MBU Intelligence
Est. 2004 · Decision Consensus
00:00
Under pressure, teams stop using what they know. Time-Out MBU is a workshop for sports teams and companies where the team practises, before the moment, a short process for getting everything on the table and reaching a decision it can defend afterwards.
Led in the room by Ricardo Andorinho: 155 caps for Portugal, ten years at Sporting CP, and a Champions League final with Portland San Antonio.
The workshop is built around one specific moment: the one where the time left is shorter than the conversation needs. It looks like this in three different places.
The score is close, the plan has stopped working, and the next possession has to be decided by people who are out of breath. This is the room the method came from.
Three functions each hold part of the picture and the meeting has forty minutes. The thing that would change the answer is the thing that costs somebody to say.
One call, information nobody considers sufficient, and a decision that cannot wait for the next steering committee.
Three exercises from handball, each named for something a company already argues about. The sport is the vocabulary here, not the evidence: what the room practises is the habit.
A closing window, and one thing that has to be said in one sentence. On a court it is a pass. In a company it is the handover that decides whether the next person acts or waits for more.
Two people cover more ground than two people should, and only while each trusts the other to hold their side. Between functions, that trust is what stops two teams guarding the same gap.
One minute, information nobody considers sufficient, and a decision that has to be made anyway. This is the protocol the workshop drills.
One team at a time, between 8 and 24 people. Quoted in a proposal and invoiced; nothing is bought with a card.
The way in. A simulation of the closing minutes, and the sixty second decision protocol the team keeps.
Court and room. The same work, run on the team's own decisions, ending in something written down that someone owns.
For a management team or a squad, with a 4G measurement at the start and at the end, so the change is measured and not felt.
For indoor team sports: handball, basketball, futsal, volleyball, hockey. A squad rehearses its system until it is automatic, and then decides the end of a game on whoever speaks first. In handball a time-out does not win a game on its own. It is a one minute pause that steadies the team, and what is said in that minute is what counts. That minute is the workshop.
A team leader before he was anything else. Ricardo Andorinho played 155 times for Portugal, ten years at Sporting CP and four at Portland San Antonio, where the club reached the Champions League final in 2006.
He was studying finance and business control while he was still playing, finishing in 2004, which is where this framework starts. He holds the state coaching title in handball, and universities invite him to lecture on this material.
He is in the room every time. The workshop is not delegated to an associate, and that is a constraint on how much of it can exist rather than a selling point.
Six weeks after an engagement, this is what is different.
MBU began in 2004 with the business algorithm framework, a structured model for understanding how organizations actually reach decisions. Twenty years of practice have refined it into the methodology behind every engagement.
Most advisors run a workshop and report what was said. We measure how a team reaches shared positions, where reaching them costs the most effort, and which working relationships carry disagreement well. That reading is structured and repeatable, so it can be revisited later rather than resting on how a meeting felt at the time.
The workshop is run by a person, in the room. The model that produces a team's scores is deterministic, with no AI and no machine learning, so a result can always be re-derived. And no report reaches a client until someone at MBU has read it and signed it off, which matters when the output informs decisions about people.
MBU Intelligence holds a skills development protocol with the University of Évora. The workshop itself has been run for a national team, in a hotel meeting room, before a qualifying campaign. Both are agreements and sessions that happened, not results claimed for them.
Why capable teams struggle to decide together is one of the better-researched questions in organizational science. The findings are consistent, and they are not flattering to anyone's intuition, including ours.
Teams reliably spend discussion time on information members hold in common and under-discuss what only one person knows. The effect is strong enough to have its own experimental paradigm, and it has held up across decades of replication.
Stasser & Titus, J. Personality & Social Psychology, 1985 · Mesmer-Magnus & DeChurch, J. Applied Psychology, 2009Disagreement about the work and friction between people are different things. Meta-analysis finds the second is what reliably damages team performance, which is why it is worth measuring directly rather than inferring from how a meeting felt.
