Our work in 2019
2019 brought us an astonishing range of opportunities to practice our craft and pursue our mission to equip change leaders with the capacity to create in social complexity. Here are snapshots of our most memorable and impactful efforts of the year.
Get unstuck, get started
Shifting group culture
We've worked with numerous groups whose patterns of relationship and communication inhibit their ability to live out their mission.
Overcoming fragmentation and cynicism
As a first step in "getting better at change," students, administrators, faculty and staff gathered to shift their story of stuckness and make their first steps toward a better campus culture.
Restore trust
A trust-breaking incident among top leadership shook the organization and its board to the core. We hosted a space in which they could reframe the conversation and find a way through.
Build capacity for change
Skills for cross-race collaboration
Our course, "A Liberated Life: practices for leading with all you've got," has helped many change leaders in Pittsburgh develop skills and practices to forge genuine relationships — an essential ingredient for cross-race collaboration.
Develop hosting and facilitation skills
Over the past eight years we have developed an arc of learning experiences that can bring people with no prior facilitation experience into their first experience in hosting dialogue, building confidence and beginning a lifelong path of mastery.
Group culture: rituals, roles, artifacts
We have helped many groups learn to make culture a matter of practical action and exploration.
Skilling for the tough stuff
Using a broad synthesis of materials, activities drawn from Theater of the Oppressed, reflection, art, and facilitated dialogue, change leaders develop more skill in working with the "tough stuff" woven into our current systems
Co-creating, community scale, and the long haul
Seeing complexity together
Community patterns, family life, the myriad little stories on a college campus--our long history of ethnographic design research serves us well as we've moved our work deeper into challenges of social complexity.
Listen to the signals
We helped over 400 members of a national science laboratory expand their whole-organization conversation about their long-term future priorities.
Community response to trauma
We were honored to assist with gatherings of interfaith clergy after the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh.