Work on your case

Bring your wicked problems with you and learn how to apply the action protocols that will solve them. This 12- week online workshop includes course content, video recordings, dedicated discussion channel, workbook and assessments. Plus you get one year of membership for free.

Solution-Focused

Your problems solved, your questions answered.

• This course works with the issues you are experiencing and the questions you need answered.

• You will practice collaborative skills by joining a team of three to work on exercises together and share observations and reflections.

• Become better at asking powerful questions

• Learn how to detect key cues in the way people are constructing the problem situation

• Use our self-assessment tools to track your progress and grade your results

Tackle Wicked Problems

A powerful experience that integrates three methods of post-formal learning:

1. Gendlin’s TOE (thinking at the edge) approach which exposes instances of itself— individual behaviors that mirror the challenge at the very heart of the problem situation the person is trying to solve

2. Heifetz’ Case in Point training that leverages group dynamics to reveal adaptive solutions to the complex challenges they are tackling

3. Torbert’s Action-Inquiry which focuses on building generative relationships in order to attain higher levels of collective intelligence

Protocol thinking

We take you further. It’s only when you include protocol thinking to the mix do you start to see surprising results. Protocol thinking reveals key choice points that lead to actions that resolve the problem into clear tasks and objectives. Protocol thinking is at the heart of our training. It is the core capacity for making sense of complexity.

Weeks 1-4

Starting from clarity

Learn how to engage in simple, powerful questions that lead to clarity around what is actually happening in the problem situation.

So often we describe the situation we are facing in overly complex terms,. Often times wicked problems arise from the complexification of fundamental errors in the same way that complex systems emerge from simple protocols.

When a team is looking at a complex problem, the situation quickly gets out of hand, as each individual adds more and more relationships between the elements. We begin to build complex maps of the relationships and create elaborate theories of causation. As a result, meaningful action gets stifled.

Weeks 5-8

Thinking with protocols

Problems often accrue complexity in an ad-hoc manner in much the same way that software code gets unruly over time.

Refactoring here means decoupling dependencies that are not essential, and paring the problem down to key conditions & constraints which generate the conflict.

We tend to latch onto earlier conversations as if they always remain relevant in the present because they were important in the past. Yet this is rarely the case in the modern workplace.

Situations move continuously in small, everyday increments, and overtime there are significant phase shifts that evolve new contexts.

Weeks 9 -12

Actions lead to solutions

Solutions emerge from choices taken, not consensus around a particular narrative.

Many teams get stuck thinking that the perfect solution arises only from perfect explanations. We have been told this is how science works.

However, science is the retrospective “filling in the explanatory blanks” after many experimental attempts. A theory is proved from a set of evolving hypotheses that shape it into greater perfection.

Understanding the choices that are already operating in the situation is more productive of solutions than reaching for perfect explanation.

Good sensemaking practices involve creative ways to “out the choices” and redirect your team’s energies toward taking them seriously.

Tools to improve learning outcomes

Our workbook. Your workout.

Kanban Style Collaborative Tracking

Self-assessments with Sensemaking Tools