Services Overview

I bring 30 years of consulting to nonprofits and philanthropists in nearly every mission area, working with thousands of leaders on vision, strategy, change management, reorganizations, growth plans, turnarounds, mergers and collaborations, founder and CEO transitions, leadership coaching, personal and organizational resilience, and many other points of significant inflection. While none of these will provide THE answer, experiences and case studies help to illuminate options and tradeoffs and spur creative thinking to tough questions. In order to come to principled decisions, it is important to engage in solid critical thinking and to leverage the lessons learned of others toward a unique answer that is best for this particular organization. In addition, I can provide a range of presentations, workshops, and educational conversations for board, staff, community stakeholders, partners, funders, and others in your sphere.

In many complex projects with no “right” answer (e.g., we are solving for adaptive challenges rather than technical challenges), the process is at least as important as the final conclusions. I can work with you to think through the various layers of stakeholders, their motivations, their influence, ways to leverage their insights and increase their connection and engagement, and how best to bring them into alignment. In addition, any process is a critical way of ensuring that the organization is modeling its core values and either reinforcing or possibly changing some elements of culture in order to best support the mission.

Most of my projects have a good deal of complexity – otherwise organizational leaders would have no issues tackling them on their own. There are generally numerous stakeholders, perspectives, and variables to consider throughout the process. Decision making usually involves layers of exploration, vetting, and narrowing – and leveraging both data and intuition. I leverage my experience facilitating groups to bring clarity out of complexity.