Meetings are where the real work can happen when they’re designed well and tap the power of diversity, participation, collaboration, and shared learning.
After 15 years of doing design and facilitation work with many social change leaders through New Directions Collaborative, I’m now offering on-line sessions as a strategic thinking partner and design coach to help your team do the good design thinking to create meetings and participatory processes that generate transformative solutions.
I start with helping you get clear on how this meeting or process fits within the larger strategic context and clarify the meeting’s desired outcomes and strategic questions you’d like answered. All design work is informed by principles of inclusive participation and how living systems change. Then we can brainstorm what kind of participatory process and agenda design can allow you to achieve the desired outcomes while growing trust and good will among the group. I can also review agenda designs and/or troubleshoot challenging group process situations.
These design coaching sessions are typically 60 minutes, though if this is the first design session you might want to book 90 minutes. When you book a session, I will send you a prep form to gather some background information so we can use our time efficiently. Any information shared is kept confidential.
If you have a design team engaged, I encourage you to include them in the coaching session.
If cost is a barrier, please be in touch and we can discuss options.
We can arrange a regular series of coaching sessions, billed as a package or by month.
My work focuses on helping state and local governments advance climate action. This means I am frequently helping them to navigate complex decisions and to engage diverse stakeholders. We use a wide variety of methods and a lot of meetings to get alignment on proposals, policies and programs.
I partner with Beth whenever I can. Better than traditional conveners I have worked with, I can count on Beth for exceptional, thoughtfully-designed meetings and collaborative events of many types. She brings a wide and deep suite of effective tools to make our meetings more fruitful and fun, and to improve the quality of our outcomes.
In my experience, working with Beth generates good policy solutions, advances advocacy, focus and alignment – and improves the quality of the collaboration by building the trust and good will among the stakeholders supporting them to work well together for the long haul. For example, when Beth teamed up with us to design an extensive series of regional meetings, she encouraged work with the stakeholders in ways that created relationships and more engagement between the state agency staff and a wide variety of organizations and individuals. And Beth has a deep and sensitive understanding of how to approach issues of diversity and justice within the process.
Even today, 10 years later, I see the lasting results of her process in the connections between people, especially underserved people, who weren’t used to working together with state officials and municipal leaders and now, still do. Today, they have each other’s phone numbers because they worked together at the tables on meaningful things.
Beth always boosts the clarity of our meetings and helps us refine and sharpen the outcomes we seek to achieve. Her meeting agendas always build in time for the group to focus, to think, and to work together in ways that leave us feeling energized and productive. I’ve seen how well it works when the meeting outcomes draw on the wisdom of participants to generate insights and actions beyond what any single member could achieve on his or her own.
Beth asks great questions. I didn’t fully appreciate the value of asking the right open-ended questions before I started working with Beth, but her thoughtfulness and use of good questions opens up a refreshing space for discussion.
Finally, I sincerely appreciate how generous Beth is. She shares her tools and resources, leaving all participants with libraries of reference materials and new ideas on ways of working together.