This is ‘how’ we do our work. Defined by the needs of our clients and their stakeholders, we provide a combination of expertise areas (services listed below) and a proven co-creative process to design, implement, and capture learning from effective projects.
We help our clients incorporate adaptive management approaches from soup to nuts. For some, it starts with strategic planning. For others, we support proposal development stage to incorporate adaptive management in the project design, MEL plan, and management chapters. Our project start-up support includes facilitating joint work planning, theory of change design and validation, and developing and implementing a CLA Plan and learning agenda. Our project implementation support includes tool and resource creation, scenario planning and context monitoring, pause and reflect facilitation, before- and after-action reviews, and CLA maturity self-assessments. We approach our work through a co-creative process, leveraging adaptive management for and in service of localization.
What sets us apart is our ability to apply adaptive management practices to help our clients navigate and work more effectively in complex environments. Our experienced staff have leveraged these practices to better address the nexus of humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding initiatives. Learning from data and being ready and able to adapt is key as the environments in which our clients work change. Therefore, we facilitate the coordination and collaboration among stakeholders to improve the sequencing, layering, and integration of activities and ensure that data is a key variable in decision-making processes.
Adaptive management doesn’t happen without adaptive leadership. We work with individuals to provide leadership coaching and mentoring to facilitate a program’s adaptive leadership, represented by improved leadership and supervisory skills, strategic and data-driven decision-making, and a strong and open organizational culture with established or adapted organizational processes and structures.
Using a variety of approaches, including appreciative inquiry and liberating structures, we can design and facilitate virtual, in-person and hybrid meetings, workshops, and learning events. These range in size from small team meetings to large conferences. Using a co-creative approach, we work with our clients to cover all aspects of facilitation, from designing, planning, facilitating, producing, and creating communication products to help clients meet their objectives. We have also facilitated communities of practice, informal peer exchanges, and regional workshops.
Knowledge is power, and when that power is harnessed (or managed) it can be truly awesome and lead to great effects. We have supported clients to conduct needs assessments, facilitated knowledge capture (including working on systemic approaches to capturing tacit knowledge), and supported the sharing of these through various platforms (designing learning events, publishing articles and blogs, and analyzing and synthesizing large data sets). We emphasize the importance of peer-to-peer learning, which we have done through the design of multi-day workshops, facilitated through communities of practice, and promoted through organization-level activities.
Through culturally sensitive activities and collaborative projects, we strengthen bonds, fostering a “One Team” approach and collaborative foundation for future programming. Our approach cultivates a diverse and inclusive environment, where each team member's unique perspectives contribute to our collective success in creating positive, sustainable impacts worldwide. We understand what it takes to impart effective leadership skills to navigate a rapidly changing, dynamic, and highly transitional environment.
We have designed, developed content for, and delivered to both individuals and teams formal in-person, virtual or hybrid training events. Applying adult learning principles and highly participatory learning approaches, we design collaborative and adaptive curricula which can be catered to specific organizational needs.