Support at every stage of your collaboration

No matter where you are in your collaboration journey, we can support you.

We design and facilitate innovative, adaptive strategies to support diverse groups from across organisations, sectors, and perspectives, to work together across differences to address complex societal issues.

Using our rigorous set of approaches, we facilitate building collaborative teams, capabilities, processes, structures, strategies, and actions toward systems change.

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Where are you on your collaboration journey?

  • Initiating new collaborations
  • Strengthening an existing collaboration
  • Implementing collaborative action
  • Broadening collaborative action

Initiating new collaborations

Are you embarking on a new complex collaboration involving diverse stakeholders?

We’ll support you with

  • Mapping interests, perspectives, challenges, and opportunities
  • Identifying and convening stakeholders
  • Designing collaborative processes, strategies, and structures
  • Building collaborative capabilities and relationships

Using methods such as

  • Systems and stakeholder mapping
  • Dialogue interviews
  • Transformative scenarios
  • Developing systemic strategies and theories of change

Examples of how we’ve supported initiating new collaborations

Strengthening an existing collaboration

Do you need to enhance an existing multi-stakeholder collaboration to augment and accelerate its impact?

We’ll support you with

  • Strengthening your capacity to work together across differences
  • Increasing trust, understanding and shared narratives
  • Transforming your strategies
  • Addressing power, conflict, and levelling the playing field

Using methods such as

  • Facilitation of multi-stakeholder processes
  • Training in radical collaboration and systems leadership
  • Learning journeys
  • Accompaniment and coaching
  • Governance and platform design

Examples of how we’ve supported strengthening existing collaborations

Implementing collaborative action

Do you need to work together with diverse others to create change with speed, scale, and justice?

We’ll support you with

  • Acting innovatively together to create impact
  • Learning from failure and from what works
  • Implementing a portfolio of solutions
  • Developing new patterns of interactions, relationships, and resources

Using methods such as

  • Prototyping, piloting, and scaling of innovations
  • Social labs
  • Facilitating and accompanying collaborative teams and partnerships
  • Building collaborative capabilities and relationships

Examples of how we’ve supported implementing collaborative action

Broadening collaborative action

Do you need to broaden your collaboration to reach more people and scale your impact?

We’ll support you with

  • Working with whole social systems
  • Involving thousands of stakeholders in systems transformation
  • Engaging senior decision-makers
  • Making sustained impact at scale

Using methods such as

  • Codifying and disseminating effective products and practices
  • Communicating transformative insights
  • Designing collaborative processes, strategies, and structures
  • Building platforms for online and in-person engagement and support

Examples of how we’ve supported broadening collaborative action

Our experience as trusted guides on complex societal challenges

Discover some of the initiatives and projects we’ve supported across a range of issue areas worldwide.

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Climate
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Education
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Energy
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Food systems
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Gender-based violence and harassment
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Health
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Inclusive growth and development
indigenous rights
Indigenous rights
information ecosystems
Information ecosystems
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Oceans, seas, and water
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Peace, democracy, and justice
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Race and power

Augmenting climate action with speed, scale, and justice

As the global impacts of climate change become more clear and severe, the need to effectively respond and adapt to these changes becomes more urgent.

Climate change ignores all national and sector boundaries. What’s clear is that collaboration is paramount, on a scale that humanity has never attempted.

Building equitable, inclusive, and effective education systems

We need equitable education systems to create an inclusive, just, and regenerative society. To do this we must develop innovative responses to dismantle structural inequities.

Only by transforming these systems can we create opportunities for everyone to reach their full potential.

Developing dependable, sustainable and affordable energy solutions

The world is in the middle of a global energy crisis of unprecedented depth. The complexity of the crisis calls for collaboration across sectors, ideologies, and cultures.

These rare levels of collaboration and coordinated action must become the norm to bring a renewed sense of agency and purpose that builds the momentum necessary for deeper change.

Creating sustainable, just and resilient food systems

Developing innovative models around food sustainability and distribution is critical to building a resilient world.

