Cross-Cutting Capabilities

   We help clients crystallize their objectives, identify the right people to be in the “room”, consult participants in advance to consider their expectations and perspectives, design and facilitate sessions, and produce executive summaries and strategic recommendations to drive next steps.

• Value-add: Creates guidelines and safe spaces for participation; enables clients to be fully present participants; provides a neutral, third-party to draw participants into conversation and navigate potential tensions; manages the time and group processes to ensure objectives are met. 
• Sample projects: Strategic visioning and planning, business process change, program design or reviews, feedback sessions.

   We help clients foster community and commitment to work together by helping them: build relationships of trust; understand a task, system, or problem from multiple perspectives; identify shared purpose; get explicit about what is in it for each actor; and identify clear structures and outcomes of working together.

• Value-add: Creates structures and processes that foster a shared purpose and clear plans; fuels motivation and learning; and ensures accountability for investment and activities.
• Sample projects: Forming and leading cross-functional taskforces and cross-organizational networks and collaboratives.

 We help clients build their understanding and capacity of core organizational and systems development and change topics.

• Value-add: Helps client groups create a common baseline understanding of a topic; provides a shared language and experience from which to launch a new project or phase of development; serves as a foundation for more advanced capacity building.
• Sample projects: Organizational development and systems change, change leadership and management, social innovation and changemaking.

   We dig into data, literature, stakeholder interviews, and/or focus groups as needed to help clients get a handle on employee, board, and stakeholder views; issue or service areas; market opportunities; or societal challenges.

• Value-add: Provides rigorous platform from which to develop thought leadership, make decisions, or design programs.
• Sample projects: Conducting research to inform the development of theories of change or other thought leadership; benchmarking organizations to better understand potential competitors and collaborators; conducting interviews or focus groups with internal and external stakeholders and informants to shape organizational culture, programs, or partnership projects.

We help draw out clients’ expertise; mine their stories, case studies, and deliverables to discover key insights; and synthesize and produce relevant frameworks, models, and reports to showcase and share their 

thought leadership.

• Value-add: Enables clients to focus on what they do best (i.e., delivering their products and services), while providing a process that not only produces internal learning but also serves as the foundation for advancing mission impact and/or external marketing.
• Sample projects: Developing frameworks, models, white papers, and books.