Consulting

What we do

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• Design organizational experiences where people can engage and connect to each other and the mission.

• Support leaders on their journey to becoming exceptional human-centred leaders.

• Develop and facilitate meetings, unconventional and interactive workshops, team-building events, and strategic planning sessions.

• Co-develop processes with groups to elicit new skills and thinking to achieve their goals.

• Host new or difficult conversations.

• Gather qualitative data to identify gaps and opportunities for organizational growth.

• Assist groups to clarify their values so that they can act in alignment with them.

• Design or examine existing structures & processes in businesses such as hiring, onboarding, recruiting, retention, evaluations, etc. 

• Help process organizational trauma

Our approach to working in organizations

Putting theory into practice

With theories we learned through the Master’s program in Human Systems Intervention as well as our extensive combined experience in leadership, we use both dialogic and diagnostic approaches to Organization Development (OD). These approaches are best used in tandem, through a systems lens. We are inspired by living systems, which are regenerative, rather than by “organization as machine” metaphors, which fail to account for the most precious resource of organizations - our humanity!

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A diagnostic approach uses theory as a lens through which to see system dynamics. Frameworks, model-building and hypotheses are used to analyze where our consulting efforts may be well placed. Behind the scenes, we make sense of what we are seeing, hearing and feeling in the client system - which includes ourselves - by comparing it to what theories tell us are common patterns. We test those theories through (potentially dialogic) interventions and observe what emerges, learning and getting more precise as we go. Depending on readiness and literacy, we may also do this transparently with the client so they can build capacity to manage ongoing change.

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Dialogic refers to a conversation-based approach in which all involved are co-creating reality. Together with the client, we sense into the language, metaphor, and images in our minds in order to surface underlying beliefs. By bringing our way of thinking above the waterline, we are better able to examine the extent to which other facts triangulate this reality (or not) and identify limiting beliefs that may be keeping a group from reaching their goals. We can also craft new stories that empower and enable clients to move towards the world they seek to create. 

Psychologically Safe 

We seek to work with organizations made up of people coming together to solve a problem, meet a need, or otherwise make a change in the world. We cannot transform society without acknowledging the damaging consequences of extractive and exploitative capitalism that underpins our current economic worldview. The capitalist model has prioritized profits over people, causing collective trauma where nobody benefits, and has disproportionately affected some groups more than others, requiring oppression to make a profit.

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Since many forms of trauma are prevalent in society today (collective, attachment, developmental, ancestral, event-based), our starting point to working with people begins with developing relationships where trust and respect are cultivated. We use the principles developed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to inform practices that develop safety, trust, mutual support, collaboration, and empowerment through transparency, humility and an acknowledgement of cultural, historical, and gender issues. Because so many organizational structures embody a disempowered approach, personal agency and re-empowerment is paramount to change work.

Appreciative, strengths-based and reflective

We meet clients where they are at, focusing on strengths and assets present that resemble the outcomes the organization seeks to achieve. This is an alternative to a deficit-based approach that looks for gaps to fill. In an appreciative stance, we observe, ask questions and reflect what we see, hear and feel to increase an organization’s ability to see itself in its context. Modeling and supporting the development of reflective capacity enables them to create new ways of understanding their relationship to the problems or opportunities with which their business is concerned. In this way, the organization can move from a place of fear, scarcity, and urgency to one that feels like there is more access to time, joy, ideas and resources; a place where dreaming of what’s possible replaces limiting themselves to what’s been done before. This is the place where truly innovative outcomes become available to the group.