Work
Ways to Collaborate
Each of these engagements can be customized to fit the team it is built for. A discovery call scopes the goals and the outcomes of the challenge, and the engagement gets designed from there.
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.
How it runs
Discovery first: conversations with the leaders who will be in the room, a read of whatever has already been written, and whatever research the decision itself needs. The session is designed for this group and this decision rather than adapted from a template, and the output is built to drop into the client's own next process instead of sitting beside it.
What comes out
Work product. A recommended direction with the reasoning attached, a prioritized set of objectives, or the raw material the next planning meeting runs on.
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.
How it runs
A validated cognitive assessment goes out as pre-work, so the room opens on the team's own data rather than a warm-up. The debrief covers individual results and the shape of the team together: where the group clusters, where it thins out, and what that predicts about how it behaves under pressure. The team then applies the language to something it brought with it, so the vocabulary gets used before anyone leaves.
What comes out
A shared way of talking about how the team thinks, and one worked example of the team using it. The test of this session is not the day. It is whether the language is still in circulation a month later.
Individual Session One person, the same design discipline. A single leader or practitioner works on their own challenge rather than a team’s.
How it runs
Quarterly cognitive assessments establish how this particular person approaches a problem. We debrief the results through experiential sessions, either in physical environments or over video. What the assessments and the debriefs surface becomes the basis for personal visioning and a strategy built toward the goals that matter.
What comes out
A direction the person can act on, reached by working rather than by talking about work.
Strategy & Planning
Strategic Planning An organization arrives at a direction its leadership owns and can execute.
How it runs
Four phases. Discovery research opens the work, including interviews with the leadership layer and a read of any prior strategy work. Data gathering follows: an anonymous staff survey and focus groups, so the plan is built on what the organization actually says rather than on what leadership believes it says. The facilitated sessions come next, captured live so nothing depends on somebody's notes. Implementation support runs afterward on whatever cadence fits, usually quarterly.
What comes out
A plan the leadership team owns, written to survive a board conversation line by line, with the implementation rhythm already set rather than left to goodwill.
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.
How it runs
Stakeholder and market research first, then the architecture of the thing itself: what it is for, who it serves, how it operates when nobody is watching, and what a participant's experience of it actually feels like.
What comes out
A program that still runs the month after it opens, with its operating structure designed rather than improvised in the first quarter.
Where it has run
The Dalí Museum Innovation Labs, co-built from intake and operations through program design and launch, including the Women's Empowerment Program. The Innovation District St. Petersburg launch. Two program launches at USF St. Petersburg, in hospitality leadership and in brewing arts.
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.
How it runs
Participants from a range of expertise and institutions come together around a shared challenge area and surface the challenges and opportunities inside it. The design holds disagreement open long enough for it to be useful, and builds the synthesis step into the arc rather than bolting it on afterward, so the recommendations get drafted while the group is still together.
What comes out
Priorities the group agrees on and recommendations for next steps, specific enough to act on. And a working group that did not exist before, which is often the more durable output.
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.
How it runs
Participants from a range of expertise and institutions come together around a challenge that is already defined and work it toward answers. Teams form around the ideas with the most promise and develop them over the course of the engagement, testing them against the people who would have to fund or deploy them before anyone leaves.
What comes out
Concrete proposals or programs, each with a team, an owner, a cost and a timeline attached. Nothing leaves the room as an idea looking for a sponsor.
Convening & Large Groups
Summit Workshop A large group from one organization, assembled for a summit or offsite, does real work together rather than sitting through an agenda.
How it runs
A cognitive assessment establishes shared language, and an experiential method puts that language to work on what the group is actually dealing with, in participants' own words. Where the event needs output rather than cohesion, the closing stretch converges what surfaced into themes, goals and first steps the rest of the event can use.
What comes out
Either a room with shared language and better working relationships, or that plus prioritized themes carrying goals and quick wins, committed to before anyone leaves.
Cross-Boundary Convening Organizations that share a problem and do not report to each other commit to something none of them could do alone.
How it runs
Each delegation arrives having diagnosed its own position, and a shared data foundation is prepared in advance so the group argues about direction rather than about whose numbers are right. The work moves toward named opportunities with named owners, and a synthesis document each organization can take into its own planning.
What comes out
Commitments that survive the drive home, because nobody can be assigned one. And a process repeatable with a different set of organizations, which matters when the convening is a pilot for something larger.
Looking for something else?
Custom Consulting For the engagement that does not match a card.
How it runs
The cards above describe work that has been done more than once. Plenty of useful work has not been done twice yet. The method does not change: understand what has to be decided and who has to own it, design backward from that, and build the session rather than adapt one.
Start here
Describe the challenge and who will be in the room. Get in touch.