Facilitation & Training

Any natural team or group within organizations that desire greater harmony, collaboration and ease in how they work together towards a shared purpose. Examples of a natural team include a C-suite team, managing partners, the entire start-up crew, a set of managers across functions, a faculty unit within a university, a group of new-hires or a healthcare unit within a hospital.

Amongst the most satisfying moments in organizational life is when team members really get each other and the work between them flows with ease.

En route to such moments, teams can get into stuck dynamics, unhealthy conflict or tough issues. Research shows that when such conflicts go unaddressed, it takes a high toll on the individuals involved, the broader team and the organization as a whole. 

Margaret Wheatley said it best, “In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles and positions.” 

Our work is highly customized and varies depending on the team’s needs. There are no two engagements that are alike. 

Our approach is experiential, practical and seated within real-life, on-the-job challenges. We are skilled and compassionate at getting to, and working with, the prickly stuff underneath the surface of team dynamics.

Typically we are invited by the team leader or a member of the team. We enter the conversation with a heightened sense of awareness to see what’s visible and invisible in the team and the culture. We co-create a design to meet the needs, outcomes and budget of the organization. We then move into the work with lightness and artful precision.  Our experience has been that having our outside perspective can be a valuable asset to help reveal blind spots and see a way forward that may not have already been seen. 

For some clients, the engagement could begin with a half-day team retreat designed to facilitate deeper understandings and communication. For another, it could look like two half-day team sessions bookending 6 months of one-on-one coaching with each member. For yet another, it could look like a series of 1hr skill-building workshops (e.g. Foundations of Communication, Giving & Receiving Feedback, Commitment Conversations) tacked onto existing monthly/quarterly team meetings. And it could look completely different. We’re here to support teams in developing the capacities necessary to create and sustain the future they seek. 

We take a whole systems approach to support durability of the change efforts. Our facilitation and training designs are co-creative, adaptive and experiential. We are experts in facilitating dialogue and see it as a powerful method to catalyze transformation at the individual, team and systems levels. We draw upon other facilitation techniques and methodologies, including, but not limited to, Theory U, Action Inquiry, Systems Thinking, Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space Technology and World Cafe.