De Dreu & Weingart, J. Applied Psychology, 2003Psychological safety, the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk, predicts whether concerns, questions and errors are raised at all. Where it is absent, the information simply never arrives.
Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999Across 1,048 major business decisions, how the decision was reached mattered considerably more to the outcome than how well it had been analysed.
Lovallo & Sibony, McKinsey Quarterly, 2010We write about this in more depth, with the sources, in Insight.
None of this means your team is weak. These are properties of group decision-making itself, which is why they show up in capable, well-run organizations. The practical consequence is that the problem is fixable by changing the process rather than the people.
MBU Intelligence has advised executive teams, boards and investors since 2004 from Évora, Portugal. Our methodology is framework-driven, transparent and evidence-based, and every workshop is run by a person.
Tell us about it, or run the diagnostic and see where your decision is stalling.
Or read how the measurement works before the day in the room.
For relationship measurement we use 4G, an established instrument published by Four Groups. We apply it; we did not write it, and we think an instrument reviewed independently of the firm using it is worth more than a proprietary one.
4G was reviewed by Blue Edge Consulting against EFPA and BPS criteria, by chartered occupational psychologists. That review rated its reliability Good, with internal consistency of 0.86 to 0.87 and test‑retest stability of 0.78, and its validity Adequate.
The same review identified real limitations, and we would rather you heard them from us. The instrument does not use norms. Its samples were incidental and not population‑representative. Its criterion‑related validity was rated inadequate. The review dates from 2007.
4G gives a team a structured, shared view of how it currently reaches agreement. It is not a predictor of business performance, and we will not present it as one. Any figure we give you about time or effort recovered comes from measuring your engagement, not from a benchmark.
We provide the structure and the measurement. Interpretation is done by a person, and the decision stays with the people accountable for it. No part of the assessment is delegated to an automated system, which matters when the output informs investment and employment decisions.
Last updated: October 2026 · GDPR compliant
The controller for personal data processed through this website is:
MBU Intelligence - Consultoria de Gestão Lda
NIF PT 506988198
Registered office: Av. Dr. Francisco Sá Carneiro, 58, 1.º, 7000-757 Évora, Portugal
randorinho@mbuintelligence.com
Data Protection Officer: Ricardo Andorinho, reachable at the same address and at randorinho@mbuintelligence.com. Write to the DPO about anything in this policy, including any request under section 7.
Diagnostic answers. While you use the diagnostic, your answers stay in your browser's localStorage and are not sent to us. They leave your device only if you ask for the summary by email: at that point, and only then, we receive the answers you gave, the readiness score derived from them, how long the session took, and the email address you entered. If you never tick that box, we receive nothing and hold no record of your visit.
Contact form data. When you submit the contact form, we collect your name, email address, organization (optional), and message. This is stored, not only emailed to us: it is kept so that an enquiry cannot be lost, so we can see whether we have replied, and so we hold a record of our contact with you. If you also asked for a diagnostic summary using the same email address, we may see those two together.
Marketing contact. If you agree to hear from us, or if you are already a client or partner of MBU, we hold your name, email address and organization to send occasional messages about our work. That list is held in GoHighLevel (see section 5) and is separate from the transactional email that carries your report, your invitations and your receipts. Unsubscribing from one never stops the other.
Requesting a date. When you ask for a workshop date we record your name, email, and whichever of organization, group size, format, preferred dates and message you chose to give. We use it to prepare a proposal and to reply to you, and for nothing else.
Booking a call. Our scheduling link opens a page run by cal.com, not by us. What you type there is governed by cal.com's own privacy policy and terms, which apply to that page independently of this one. What reaches us afterwards is narrow and deliberately so: the date and time, which type of call it was, and the name and email address you booked with. We do not receive your phone number or your time zone, and we do not store any free-text answer you gave cal.com. We keep that record so a call you booked sits alongside our other contact with you, and if you move or cancel it we keep that too, because a record still showing the first date is worse than no record at all.
