How the work is designed
Every engagement is built for the situation it serves. No two look alike, because no two organizations carry the same history, the same people, or the same moment.
Four commitments shape the design and the fourth makes the other three possible.
How I approach it
Appreciative.
Begins with what is working at its best, often undervalued, and builds from there. This is the practical choice as much as the generative one. People move toward what they help create, and they create most readily from strength.
Integrative.
Cooperrider's appreciative inquiry, Kegan's immunity to change, Scharmer's Theory U, Edmondson's psychological safety research, Wheatley's whole-systems thinking, Sharpe's Three Horizons, and a good deal more, each doing specific work at a specific moment. The synthesis is the point: an architecture that can meet the actual situation.
Adaptive.
The design changes as we learn. What we thought a retreat needed to accomplish in March may look different by May, and the plan should be allowed to reflect that. Adjusting as the work reveals what it needs is a feature of the partnership, and one of the ways adaptive capacity gets built into the organization itself.
Inside out.
Each of the three above depends on a fourth commitment, and it's the one leaders tend to notice last: the work starts with the leader's inner condition (mental maps and mindset) and moves outward from there. The success of the intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor. That line is Bill O'Brien's, and after forty years I have yet to find the exception. It's also why the other three hold.
The quieter question
Some of the leaders I work with carry a question they don't voice in the boardroom. Am I the one to find the breakthrough? Will the board (or the CEO) give me the runway? Is this organization capable of the shift, or are we only talking about it?
Capable, yes. Usually more capable than it looks from the inside.
Organizations produce what they're designed to produce, and most of that design lives beneath the waterline, in the beliefs and relational patterns that shape a decision before anyone makes it. That's where the wicked problems live. It's also where the capacity you're looking for tends to be found, waiting on better questions.
The forms the work takes
Strategic planning as whole-system dialogue, so that direction is owned by the people who have to carry it. Retreats designed from the inside out, beginning with what the organization most needs from the experience. One-on-one thought partnership for leaders holding questions they can't yet put before their board. Longer organizational development partnerships that stay with the deeper conditions over time, through leadership transition, culture alignment, and positioning for a new level of philanthropic investment.
And The Flourishing Framework, the most concentrated expression of this approach: a leadership immersion customized to your institution and co-designed with you, for teams that want to build adaptive capacity by cultivating a vanguard of change influencers from within.
Which form fits your situation is something we'll discover together, and it may evolve as the work shows us what it needs.
Tell me what you're carrying. We'll go from there.
