Our Approach

We work collaboratively with you, over time, to help you to engage effectively with, and stay engaged with, your complex problems and challenges. 

We start with and stay close to your current context and challenges, identifying your pressing concerns and finding workable ways to respond to them. As the world around you changes and new concerns emerge, we help you learn to adapt in real time.  

The success of our engagement depends on the quality of the relationship we develop with you – we ensure our relationship is underpinned by the principles of caring, commitment and curiosity.

Rather than trying to solve your problem for you, we provide a guiding process to help you develop your capacity to solve (and re-solve) your own problem so that you have an approach that you can apply to other problems – today, tomorrow and in the future. This approach means your problems will be solved more effectively and will stay solved longer.

When neither the problem or the solution is clear, focussing on problem-surfacing and problem-solving processes provides the best way forward, at least until it becomes clear what is going on. 

We design and facilitate a series of steps to help you identify, define and understand your problem, and to think through options and alternatives for how your problem might be solved. This focus will leave you and your organisation more capable of future self-development, more aware, and allows you to retain a sense of ownership over the problem.

This process of inquiry helps you to make wise decisions and take effective action when things are complex and uncertain.

When you are working on complex problems, you need to find creative ways to motivate people (internal and external stakeholders) to join you and to stick with you, to tap into their intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual energy to “show up”, and to keep showing up when things get tough.

Interpersonal factors are always at play when people work together, affecting how well the work gets done. They can either enhance or detract from the ability of a group to engage well with complex problems and to solve them effectively. 

We support you to equip people and groups to work well together over the long term to engage effectively with challenge, complexity, and change and to solve complex problems sooner rather than later. 

Our processes generate quality conversations in complex domains among people with different perspectives and opposed positions. These conversations are not about obtaining agreement, but about gaining understanding of different perspectives and positions.  

Engaging human energy in this way supports groups to stay at the table when times get tough, allows tensions and dilemmas to be surfaced so they can be worked with constructively, and helps resolve stuck patterns in individuals and groups so that they can move forward.