What we do
Our services
Learning, evaluation and guidance
We act as learning partners for our clients helping them co-design learning plans, build foundations for collective approaches to evaluation, and identifying what support is missing.
We can help you understand the practice behind the theories, and work with you to plan actions that you might take to shift, navigate, or steward a system. We can act as critical friends who help you to stay accountable to the people you’re supporting.
We can help you as a group or individual process critical moments of confusion, blockages or friction through on-demand or structured guidance or supervision packages. We also provide a range of products to support self-directed learning and critical reflection.
Strategy design and organisational transformation
We help organisations develop pathways to their desired futures. We can support you to rethink your organisational vision, mission, or values, and work with you to develop a long-term strategy that accounts for the messiness and complexity of the world.
Staff and volunteers can get left behind when new technology or different management structures are brought into organisations. We can help you with the human side of this work, keeping your team at the heart of any changes you’re making, and supporting you to develop new ways of working inside of these disruptions.
- Redesigning a large national charity's calls for research proposals
- Research and facilitation for organisational vison, mission, values and theory of change
Creative facilitation
Well-facilitated gatherings can completely change the trajectory of a group, exciting them about new directions or enabling them to release long-held tension. We bring creative activities and serious games to help you have meetings, workshops, and gatherings that are purposeful, reflective, and make space for everyone to participate. We make space for the conversations that need to happen, transform conflict, and help you envision sustainable futures.
- Story mapping through conflict
- Helping people think expansively and have creative discussions together
Research and design
We provide a variety of research services, including desk research, participatory research, and user research for products, services, or policies. Using co-production and participative approaches, we design and evaluate services that are grounded in helping you understand the real-world impact your service makes, and provide actionable recommendations for improvement.
- Designing an immersive experience to explore haunting, reproductive justice and abolitionist practice
- Workshops to help the Scottish Government revise their open data policy
Our approach
Every project we do is built around the specific context and needs of each client, but we use a consistent set of tactics to help us throughout our work to transform relationships, power, and work. We draw on a diverse set of methods to:
- Make different kinds of conversations possible
- Translate between different disciplines and domains
- Recognise and articulate the complexity of systems
- Build and nurture caring and committed relationships
- Work in the open and build capacity within teams
- Provide external critique that is constructive, specific, and generative
- Support the development of reflective and reflexive practice
- Envision and dream potential futures
- Analyse systems of oppression and develop strategies to shift them
These tactics are likely to shift over time, as the systems around us change and as our practice develops. We draw on a common core of skills in using these tactics from a variety of different disciplines, including games design, research, facilitation, service design, and evaluation and learning.
Get in touch if you want to chat about our services or how we could apply these tactics in your context.
