our planet doesn’t have time for bad meetings
Climate change requires us to act urgently and creatively. But our meetings - the most basic unit of collaboration - are bogged down with bureaucracy and boredom. Let’s make space to ask more questions before jumping to solutions. Let’s make space to ensure everyone can contribute meaningfully. Let’s make sure we are creating space to imagine solutions and not merely fix problems. We need to work together more successfully and creatively than ever before to take our shot at averting climate disaster.
For organizations and groups who want to urgently and effectively address climate change, I facilitate and design experiences to improve the quality and pace of collaborative innovation.
creativity makes possible:
More comprehensive visions and effective strategies to prevent climate change
Sustainable momentum by moving purposefully from insight to action
Stakeholders who experience more connection and alignment and have more fun working together
Use this process to make shared decisions that meet everyone’s needs. This is an alternative to debating between a few pre-baked solutions.
Under the umbrella of human rights, this tool identifies rights and responsibilities that are critical for building and maintaining an ownership culture in worker-cooperatives.
Why are rights and responsibilities important in our workplace democracy? How do rights and responsibilities relate to the cooperative principles and values?
How can I be an effective contributor in decision making at our cooperative?
Explore how vulnerability can create the conditions for accountability and contributes to the success of the co-op.
Leadership is a way all workers, regardless of their role in the co-op, can contribute to the business’ success.
Appreciate your colleagues when they have a positive influence in your life. Tell them how their effort matters.
A useful tool that invites groups of people to notice, name, and evaluate various states of being.
Organizational design has enabled Patagonia to envision transformation at the systems-level and live out their mission to “use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”
Most traditional goal setting methods, such as SMART goals, overvalue the importance of setting goals without offering a reliable process to make progress. These tools or programs tend to overemphasize goal-achievement as the ultimate marker of success. Strengths-based goals replaces a static timeline of action steps and due dates, with real-time adjustments and iterative planning.
Five teaching modules designed to help cooperative organizations train new worker-owners to cultivate a culture of mutual learning and collaboration.
When workers and cooperative businesses recognize, advocate, and design mechanisms to fulfill human, worker, and cooperative rights, it creates ideal conditions for workers to choose to live into their social interconnectedness.
When my planning mind demands to know and be certain, I can remind myself of the wisdom of taking one small step at a time.
Design is a creative process that produces ideas that haven’t existed before. Going beyond a win-win to a win-surprise. By sharing what we know in the research stage, to prioritizing outcomes rather than winners, we can create something of meaning and value.
Just sharing your experience and giving feedback to researchers is not itself a creative act. Designers must not fall into the trap of separating experiences from the people who lived them.
A knowledge intervention often assumes a lack or deficit in people, which is to be conveniently filled by another individual who “knows more.” We fall into the trap of judging individuals for “not knowing” or blaming them for “not knowing better.”
My insights from skateboarding suggest balancing is not static, rather it is a series of responsive movements. Leaders seeking balance are better served by moving with a changing environment rather than attempting to arrive at a steady state.
When feedback can throw basic elements of our self, relationships, and understanding into question, it is no wonder that many people are terrified of feedback. If a strategy of radical avoidance isn’t desirable, what other choices do we have?