairly sure that several more urgent things were waiting at their desks, and not remotely interested in a workshop with colleagues.
Ten minutes after the cards came out, that atmosphere changed completely. They were choosing, discussing, explaining their choices to each other, thoroughly caught up in a question they had not wanted in the first place. One client put the same feeling this way after a session of her own.
“It felt like we weren't working, but we were actually working really hard.”
Why does that happen so quickly?
Partly because the cards do not ask anyone to speak using a particular style of language. As Robert says, you could talk about a brand with your grandmother, or your neighbour, or anyone who has never worked a day in branding.
This means the same conversation opens up to colleagues in production, research and accounting who may never have been asked to try it before. Everyone starts on the same footing.
It also makes vagueness harder, in a gentle way. A card either goes on the table or it does not, and that small act of choosing keeps things moving.
Why spend a day at Mastery School?
Well, the cards themselves are intuitive. You could open a set tomorrow, read the leaflet folded inside, and get something useful out of it by the afternoon. That is why a set comes included in the price of Mastery School rather than sold separately.
The deck is not the thing you come for.
What takes longer to pick up is the judgement around it. What do you put in front of fifteen people? Which question do you ask first? What do you do with everything that comes back, and how do you turn a table covered in cards into something a leadership team can act on?
That part is a craft, and it is far easier to learn next to people who have done it many times.
It is worth being straight about what one day can do. It leaves you fluent in the method, and it leaves you fluent quickly. What it does not do, on its own, is make you a brand strategist. So if you are coming to this from outside brand and culture work, then you will still want to build that knowledge somewhere else. The method is an instrument. The musicianship stays yours.
If you already run rooms for a living, that is exactly the appeal. A new instrument for work you know how to do.
The Mastery School day itself
The morning covers where the method came from, the research beneath it, the twenty-four drives and the five clusters, then moves into the cards. You build profiles for brands everyone in the room already knows, which is usually the moment it clicks. When the cards line up with brands that you understand in your own life, the value becomes obvious.
The afternoon opens with your trainers running two or three ways of working with the cards in full, so you see how a session actually goes and how the method reaches past branding into culture and HR. After that you build the emotive profile of a concept of your own choosing. You leave having made something, not having watched it being made.
Carmen Phillips, Chair of the Board of The 23plusone Collective, and Robert Essenstam are with you all day. Playful, structured and intuitive is how Carmen describes the method, and the day runs in much the same spirit.
When and where is 23plusone Mastery School?
Wednesday 23 September 2026, 10am to 5pm, with drinks and finger food afterwards.
Edge Workspace, Amsterdam.
492 euros ex VAT, including your own set of 23plusone cards.