One of humanity’s biggest problems
is the inability to work together.
We aim to help with that.
The world has changed rapidly and more change comes every day. Change brings uncertainty, opportunity, success and failure. Now more than ever, people need to work together to develop practical solutions to solve the complex challenges of sustainability, resilience, and equity.
We help groups of individuals work as one to explore tough common issues, solutions, share resources and develop productive relationships.
Using advanced problem solving structures, we harness your team’s collective skills and knowledge in defining the issues, developing solutions, creating plans and putting them into action.
To leverage our own experience and knowledge base, we focus on those who are working on climate, equity, and sustainability issues.
Structured Problem Solving
We use a series of structured problem processes to guide our work. Inspired by complexity science, these social interactions leverage the innate human skills of problem solving, working together, and feeling connected. The protocols offer extremely rich, high-quality conversations that help teams move towards realizing their vision/goals.
Our trained facilitators guide teams smoothly through some of the more difficult challenges they face. We apply the most applicable methods from Liberating Structures, Systems Practice, Emergent Strategies to uncover the wisdom of the collective.
Useful for:
- Private businesses, governments, membership organizations, nonprofits and NGOs
- Executives, managers, owners, staff, and any combination
- Generating ideas, defining issues and building consensus (in a way that organizational hierarchies can’t)
Facilitation
Facilitation is a guided approach to conversations that makes communication work better. The facilitator draws from a variety of conversation formats to lead the group through defining issues, generating ideas, building consensus, refining goals, and more. The powerful quality of these focused conversations removes significant roadblocks to successful solutions. In a proper facilitation, all participants feel heard, seen and respected. That allows the team to work together towards achieving its goal.
Co-creation
Co-creation is what you get when you combine collaboration and innovation.
It’s taking the best of each one of you, and creating something new. It’s greater than the sum of its parts. Done right, it can be an exponential increase in the ability to solve problems. Co-creation is innovation that belongs to all involved. When all parties feel involved, bonding happens. Bonding makes audacious goals possible.
A Typical Engagement
PHASE 1: Core Process
1. Pre-load the issues.
In advance of the session, we’ll send out a questionnaire to prep the attendees for the meeting and also give us a sense of the working culture of this particular group.
2. Develop Issues.
We convene and generate ideas during live conversation. This process engages everyone and generates ideas quickly, building rapport and a sense of accomplishment.
3. Convert ideas to solutions
The above exercises are followed by diving into the work. The type of work session we lead will depend on the ideas, problems and opportunities uncovered above. All parties will be involved so the solutions have buy-in and a broad set of feedback.
4. Takeaways / Reporting
We consolidate and report the results with resources members can follow up with. Common elements include:
• snapshot of ideas generated
• guide / checklist for next steps
• suggestions for improved cooperation
PHASE 2: Implementation Support
We provide follow up sessions to facilitate the implementation of the collectively generated solutions. The methods applied vary by the type of problems there are to solve for but generally they support active listening, increased communication, and cultural change. These can be added on as needed.
Complimentary Session
Join us for a complimentary 30-minute meeting where we explore some ways facilitation can help your team achieve its goals. You can join one of our open, regularly scheduled Ecopreneur Climate Sessions.
If you’re a member of local government, you can also join our next Local Government Climate Session.