Your team deserves a great—and productive—experience the next time they get together to solve problems
How we help
With a combined six decades worth of experience working in leading consulting firms, Fortune 500 companies, and well-funded startups, we bring to our clients the most advanced approaches to creative, collaborative problem solving—but with far greater agility and efficiency.
Our services include four core offerings, a set of standard, highly interactive talks, and several other additional options, all of which relate to our practice disciplines of strategy, innovation, and team effectiveness. (For perspective on these three disciplines, see the section on High-Impact Conversations.)
Core offerings
Our core offerings are centered around workshops for teams to guide them as they work through some of their toughest challenges. Our process is never a “one-off” but always consists of three phases: strong prep-work, a full-day workshop, and targeted follow-through.
Strategic Conversation Session
Our first core offering is a full-day (or more) strategic conversation with a group of between 5 to 20 participants, following a process defined in our best-selling book, Moments of Impact, and drawing on experience designing and facilitating hundreds of sessions over the past three decades.
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Strategic conversations typically are focused on one big, well-defined challenge question. The group could be the leaders of a business unit, a functional/operating team, or a cross-functional group for challenges that cut across silos.
Our process is never a “one-off” but always consists of three phases:
- Strong prep work—includes participant and stakeholder interviews, key document review, and targeted outside research, to clearly define the challenge question and identify critical leverage points for problem solving.
- Full-day Workshop—the session itself can be part of a larger strategic planning meeting or retreat but requires at least a full-day time commitment to make serious progress against a serious challenge.
- Targeted follow-through—consists at a minimum of a sharp memo outlining three things: (1) observations of your team’s engagement (as compared with hundreds of priors); (2) recommendations of actions to move forward; and (3) outstanding questions that need further exploration. Additional, follow-up options are below.
Team Building Event
The words “team building” tend to trigger ideas like doing an escape room together or various forms of “trust fall”-type activities (ugh). However, the research literature of teams is crystal clear on this point: the real work of team building consists of building collaborative muscle mass by solving tough challenges together.
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While having a nice dinner or outing together can support team bonding, it’s important not to confuse the icing for the cake. You don’t need to know each other’s birthdays or kids’ names to do great work together (though it is nice to do so). What is necessary is strong collaborative habits, rooted in real respect and candid conversation.
Our team effectiveness workshops are customized to context and typically involve three elements:
- analyzing the results of a team effectiveness diagnostic survey (we recommend the outstanding Squadify tool);
- engaging in targeted activities to close key gaps (common ones include: lack of clarity or alignment on direction; so-so feedback culture and capabilities; or limited levels of trust and psychological safety); and
- diving into creative problem-solving work on a pressing, current challenge to build collaborative muscle mass
As with our first core offering, our team building workshop projects consist of three, slightly different phases:
Strong prep work—includes running a team effectiveness diagnostic survey; conducting targeted interviews to gain perspective on the results; and identifying an appropriate current challenge for collaborative problem-solving
Full-day Workshop—which can be part of a larger strategic planning meeting or retreat but requires at least a full-day time commitment to make serious progress.
Targeted follow-through—consists at a minimum of a sharp memo outlining three things: (1) observations of your team’s engagement (as compared with hundreds of priors); (2) recommendations of actions to move forward; and (3) outstanding questions that need further exploration. Additional, follow-up options are below.
Innovation Ideation Workshop
Too many brainstorming sessions are “garbage-in, garbage-out” events where participants leave with a long list of ideas that they already had coming in. When asking a group to come up with new ideas, it’s critical to provoke them with surprising content, provocative questions, and real voices of the customer so that they get well beyond the usual stuff.
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Being innovative is not about wearing funny hats and putting toys on the table—it’s about looking at the problem through many different lenses and combining elements in new ways until you get to truly novel options.
As with all our core offerings, our innovation ideation workshop projects consist of three, slightly different phases:
Strong prep work—includes identifying stimulating content inputs—such as recent innovations in fringe markets or adjacent spaces, outlier customer perspectives, creative solutions to analogous problems well outside of your market, and more…
Full-day Workshop—which can be part of a larger team meeting or retreat but requires at least a full-day time commitment to make serious progress.
Targeted follow-through—consists at a minimum of a sharp memo outlining three things: (1) observations of your team’s engagement (as compared with hundreds of priors); (2) recommendations of actions to move forward; and (3) outstanding questions that need further exploration.
Board Retreat
Boards of a Directors are a special kind of “pseudo team.” While they are usually of reasonable size and collaborate around common goals, they don’t often exhibit a high degree of interdependence or spend enough time together to establish strong working relationships and norms. What’s more, Boards often have uneasy agreements with management, whereby collaboration and oversight get tied together in a confusing muddle.
