What we do
Consultation
Existing programs or approaches may benefit from review to ensure they are delivering the outcomes you plan, in a manner that aligns with the values your organisation holds. We offer a review that will embed systems thinking and deliver the outcomes you have dreamed of. We can help your work become more transformative, inclusive, equitable, collaborative and responsive to complexity.
2. Talks
Talks
As many of our workshops and programs can be delivered as a short talk, please look at our “workshops and programs” or contact us to design a bespoke talk for your needs.
Sample talks are opposite:
Parenting to change the world:
Manage challenging behaviour without punishments, rewards or shouting
Develop skills for addressing aggression (hitting, biting, kicking)
Learn new skills for playing that can bring more joy and ease to your role
Please see our “Media” section for our latest book contribution on Attachment, Play and Emotional Release
Navigating the teenage years, a Rites of Passage perspective:
Learn how to strengthen your relationship
Understand the teenage brain
Appreciate their specific needs as they enter adulthood and
Discover how to meet their needs
Active Hope:
Young people and adults alike are increasingly impacted by the state of the planet. Hear why information alone is not enough to change behaviours. This work builds on Joanna Macy and The Work that Reconnects.
Boundaries, Communication and Conflict:
Understand the role of better communication in times of conflict. Learn skills and practices to build connections whilst setting limits.
3. Workshops
Workshops are a single training event designed to address a particular gap in the groups’ knowledge, skills and perceptions. By the end of a workshop The Change Agency will help you develop new understandings, and the skills to put them into action.
Workshop Structure.
Workshops run from 2-8 hours and can be held online or onsite.
Who is this for?
Challenge: Is there a gap in your teams’ existing skill set, or a conflict that keeps showing up? Perhaps the content of the training you took last is just not embedding itself in your work as you would like?
Hope: Alternatively, you might have a vision of something you would like to make happen, but need support to bring a group together, plan it and actualise it. We can help with our targeted and bespoke workshops. A selection of what we offer below.
Workshops for all groups:
A. Needs Assessment for Culture Change
You may have a desire to change something, but you are not yet sure what, or you may have identified a particular challenge in your group, such as barriers to inclusion or challenges in relationships. Perhaps there is conflict, mission-drift, stress or burnout, lack of diversity, or loss of group members. We can offer a tailored program to assess the needs of your group and develop a proposal to train and develop your skills.
B. Navigating Change and Working with Complexity
Dealing with uncertainty typically amplifies existing challenges but it can also offer the potential for new ways of doing things to emerge. If you would benefit from engaging with complexity theory and ecological thinking in order to apply the approach to the next phase of your work then this is for you.
C. Narrative Training
The process developed by Marshall Ganz and famously used by President Obama in his election campaign. The story of Me, Us and Now can be used to activate and engage your network of volunteers or clients. We will train you how to use your own stories, connect them to your desired outcomes, and motivate others to act supportively.
If your organisation is seeking to grow its reach, become more visible or gain clarity about what you do and how, this could be for you.
D. Communication Training
Learn how to foster a culture of dialogue, not debate. We offer training in an easy to use toolkit to support groups to navigate differences in perspectives. You will learn how to address hot topics without explosions or shut-down. How to develop win-win outcomes for more people.
This workshop can be combined with an anti-racism and anti-oppression framework.Communication never occurs in a vacuum; the situation is already populated with inequities, power-differentials, and personal experiences. This framework will help you to develop a deeper understanding of power, rank, inclusion and equity issues. Learning to notice, navigate and address these is profoundly important for people, especially those in positions of power.
E. Conflict Skills
Build skills to handle conflict well together so that your group is able to recognise their patterns, develop new methods for responding, and addressing underlying causes of conflict so it is less likely to be destructive. You will learn how to use your own responses to your benefit, and how to maintain strong relationships as you navigate conflict more easily.
Workshops for Educators:
F. Empathy in Education Training
This workshop is designed for educators already implementing more relational approaches to learning, who want to hone their skills, build their inner capacities and understand how to create the changes that will support their values and visions.
Typical content will address:
Behavioural challenges.
Supporting teenagers.
Communication and conflict skills.
Consensus decision making.
Support to increase teachers’ capacity for empathy.
G. Facilitator Training.
Mentoring and training to build on your existing approaches to include more complexity, transformational potential and 21st Century leadership skills. We help you hone your skills so you can deliver your work with a framework that creates the outcomes and experiences you have been searching for.
4. Courses, Events + Retreats
If you are willing to undertake a commitment to change, we will help design a suite of training that will take you on a rich, empowering journey to meet the future, as it emerges.
Our bespoke programs offer a longer, deeper immersion into our work for change. If your group is ready for more complex change that is strategic, relational, and systemic, we will design a program that is effective beyond your wildest hopes.
