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What I do

Values

My work is grounded in a set of values that I have carried for my entire working life.

  • Working on indigenous lands, respecting indigenous sovereignty. I live in Squamish Nation territory, and in acknowlegdement of the legacy of colonization and my status as a settler, I donate time and money to Squamish projects, focusing specifically on langauge and culture revitalization. I support indigenous sovereignty as a pre-condition to reconciliation. Indigenous projects always receive a discount on my daily fee and indigenous youth projects are typically done pro-bono. We always gift a spot in our open workshops to a local indigenous participant. When asked to do a territorial acknowledgement as a part of our work, we always make a cash gift to a local cause and encourage our partiicpants to join in supporting that cause too.  I am deeply inspired by the Squamish value of chenchenstway, meaning “lifting each other up.”
  • Working for justice, equity and equality and affirming the dignity of the human beings I work for and with. I am committed to justice, inclusion and equality, working within societies that perpetuate unjust outcomes based on race, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, mental health status, age, ethnicity, citizenship status, economic status, and disability. I work hard to address these issues in my work, on our teams, and in the broader world. From time to time I fail, and I am committed to receiving feedback on my efforts with grace and curiosity.
  • Building capacity and leaving more community than I find. As a consultant I am committed to building capacity and teaching you how to do the things that you hired me to do. I enjoy long term consulting realtionships with many of my clients, and I also treasure the moments when we are finished, having built a strong relationship and strong internal capacity.
  • Mentoring emerging practitioners, especially from marginilized demographics. Positive change comes from the edges. I recognize that as I move into and through the second half of life, my role is increasingly to build up younger leaders and practitioners especially from marginalized communities. I am constantly amazed by the capacities of people younger than me and I am inspired by the energy of what is being created at the edges of the mainstream. As much as possible, I offer what I can to these practitioners to feed their curiosity and fuel their journey towards mastery.
  • Supporting participatory community. Our great hope for justice and dignity in the present and future lies in participating and creating that world now. In my work, on my blog, and in my personal life I champion participation in community, support of good casues and people doing good things ,and lifting up and illuminating stories of the better world we are working for.

Facilitation

  • Large group process facilitation using participatory methods such as World Cafe, Open Space Technology Pro-Action Cafe and custom designed processes.
  • Community and employee engagement.
  • Complexity focused strategic planning
  • Dialogic organizational development.

Strategic process design

  • Working with organizations and communities to bring strategic decision making to engagement, planning, governance, and the art of making sense of the world we are living in and the changes we are experiencing.

Evaluation

  • Specializing in developmental evaluation with a deep interest in equitable evaluation, and participatory narrative inquiry.
  • We run projects using large scale narrative capture through tools such as NarraFirma, Sensemaker, and Spryng.
  • We specialize in face to face and online partiicpatory sensemaking methods to create actionable insights

Training and teaching

  • Training in facilitation, complexity thinking, and participatory leadership through the Art of Hosting and custom designed learning events.
  • I can provide exceptional training both in person and online, using participatory pedagogies and supportive mentoring and coaching.

Coaching and apprenticing

  • Individual coaching in facilitation and hosting practice.  I have a number of clients that I work with over Skype and Zoom supporting their practice and development. Coaching is available by the hour either as a single session or in a series.
  • I apprentice young and new practitioners as well, focusing on those who are beginning to apply the Art of Hosting and participatory processes in strategic contexts.  This usually takes the form of working closely with an apprentice on an actual project to design and apply learnings.  If you are interested in apprenticing contact me to begin that conversation.

Who I work with

I rarely work alone.  With my partner Caitlin Frost, our company Harvest Moon Consultants offers a full range of organizational and leadership support services including coaching for teams and executives, facilitation and strategic decision making.

We work with an extensive network of practitioners around the world.  Some of our regular consulting, evaluation, and teaching colleagues include:

We also work with a great crew of graphic recorders including:

Online support and online learning design:

We have an extensive network of colleagues around the world who work in many different languages. We can offer support throughought the Americas in English, French, Spanish, and Portugese, and several indigenous langiuages, and have multilingual colleagues we can call upon in Europe, Japan and southern Africa