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Offsite retreats are an important vehicle for Board development, and yet all too often session agendas are packed with management “update” presentations that could be delivered by video or other means followed by vague efforts at relationship-building over drinks, dinner, and maybe golf.
We take a different approach to Board retreats, taking the time to identify high-value strategic topics for open conversation and the right way to frame them so that truly collaborative problem-solving can happen. And we work with management to identify specific Board relationships—with each other and with management—that need to be fortified for clear business reasons.
As with all our core offerings, our Board Retreat projects consist of three, slightly different phases:
Strong prep work—includes identifying key strategic and operational topics for discussion as well as working relationship-building goals around which to design the retreat.
Retreat support —includes design and facilitation of the retreat itself, with a strong bias toward group interaction over formal presentations.
Targeted follow-through—consists at a minimum of a sharp memo outlining three things: (1) observations of your Board’s engagement (as compared with hundreds of priors); (2) recommendations of actions to move forward; and (3) outstanding questions that need further exploration.
Advisory services
In addition to our core offering, there are several other ways we can help, including coaching, training, scenario planning, and expert due diligence.
Scenario planning projects
If you’re facing future uncertainties that have you wondering which way to turn next, we can tap into our deep expertise in scenario planning to help you explore a wide range of possible futures and arrive at a clear and adaptable point of view for decision making and action.
Thought partnership for special event design
If you have a high-stakes event coming up—whether a workshop, team retreat, or stakeholder engagement process—and are planning on running it internally, we can help you as a thought partner to develop a creative experience design that works.
Custom training in strategic conversation or team building
If you have a team that needs to raise their game in how they collaborate, we’d be glad to craft a custom program to help them get to the next level.
Coaching in strategic conversation or team building
As follow-up to a workshop, project, or custom training, we can also provide strong, ongoing support and accountability as outside coaches with regular check-ins.
Stakeholder engagement campaigns
Important change initiatives often require thoughtful stakeholder management strategies and campaigns to succeed. These campaigns need to strike the right balance between listening and persuading, and should feature a logical sequencing and “build” of different conversations. When it really matters, we can work alongside you to design stakeholder campaigns that tap into best practices for genuine human engagement by including people as real participants in your journey—not just observers.
Outside consultant due diligence
Finally, given our deep background in professional services, we can help write and/or review RFPs for larger projects that you’re taking to market—as well as help evaluate candidate proposals. Think of this as a small insurance policy against potentially poor matches between your needs and the candidates’ proposed approach for must-succeed projects.
Interactive talks
A good way to get to know us is to include some of our compelling content in your next program or event. Chris is an experienced presenter and teacher, who never talks at an audience. Instead, his presentations are highly interactive, following the “10-minute rule” from brain science–with real participant engagement around each well-defined “chunk” of content. Sample talks include:
Brain-Centric Design: The Neuroscience of Great Experiences
Great experiences–of all kinds–start with a basic understanding of individual and social psychology (whether acquired through study or in the field). Our brains are prediction machines that respond far better to some stimuli than others. In this talk, we look at the core principles of experience design that go with the grain of our brains.
No More Trust Falls!: The Real Work of Team Building
The words “team trust building” tend to evoke images of fancy dinners, rural retreats, or therapy sessions. But research is clear on this point: the real work of team building happens when people tackle tough challenges together. In this talk, we review the key principles of great teamwork, with focus on how your team can up their game.
Moments of Impact: Designing Great Strategic Conversations
Key lessons from the book that launched (at least!) a thousand conversations… This talk shares core principles and practices for creative and collaborative problem-solving, drawing on experience with hundreds of groups–and focused on what’s most pressing for your team, now.
Practice areas
While we’ve worked in dozens of industries and are open to discussing many possibilities, three practice areas are best aligned with our experience and personal passions:
Future of Learning, Education, and Workforce Development
Economic opportunity increasingly turns on access to skills building, whether through formal education and training or other means. Meanwhile, the rise of generative AI is raising tough questions about which human skills will matter most as the future of work is reorganized. We’ve worked on these issues from a variety of angles and are energized by finding new ways to help people attain the skills they need.
Combatting Climate Change through Decarbonization
Climate change is here—and it’s posing serious challenges to our environment and economy, as well as reshaping where and how humans and other animals live and co-exist. We’ve spent years helping companies manage their hard assets in more resource-efficient (and cost-efficient) ways—and are eager to help that movement forward.
Scaling “Disruptor” Entrepreneurs and Startups
We’ve spent quality time inside organizations both small and huge—and know what it takes to get from here to there. We love helping creative innovators bring new solutions to customers at scale.