Orders. Card payment is no longer offered on this site; workshops are quoted in a proposal and invoiced. Where an order was placed while it was, we hold the email, organization, tier, group size and payment status on that record. Card details were entered on Stripe's own checkout page and were never seen or stored by MBU.
Engagement participants. If your organization commissions an engagement, the sponsor supplies the names and work email addresses of the people to be invited. Each participant receives a private link, gives their own consent before answering, and their responses are used to produce that engagement's report. We do not ask for, and do not want, individual salaries.
Consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR) for the diagnostic summary, given by ticking the box before you send it, and for contact form submissions. Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) for orders and engagement delivery. Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) for the session data that stays on your own device, and for keeping a record of business contact: replying to you, not losing your enquiry, and knowing what was discussed. You can object to that record at any time under section 7, and we will delete it. A call you booked yourself rests on the same legitimate interest in keeping a record of business contact, and is equally open to objection under section 7. Consent, or legitimate interests where you are already a client or partner (Art. 6(1)(f), recital 47), for marketing messages. Every one of them carries a one-click unsubscribe, and unsubscribing is honoured immediately and permanently.
What you send us is used to answer you, to deliver what you ordered, and for nothing else. We do not sell data and we do not profile you for advertising.
Scores in an engagement are computed by a deterministic, rule-based model, with no AI and no machine learning. No report is released to anyone by automation. A person at MBU reviews every result before it is sent, so no decision producing legal or similarly significant effects is taken by automated means within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR. That is a deliberate design choice, not a limitation we are working around.
Cloudflare hosts this site and runs the database in which orders, diagnostic summaries and engagement data are stored.
Resend (resend.com) delivers our transactional email under a Data Processing Agreement.
Stripe processes payments and receives the email address and amount for an order. MBU never receives your card details.
cal.com (cal.com) runs our scheduling page, and a call is booked there rather than here. It receives what you enter in order to book — at minimum your name and email address — under its own privacy policy and its own terms, which we do not control and cannot vary on your behalf. It receives no diagnostic answers, no engagement data, no participant responses and no payment information. We receive back only the booking details named in section 2, sent to us by cal.com when a booking is made, moved or cancelled.
GoHighLevel (gohighlevel.com) holds our marketing contact list and sends our marketing email. It does not receive diagnostic answers, engagement data, participant responses or payment information. Those stay in the database described above and are never synchronised to it.
Transfers outside the EEA. cal.com is operated by Cal.com, Inc., a United States company, and a booking you make is processed there. That transfer is covered by Cal.com, Inc.'s certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and by Standard Contractual Clauses. If you would rather your data were not processed in the United States, do not use the booking link: write to us instead, at the address in section 1, and we will arrange a time by email.
GoHighLevel is also hosted in the United States, so your name, email address and organization are transferred there. That transfer is covered by the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses under our Data Processing Agreement with them. If you would rather we did not, unsubscribe or tell us and we will remove you from that list while keeping any transactional contact intact.
Each operates under a Data Processing Agreement, on infrastructure within the EEA or under adequate safeguards. We will name any further processor here before it receives your data.
Data left in your browser is controlled entirely by you, clear it at any time via browser settings. Contact submissions and diagnostic summaries sent to us are retained for up to 2 years from our last contact with you. Marketing contact is retained until you unsubscribe or ask us to stop, and is reviewed every two years so that a list nobody engages with is not kept indefinitely. A record of a booked call is retained for up to 2 years from the date of the call, on the same footing as any other record of contact, and is deleted on request. Order records are retained for as long as accounting law requires. Engagement data is retained for the life of the engagement plus the period agreed with the commissioning organization, and is deleted on request.
