Creative Collaboration
for Complex Challenges
Facilitation and strategy for leadership teams, large groups and coalitions
Offerings
Team & Leadership Development
Executive Alignment
A leadership team produces something it carries forward: a decision, a set of priorities, or input into a planning cycle it already owns.
Team Session
An intact team builds a shared understanding of how its own people approach problems, then uses an experiential problem solving methodology on a real challenge they are facing.
Individual Session
One person, the same design discipline. A single leader or practitioner works on their own challenge rather than a team’s.
Strategy & Planning
Strategic Planning
An organization arrives at a direction its leadership owns and can execute.
Program Design & Launch
An organization is standing up something new, a program, an initiative, a center or a partnership, and needs the research and design work to make it land rather than just the launch event.
Innovation & Problem Solving
Discovery Workshop
The room does not yet agree what the problem is. Output is a ranked set of priorities and recommendations, plus a group that did not exist as a group before.
Solutions Workshop
The problem is known and the answers are not. Output is concrete proposals or programs, each with a team, an owner, a cost and a timeline.
Convening & Large Groups
Looking for something else?
Selected work
Some of what we've done
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Executive alignment · in partnership with Collaborative Labs
Four legacy brands becoming one company
A multi-brand consumer group consolidating into a single operating entity, with long-established cultures in different states that had never had to agree on anything. The plan had to survive real trade volatility, and it had to be something the leadership team could take to its board and defend line by line.
Outcome A three-year strategic plan the leadership team owns, built to survive a board conversation line by line, with the implementation rhythm already set.
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Executive alignment · technology
Appfire, a new leadership team's first planning cycle
A newly constituted executive team heading into the first annual planning cycle it would own from start to finish, after a period of significant change at the company. The ask was not a plan. It was building the team's capacity to think creatively together, in a market where the right answer keeps moving.
Outcome A leadership team with shared language for how it solves problems, and the year’s strategic objectives worked through together before the planning cycle opened.
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Executive alignment · agritourism
Ananda Farm, a leadership team choosing a direction
A forty-acre farm deciding whether to keep running year-round for the public or pivot its spring season to private and corporate use. The leadership team had strong instincts and no shared evidence, so the work started before the room did: two hundred and sixty-nine customer reviews analysed, five personas built, the market sized, three options modelled.
Outcome A recommended direction with a phased way into it, and a leadership team that agreed on the reasoning rather than just the answer.
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Program design · in partnership with the Dalí Museum Innovation Labs
The Women’s Empowerment Program
A standing program at the Dalí Museum’s Innovation Labs, bringing creative thinking, problem solving and professional development training to under-served women and to the local organizations that serve them. Delivered with community partners, among them Dress for Success and organizations supporting survivors of domestic abuse.
Outcome Women trained across several community organizations at once, reaching clients, staff and boards rather than one tier of any one organization.
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Summit workshop · technology
Sumo Logic, global go-to-market leadership
Sales, marketing, engineering and customer success leaders opened a two-day conference, each running teams of between two and forty people. The CEO had framed attrition as the central problem, so the session had to surface what those leaders were actually running into rather than confirm what leadership already believed.
Outcome Themed challenges and opportunities in the leaders' own words, sorted by the room and presented before lunch, which set the agenda for the rest of the conference.
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Summit workshop · health system
Inova Health, marketing and communications summit
The largest room on record, and a full day. Leadership had already set its priorities two weeks earlier, so the problem was not generating ideas. It was connecting a team-building morning to a content agenda that was already written, without the two halves feeling like separate events.
Outcome Prioritized clusters, each carrying two to three goals and one to two quick wins, with commitments made in the room before anyone left.
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Cross-boundary · in partnership with Knowinnovation and the National Science Foundation
AI Efficiency: researchers and industry in the same room on purpose
Academics holding finished results, and industry practitioners with the capacity to deploy them. Two groups with genuinely different incentives, different vocabularies and no reporting line between them. Run as a hybrid over five sessions across three weeks, which meant momentum had to survive the gaps.
Outcome Five developed project concepts, each with a route to real-world deployment and an industry partner attached.
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Cross-boundary · in partnership with Renaissance Teams and the National Science Foundation
Leaders from several states, building innovation roadmaps
Government, universities, industry, non-profits, tribal nations and community colleges, grouped three and four states at a time. Nobody in the room reported to anybody else, so the design had to earn commitment rather than assign it, and it had to work the same way the next time with a different set of states.
Outcome Roadmaps each state owns, plus a repeatable process built to be run again without the people who designed it.