Our role is to create the conditions to help you and your team achieve your goals. This means we may act as coach, cheerleader, or provocateur at different points in a project. We bring curiosity, intentional listening, strategic insight, and enthusiasm to every engagement.
And we’ll customize our services to meet your needs, budget, and the timing. We do everything from 3-hour training sessions to months-long insight and strategy projects. Whatever the project, our goal is to design a co-created learning journey that leaves you and your team with new insight, skills, and capacity.
LABS + FACILITATION
By definition, a lab is a space for experimentation, exploration, and understanding. Read More +
As skilled facilitators, we cultivate the conditions for a successful lab, including the physical space, the design of the day, the work pace, and the ambiance. Your team will feel supported and inspired as we do this work together.
Each lab is crafted to meet the needs of the project. To do that, we draw on diverse experiences and a broad range of techniques, including ideation, healthy dialogue, improv, mindfulness, and engaged inquiry. Here are our most popular labs, though we are always happy to design a lab to meet the needs of your team.
Brand Clarity Lab
Your brand is your promise, and your branding are all the signals you send to transmit that promise. Too often, groups get hung up on their signals BEFORE they have clarity of purpose. To breakthrough in today’s world of constant distraction your signals (website, logo, messages) must be strong and clear. This means starting with your WHY, not your WHAT.
The goal of this lab is to arrive at this clarity using the structure of a brand framework (promise, cultural values, and guiding beliefs). At the end of this process, your team will be engaged and aligned with the essence of your organization, what you most care about, and why you matter to the world. This work is often done as a foundational step of strategic planning.
Activation Lab
Activation labs are designed to generate ideas and momentum toward a specific goal. These labs might be fueled by insight from qualitative or quantitative research, they might be inspired by a brand framework or a strategic plan. Whatever the starting point, by the end of this lab, your team will be galvanized and ready to take action.
Culture Lab
The most powerful brands start with a powerful and aligned culture. The work of a culture lab is to diagnose where your culture is creating the conditions for success and where it is blocking progress. Your team gets real, and then it gets inspired to co-create a thriving and highly functioning culture.
INQUIRY + RESEARCH
We are fanatical about powerful questions — the kind that call you to attention, the kind that once asked can shift your entire way of looking at the worldview. Read More +
With a deep background in qualitative research, we have been practicing the art of inquiry and asking powerful questions of individuals and groups for over 20 years. We’ve seen focus groups fall in and out of favor, and we’ve been a part of pioneering new research methodologies that harness social media technology. We’ve talked to people about cars, coffee, affluence, fly fishing, and about what motherhood means to them. Regardless of topic or methodology, what remains constant is the importance of being able to connect at a human level and deeply listen for understanding and meaning.
Focus Groups • Depth Interviews • Research Blogs • Video Diaries • Ethnographies.
COACHING + TRAINING
At the end of the day, a team is a group of humans, working in community towards a common goal. Read More +
This means that things can get messy, confusing, and contentious. It also means that things can be connected, whole hearted, and deeply meaningful. Our coaching is designed to help support an individual or a team as they do this messy and meaningful work. Our team is comprised of coaches who know how to stand in the fire, support your team, and get to the heart of the matter with courage and compassion.
In addition to individual and team coaching, we can customize brand clarity and leadership trainings for your team. Our 3-hour brand clarity training has been a cornerstone of the Spitfire Communications Training at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for the last 10 years.
Leadership Coaching • Team Coaching • Brand Clarity Training • Qualitative Insight Training.