Under GDPR you have the right to: access your data, rectify inaccuracies, request erasure, restrict processing, object to processing, withdraw consent at any time, and data portability. Exercise any right by emailing our Data Protection Officer at randorinho@mbuintelligence.com. We answer within one month, as Art. 12(3) requires. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing carried out before you withdrew it.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Portuguese supervisory authority: CNPD (Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados), cnpd.pt.
This website does not use tracking cookies or third-party analytics. localStorage and sessionStorage hold session data on your own device. If you arrived from one of our campaigns, the campaign identifiers in the link are held for the session and sent to us only if you go on to ask for the summary by email. Arrive, read, and leave, and nothing is transmitted.
We may update this policy periodically. The "last updated" date at the top reflects the most recent version.
Last updated: October 2026 · Governed by Portuguese law
This website is operated by MBU Intelligence - Consultoria de Gestão Lda, NIF PT 506988198, with registered office at Av. Dr. Francisco Sá Carneiro, 58, 1.º, 7000-757 Évora, Portugal. It provides information about our consulting services and a diagnostic tool for indicative assessment. All outputs of the diagnostic tool are indicative only and do not constitute professional advice of any kind.
All content on this website, including frameworks, methodologies, diagnostic logic, text, design, and software, is the exclusive intellectual property of MBU Intelligence. Reproduction, distribution, or adaptation without written consent is prohibited.
You agree not to misuse this website, reverse-engineer its systems, use automated tools to scrape content, or attempt to bypass any access controls. Commercial use of diagnostic outputs without a consulting engagement is not permitted.
MBU Intelligence provides this website on an "as is" basis. We make no warranties, express or implied, about the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for purpose of any content. To the fullest extent permitted by law, MBU Intelligence is not liable for any direct, indirect, or consequential loss arising from use of this website.
This site uses Cloudflare for hosting, Resend for email delivery, and cal.com for scheduling calls. These third-party services have their own terms and privacy policies, which apply independently of ours. Booking a call takes you onto cal.com's own page and under cal.com's terms; nothing in these terms limits or extends them, and a dispute about that page is between you and them.
These terms are governed by Portuguese law. Any disputes shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Évora, Portugal, being the seat of the company.
We reserve the right to modify these terms at any time. Continued use of the website after changes constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.
Last reviewed: August 2026 · WCAG 2.1 Level AA
MBU Intelligence - Consultoria de Gestão Lda (NIF PT 506988198) is committed to making this website accessible to all users, regardless of ability or technology. We aim to conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards under the Web Accessibility Directive (EU 2016/2102) and EN 301 549.
lang attributearia-live on conversation output for screen-reader announcementsWe are not currently aware of any significant accessibility barriers. If you encounter one, please tell us.
If you experience difficulty accessing any part of this website, contact us and we will respond within 5 business days:
randorinho@mbuintelligence.com
If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact the relevant supervisory authority. In Portugal, accessibility complaints may be directed to the AMA (Agência para a Modernização Administrativa).
Issued: June 2026 · EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689)
Our diagnostic tool is a structured conversation engine. It asks a series of questions, records your responses, and applies pre-defined consulting frameworks built over 20 years of practice to surface relevant information. Every output is the product of explicit, human-authored conditional logic, not probabilistic inference.
Three commitments, each about a named thing rather than about the company. The scoring model is deterministic and rule-based, with no AI and no machine learning, so a score attached to named people can always be re-derived. A person reads and releases every report, with a written note, so no decision producing legal or similarly significant effects is taken by automated means within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR. The diagnostic tool on this site contains no AI component, as stated above.
MBU uses ordinary software tools, including AI, in its own working. We do not claim otherwise, and these three commitments are deliberately narrow enough to be checked.
This notice is issued by MBU Intelligence - Consultoria de Gestão Lda, NIF PT 506988198, Av. Dr. Francisco Sá Carneiro, 58, 1.º, 7000-757 Évora, Portugal. For questions about our approach to AI, automated systems, or EU AI Act compliance, or to reach our Data Protection Officer: randorinho@mbuintelligence.com