Creative Collaboration
for Complex Challenges

Summit workshop · technology

Sumo Logic, global go-to-market leadership

Sales, marketing, engineering and customer success leaders opening a global go-to-market conference. The design had to surface what those leaders were actually running into, in their own words, and get it in front of the room early enough for the rest of the conference to respond to it.

Outcome Themed challenges and opportunities in the leaders' own words, sorted by the room and handed back to it in time to set the agenda for everything that followed.

Summit workshop · health system

Inova Health, marketing and communications summit

A marketing and communications organization coming together around an agenda that was already set. The work was to build a session that strengthened the team and moved that agenda forward at the same time, 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.

Cross-boundary

PEER, launching a national elections and emergency response partnership

Election officials and emergency managers, two professions that tend to meet each other during a crisis and seldom before one. The convening had to turn a proposed initiative into a standing body, which meant building enough trust across the two communities for people to put their names against work that would outlast the room.

Outcome A mapped set of challenge areas at the intersection of the two fields, teams formed around the priorities with leads attached and a commitment to meet within thirty days, and a governance structure the founding group affirmed together.

In partnership with Knowinnovation

Cross-boundary

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, across sessions rather than in one sitting, 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.

In partnership with Knowinnovation and the National Science Foundation

Cross-boundary

Leaders from several states, building innovation roadmaps

Government, universities, industry, non-profits, tribal nations and community colleges, grouped by region. 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 already run with two cohorts of states and designed to carry the cohorts that follow.

In partnership with Renaissance Teams and the National Science Foundation

Cross-boundary

A built-environment research community, convened over several years

Engineers, architects, interaction designers, computer scientists and social scientists spread across institutions, industry and continents, working on a field that did not yet have an agreed definition. The work ran as a sequence of engagements with the same community: a first convening to draw the road map, further workshops that narrowed onto specific territory, and finally a writing workshop aimed at putting a definition on paper.

Outcome A road map the community owns, and two manuscripts submitted to a peer-reviewed journal setting out a research framework for human-building interaction.

In partnership with Knowinnovation

Discovery workshop

Arecibo Observatory, options for what comes next

After the collapse of the 305-meter telescope platform, an open question about the future of radio science in Puerto Rico. The design had to reach past the existing research community into universities, colleges and museums across the island, and turn a wide and emotionally charged field of ideas into options that could be acted on in the near, medium and long term.

Outcome Actionable options across all three horizons, carried into a report that drew a United States Congressional Mention commending the National Science Foundation for convening the workshop.

In partnership with Knowinnovation and the National Science Foundation

Discovery workshop

Maternal mental health, and the systems meant to serve it

Mothers with intellectual and developmental disabilities, the providers who care for them, the researchers who study them and the policymakers who fund the services, convened as one group across a series. The design had to hold the mothers' own accounts at the center while clinical, research and policy expertise worked around them.

Outcome An agenda of needs and recommended interventions in the participants' own framing, submitted and presented to the Administration for Community Living for review by the President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities.

In partnership with Knowinnovation

Solutions workshop

Bringing Chemistry, Physics and Computing to Life

Early-career researchers working at the edges of nonequilibrium physics, artificial life and biological chemistry, three fields with very little shared language between them, brought together in Prague. The design had to move them from meeting each other to writing together, with real research funding attached to whatever they produced.

Outcome Collaborative teams formed across the three fields, each submitting a pre-proposal for a stake in the funding to take the work further.

In partnership with Knowinnovation and the John Templeton Foundation

Executive alignment · technology

Appfire, a leadership team ahead of its planning cycle

An executive team heading into the annual planning cycle it would own from start to finish, looking to build its 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.

Executive alignment

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.

In partnership with Collaborative Labs

Executive alignment · agritourism

Ananda Farm, a leadership team choosing a direction

A working farm weighing a change in direction for its next few years. The work started before the room did: customer and market research first, then a set of modelled options the leadership team could weigh against each other in the session itself.

Outcome A recommended direction with a phased way into it, grounded in evidence the leadership team had worked through together.

Team session · cancer research

Moffitt Cancer Center, leadership development for postdoctoral researchers

Postdoctoral researchers at a cancer center, moving from bench science toward leading people and projects. The session builds a shared vocabulary for how each person in the room approaches a problem, then puts that vocabulary to work on the challenges they are actually carrying.

Outcome A standing annual engagement, run again for each new cohort, with every group leaving with a read on its own thinking preferences and a personal direction to act on.

Program design

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.

In partnership with the Dalí Museum Innovation Labs

Program design · higher education

University of South Florida, standing up two new programs

A university building a hospitality leadership program for the Tampa Bay region's restaurants, hotels and breweries, then a brewing arts program alongside it. Both began with interviews out in the industry, so the curriculum answered what employers were actually short of.

Outcome Research that anchored the curriculum decisions and surfaced the lead instructor who launched the hospitality program, plus a later study that reshaped the brewing program's internship component and its code of conduct.