Services
We help you collaborate with others (internally and/or externally) to improve performance and reach your goals. True collaboration requires specific skills, methods, and experience. Luckily, we provide all of these through our seven service areas.
Can’t do it alone? The cutting-edge practice of engagement supports you to identify, connect, and collaborate with like-minded others to reach common goals. Working together in this way builds skills, trust, and momentum. Impact increases rapidly.
Use our proven STRONG ENGAGEMENT model for effective collaboration with a range of people both inside and outside your team and/or organization. Collaboration at its finest!
Supported by effective communication, powerful tools, and our learning-by-doing approach, engagement will bring incredible results for you, your team, and all involved.
Collaboration depends on trust, shared goals, and respect. It can be difficult to get this all of this right sometimes, especially if expectations and culture are not aligned, not to mention egos, personalities, and power differences. You need advice and support to address this when there are critical issues to address, hopefully with the support of the whole team and network.
We design, run and report from focused and highly interactive meetings, workshops, forums, retreats, and conferences. These bring diverse views into the room, inject creativity, generate insight, build consensus, and drive action. If there is conflict that needs to be addressed, we are comfortable helping you do that as well, thoughtfully and respectfully.
Supported by a toolkit of 50+ participatory and illuminating formats and exercises for individual and group insight, we pride ourselves on the quality, functionality, and productivity of our events. We never do the same thing twice, customizing our formats and designs to the location, topic, and organizations we are working with.
With literally hundreds of successful facilitated events and processes under our belt, and extensive experience training others to facilitate effectively, you can rely on us.
For the last 30 years, providing a variety of ways to participate in policy, project, and service discussions has been a recognized best practice. However, implementation was uneven, and face-2-face engagement was often favoured.
We now have a different landscape that is smaller, riskier, connected and dynamic where providing information, leading engagement, and supporting robust collaboration both in-person and online is possible, powerful, and required.
Our firm is a leader in designing and deploying multi-channel approaches, having developed toolkits and training for everyone from national governments to local teams.
We actively stay on top of new tools and formats, but never waver from our core values and practices. Join one of our projects and see how we do this while also training others in both hybrid and digital forms of engagement.
Even with a clear purpose, fresh strategy, and a committed team, clients benefit from compelling communications as a foundational element of their projects. When you are trying to reach big goals and/or change a system, internally or externally, the better you and others can discuss and see the whole system, the easier it is to co-create change.
Knowing why, how, what, and when to communicate is always a key consideration. Being able to respond to questions, address the issues and needs of partners, and share challenges and lessons learned with stakeholders and aligned groups is essential. Infographics, newsletters, graphic recording, surveys, and rich online dialogue all play a part, as do powerful visuals.
That is why we always weave robust messaging, learning, celebration, and team-building activities into initiatives we support. The use of multiple communication channels and formats (including social media) to reach diverse audiences is a core practice, as is clear reporting on activities and “closing the loop” with all participants. Our team has all these tools and skills at their fingertips, and can coach you through it.
Your team’s internal capacity, alignment and focus need ongoing attention. We strengthen these essential aspects of performance with powerful tools for visioning, goal-setting, strategic plans, teamwork, leadership, culture change, and/or conflict resolution.
Having clear values, empowered people, shared objectives, strong relationships, increased trust, and “distributed leadership” is critical to any high-impact initiative.
We excel at enhancing your performance by:
- Clarifying purpose, goals, and strategies
- Seeing and building on organizational strengths
- Gathering stakeholder insights, input, and support
- Creating aspirational plans for change and growth
- Working through conflict and finding joint solutions
- Fostering creative and innovative approaches
- Enhancing employee engagement and alignment
- Celebrating wins, while learning from missteps
- Deepening and broadening the skills of leadership
When you need some additional capacity, our experienced team can partially or fully design, deliver, and evaluate any collaborative project or network. We also prepare funding applications, mid-point reviews, capacity assessments, etc., to support project teams straining to complete all their tasks or seize new opportunities.
Another speciality is advising new businesses and their management teams, helping them move from start-up excitement to maturity, stability, and sustained success. Young entrepreneurs often benefit from the “power skills” we bring in terms of interpersonal communication and strategy, even as they lead in their areas of technical skill.
Capacity building a key element of our approach. We offer customized courses to build skills in your team and organisation, and deliver certificate programs through academic institutions. We are also developing an online training institute, which will launch in early 2023.
See our training page to learn more.