When progress stalls, we help leaders move forward together

The Dutch cabinet wanted to meaningfully involve citizens in climate change, one of the most complex and polarised policy challenges of our time.

We led the design and facilitation of 175 randomly selected citizens who deliberated over seven weekends, alongside a public consultation that yielded over 35,000 contributions.

13 recommendations with over 75% citizen support, handed to the cabinet and five ministries.

Forty years of the "war on drugs" had produced escalating violence across the Americas, but the political space to discuss alternatives was lacking.

Mandated by heads of state at the Summit of the Americas and under the auspices of the Organisation of American States, we supported 46 leaders from across the hemisphere in a seven-day scenario process to produce a landmark report on the future of drug policy.

The process broke a decades-long taboo, triggered the first OAS General Assembly session devoted to drug policy, and was used in the training of judiciary and health systems.

Valterra Platinum (formerly Anglo American Platinum), the world's largest primary producer of platinum, needed a coordinated, leader-led approach to addressing gender-based violence across 11 operational sites.

We assessed existing efforts, engaged diverse stakeholders across the organisation, and surfaced opportunities for cultural transformation — building leadership capacity at both the site and corporate levels.

A multi-stakeholder, site-level framework for addressing GBV now embedded across the organisation, with governance structures, leader-led approaches, and strategic communications aligned to drive lasting culture change.

Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) needed to understand what was limiting growth and improve alignment across business units with different cultures and priorities.

A deep engagement of the team and capstone executive workshops with the organisation's top 200 leaders.

Unlocked collaboration between departments, increased clarity on growth constraints, and new conversations about how the organisation needed to work differently.

The international NGO sector needed to address long-standing power imbalances.

We designed and facilitated a Social Lab with Rights CoLab and WACSI, developing and testing concrete innovations across the sector.

Working prototypes — including a reverse call for proposals, participatory grant-making, and a justice-centred accountability mechanism — now influencing practice globally.

The people of Southern Africa face severe hunger due to complex, interrelated causes. Responses to food insecurity were fragmented, leaving no platform for the coordinated, creative action the crisis demanded.

We supported the Southern Africa Food Lab in bringing together NGOs, government, retailers, producers, and academics to develop a shared understanding and drive action on smallholder farming, urban agriculture, and food policy.

New collaborations and viable models for supporting smallholder farmers, advances in urban agriculture, and improved national food policy discourse, with the Lab receiving international recognition from the UN's 10-year framework on sustainable consumption and production patterns in 2018.

Millions of US students drop out each year for financial reasons. Emergency aid programs have the potential to support students, but they are typically fragmented, informal, and too inconsistent to drive systemic change.

We developed and delivered an 18-month Emergency Aid Lab with five colleges, bringing together 100+ administrators, faculty, and students to fast-track research, design, and implementation — producing the Roadmap to Effective Emergency Aid, a replicable model now used across the sector.

At Florida International University, 88% of emergency aid recipients stayed enrolled or graduated. The programme has since expanded to 20 colleges in Texas, each successfully transforming informal aid efforts into sustainable, data-driven programmes.

Practitioners across fiscal governance — parliaments, audit bodies, finance ministries, civil society — lacked a shared framework for reform.

Funded by four international foundations, we designed and facilitated a process to build an international coalition that convened 38 fiscal reform leaders from a range of countries, including Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa.

A shared ecosystems approach to fiscal governance reform, now entering a second phase and expanding into a global community of practice.

Semi-arid regions across Africa and Asia face acute climate vulnerability, yet research is rarely translated into local adaptation action.

Convened by the University of Cape Town's African Climate and Development Initiative and supported by Reos Partners, we facilitated transformative scenario processes across five countries, bringing together interdisciplinary researchers, policymakers, and communities to develop shared understanding and build local facilitation capacity.

Local actors developed a systemic understanding and took action, from farmer capacity-building initiatives in Ghana to strengthened relationships between research institutions and regional government in Namibia, thereby informing water security planning and policy.

A leading independent research organisation needed to scale its impact by collaborating with non-traditional stakeholders but lacked a systemic framework for doing so.

We supported internal sprint teams through Scoping Sprints and Horizon Scans to develop a systemic understanding of key focus areas and identify leverage points.

A new strategy built around radical engagement with non-traditional partners and new ways of approaching programming from a systemic perspective.