Our Services

Initial assessment

We begin our work with any organization or stakeholder group by assessing the needs, challenges, and opportunities that are prompting leaders to seek our services. From the first phone call, we tease apart interpersonal problems, group dynamics, and systems issues so you can see exactly how to shift towards collaboration and increase alignment with purpose and values. We shed more light by interviewing individuals, observing meetings, and facilitating groups. The information we gather helps us design structures and practices that will sustain results over time.

Executive coaching and management consulting

We provide extensive support to managers as well as individuals who aspire to grow into management positions. Topics include strategic thinking, empowerment, clarity in making choices, difficult conversations, negotiating agreements, navigating power relations, collaborative leadership, and many others. In all these areas, we zero in on the heart of the matter and build capacity to respond to challenges with integrity and effectiveness.

Meeting facilitation

Our consultants use Convergent Facilitation to guide meetings for existing teams or for specific configurations of stakeholders. Whatever the topic or purpose of the meeting, we support everyone in clearly articulating what’s important to them, making clear requests about what would move the group forward, hearing fully any concerns that arise, and reaching decisions that attend to the needs of all participants and the organization as a whole. Our facilitation process creates accountability and follow-through without increasing stress.

Mediation

To support your organization in handling conflicts, our experienced mediators and facilitators first meet individually with everyone involved, then arrange joint sessions where each person can hear other viewpoints, experiences, and needs. Once all parties understand one another better, we help them create their own solutions to the conflict.

Team building

Our consultants work with teams to identify and celebrate areas where they are functioning well, and to recognize behaviors and norms that divide and obstruct them. With our support, communication patterns and decision-making systems shift from a semi-conscious blur into sharp focus, and teams adjust these processes to enhance collaboration and workflow. To ensure that positive changes last, we help create new systems for providing feedback within the team and establish methods for resolving conflict.

Training design and delivery

Our trainings for organizations range from two-hour introductory sessions to intensive trainings that span months and aim to create cultural cohesion and transformation across the entire organization. The trainings are highly interactive, tailored, and focused on practices that can be put to use immediately. Trainings are developed in collaboration with key stakeholders to focus on what is most useful, relevant, and aligned with purpose. Trainings highly recommended by past participants include Feedback Giving and Receiving, Navigating Difficult Conversations, Leadership Development, and Convergent Facilitation.

Collaboration tool spotlight:

Convergent Facilitation

Convergent Facilitation is a tool for efficient, collaborative decision-making that we’ve been developing since 2004. The process lays the cornerstones of a productive meeting:

  • Building enough trust in the room for people to voice their real concerns
  • Transforming disagreement about positions into agreement about principles, so the group can focus on problem-solving together
  • Attending to everyone’s needs and concerns, which gives people room to stretch, shift, adapt, and even advocate for others
  • Encouraging honesty while crafting agreements, so no one says they’re willing to compromise and then sabotages the decision later.

Convergent Facilitation generates decisions that stick because they have everyone’s wholehearted support. It works for quick emergency response, long-term team projects, ad-hoc task forces, and even highly polarized groups, like the longtime political enemies who recently used this process to pass landmark legislation in Minnesota. Read the case study.

Bringing it to your organization

We use Convergent Facilitation to run effective meetings, and we teach this process in custom staff trainings and public workshops. 

Learn more about private staff trainings in Convergent Facilitation

Find public trainings around the world (via our parent organization, BayNVC)

Or book a free consultation and we’ll explore whether facilitation services or training are the best fit for your needs.

Now, when I plan a meeting, I use Convergent Facilitation to guide how I shape my agenda so we get to outcomes that everyone can live with. I would highly recommend this training to anyone who has to engage a variety of stakeholders or consistently seek input from a team.

– Mary Oleksy, Associate Director of Joint & Dual Degree Programs, Stanford Graduate School of Business