The path to creating sustainable, just and resilient food systems calls for food system innovators to collaboratively enact practical solutions and build replicable models to chart a new course.

Addressing violence against a person because of their biological sex or gender identity

Gender-based violence (GBV) is deeply rooted in gender inequality and is one of the most prevalent human rights violations in the world.

We must create interventions to address GBV at a systemic level to develop responses toward a more just, equitable, and peaceful world for women, children, and other vulnerable members of society.

Tackling gender-based violence

Improving access to equal, just, and quality health systems

Health inequalities across the world are widespread and often increasing. This entrenched inequality leads to great disparities in health outcomes across population groups.

To ensure that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health, we must address the systemic drivers of health.

Expanding equal access to economic opportunity for marginalised people

Economic inequality continues to rise and is tied to several factors. The complexity of economic inequality cries out for a deeper understanding and fresh thinking.

To realise a more inclusive economy, sustainability and equity must be embedded into development processes, and poverty and inequality reduction must be driving factors.

Dismantling colonial, institutional, and systemic barriers for Indigenous rights

Indigenous people face multiple and varied forms of systemic discrimination and oppression, are often marginalised and excluded from effectively participating in processes that impact their rights.

The legacy of colonialism and institutional racism must be dismantled to ensure the survival, dignity and well-being of Indigenous people worldwide and protection of their collective rights.

Strengthening social cohesion in an age of mis- and disinformation

In a world of instant global communication and information overwhelm, we’ve seen an explosion in misleading content and its influence over social, cultural, and political life.

We need to employ a systemic approach to unearth the underlying causes and drivers of mis- and disinformation to develop collective strategies to address these challenges and obstacles.

Enhancing the sustainability and resilience of oceans, seas, and water supplies

Sustainable oceans and clean water are two of the most essential resources for sustaining life on Earth. 

As the world's population continues to grow, the water demand is rapidly increasing, and the world's oceans are subjected to more and more stress from human activity.

To enhance the sustainability and resilience of oceans, seas, and water supplies, diverse stakeholders must take collective action.

 

Working with differences to build and sustain peace, democracy and people-centred justice

For 30 years, we’ve been helping people find a peaceful way forward together – not necessarily by resolving their differences, but despite these.

We’ve repeatedly seen that even in complex, deeply entrenched conflicts, real progress toward reconciliation and renewal is possible.

Strengthening peace, democracy, and justice

Disassembling structural and systemic inequities to advance racial equity

The current systems and policies, actions and attitudes that exist in the world lead to inequitable opportunities and outcomes for people of colour.

We need to address the root causes of inequities, not just their manifestations, to eliminate racial disparities and prioritise measurable change in the lives of people of colour.

Our approaches for systems change

For over two decades, we’ve pioneered groundbreaking approaches for systems change, including transformative scenarios and social labs.

Transformative scenarios enable you to construct shared understandings, build stronger relationships, and develop clearer intentions to create the potential to shape a better future.

Transformative scenarios differs from other scenario planning methodologies in that:

  • The focus is not only to understand or adapt to the future but also to shape and transform it.
  • The scenarios are crafted not by academics or consultants but by an inclusive multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary group of actors. Each participant holds a valuable piece of a wider puzzle, not only in their knowledge but also in their agency and sphere of influence.
  • The co-creative facilitation approach builds relationships, trust, insight, ownership, and collaborative capability, generating results beyond the knowledge outputs produced.

Social labs enable you to bring people together across a system, identify the root causes behind a problem, devise collective solutions, test and action them in the real world.

Social labs are:

  • Systemic
    Addressing root causes – not only symptoms and quick fixes.
  • Experimental
    Iteratively prototyping and piloting interventions and then scaling solutions in practice – not only producing reports, recommendations, or plans.
  • Ongoing and sustained
    Mobilising a network to implement and sustain solutions through learning, trust-building, sharing, and communicating – not just a one-off project.
  • Collaborative and inclusive
    Bringing together actors from across the system – not only experts or authorities.

Your partners in systems change