Descriptor: Our programs are non-linear. You feast on them as your hunger directs you. We will help you get a sense of where to begin in our smorgasbord of transformative offerings, and you will already know.
A. Strategy Development Road Map - our 3 Stage Process
Stage 1: Clarify organisations shared values
Stage 2: Develop a clearer more inclusive vision
Stage 3: Design a strategy that is flexible and collaborative
Stage 1: Value Clarification
‘Action’ and ‘planning for action’ are the typical focus of most initiatives and are overemphasised. “Perception is action” (Nora Bateson). The action we take is a result of how we see the world. How we perceive is informed by our worldviews, values and beliefs. If we jump too quickly to action, without investigating and sharing our values with others, we miss exploring the rich information that comes, information that adds complexity to the issue we are acting upon. Adding more complexity gives us much better-fit actions, with less unintentional consequences, more equitable outcomes.
Stage 2: Vision Development
A clear purpose and vision is needed to help guide activities. The vision is developed from an exploration of passions, interests, beliefs, and values. Emotional intelligence and other ways of knowing, beyond the cognitive, are welcomed. We may use art, story, laughter and other fun elements that also produce more complex visions that are more inclusive of other perspectives and needs.
Stage 3: Strategy Design
Our core principle is that the means create the ends. In other words, how we do something creates the outcome. With our approach blending complexity and 21st Century skills, we generate an understanding of interdependencies as well as inequities. Strategies are infused with clear ethics and diverse perspectives. With our focus on collaborative leadership skills, the process of developing and delivering your strategy is enriching to your group’s culture and wellbeing. Our sensitive understanding of complexity delivers flexible, responsive and emergent strategies that are alive in each group member, not just in another document.
B. Regenerative Culture Change
This program is one of our favourites and your investment in time and energy brings phenomenal outcomes. This bespoke service is tailored to your needs via an assessment tool, one to one meetings, and group workshops or retreats. Together we transform your organisation’s structures, activities and services to move towards regenerative practices.
A regenerative organisation is one that is agile in its responsiveness, has transparent relationships to power, welcomes and values diversity and is focused on the well being of staff and networks. The motivation to begin often comes from crisis: conflict, absenteeism, stress, burnout or lack of motivation. However motivation may also come from clear values and vision, that perhaps needs the structure and processes to enact them into a strategy of actions.
C. Intersectional Leadership: Equity and Power
We offer leadership development that prepares people in positions of power to navigate interpersonal challenges, enhances communication and conflict skills and frames inclusion work within an anti-oppression and anti-racism model. Even with intentions of ‘not being racist’ or trying to be ‘inclusive’, there are impacts on the people we may be unaware of. We help your team develop the skills to establish cultures that recognise inherent inequity and actively address and dismantle systems of oppression that appear within groups. We deliver training that is informative, sensitive, non-judgemental, and empowering.
D. Community Building | Network Activation | Movement Building
For groups that want to empower others with their engagement strategies, we provide training, mentoring and support for designing a new method of outreach, activation and movement building.
Decision-Making
We are passionate about democracy and it’s next stages; collaborative and consensus decision-making. We have a wealth of experience making decisions and training in consensus. Consensus skills are very important for power-sharing to have real impact.
Kathryn Mc Cabe was on the organising committee of the International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) in Australia and is a founder of a democratic school and a director of collaborative leadership programs, including one for 100 international teens who live together for 6 weeks.
The Offers & Needs Market
Is a process for Community Assets Mapping from The Post Growth Institute. In a two-hour, guided process community members meet (virtually or in person) to identify and exchange their passions, knowledge, skills, resources, opportunities, and needs.
It is community building in its approach, that is relational rather than transactional. It can be anything from finding a place to live, to offering graphic design, anything's possible at an Offers and Needs Market.
Moving from Hierarchy to Collaboration
Even progressive organisations inherit structures that invoke more hierarchy than they would like to. Triangles are strong, but they distribute power unevenly.
Uneven power distribution eventually creates instability, in the form of rigidity of response, an inability to actualise the deeply held desires in the group, or as stress or burnout.
At an organisational level, the quantitative fallouts are likely to be loss of market share, staff replacement costs, and inability to respond with agility to changes in the system. Collaboration can be fostered and enhanced with a program designed specifically for you.
Warm Data Lab
Planning with complexity at heart
The typical approach to change separates issues out, and takes them out of the context of their relationships with other things.
You know a new approach is needed for addressing complex problems which are all interdependent.
You can see the existing siloed approach to addressing big challenges is limited.
You are looking to address old issues in new ways.
You want to generate new thinking that is infused with complexity and transcontextual understandings of the issue being explored.
Warm Data Labs are 2-3 hour hosted group (8-49 people) conversations (online or in person) for generating new approaches and the understanding of our work across contexts. They build relationships with ease and flow.
Nora Bateson, Warm Data Lab creator at The Bateson Institute