Approach
Our approach to strategic planning and organizational renewal go hand in hand. We know that a strategic plan, without the organization supports to enable it, will be superficial at best. That’s why we use a robust transformational process to identify your strategic goals and build a supportive ecosystem of capabilities, relationships, resources and mindsets.
Also, central to our process is the recognition that engagement matters. Frankly, we believe that strategic plans without committed people sit on shelves gathering dust. Working with you, we help you carefully consider who needs to be involved and how, so that the right people—with knowledge, perspective, credibility, authority are meaningfully engaged.
Engagement does several things:
it taps people’s expertise and perspectives so that we create smart, doable strategies,
it enables people to learn from each other – so that they expand their views of what’s needed and what’s possible,
it builds commitment.
Our 4D Action Learning Process engages strategy teams in a robust and iterative process of reimagining their strategic priorities and new organizational capabilities. We also recommend our Blueprint for Organizational Effectiveness, a whole systems tool to help leadership teams envision and design a supportive ecosystem for the new strategy.
Brenda Barker Scott
Inspired expertise.
A catalyst for change.
Brenda Barker Scott has extensive experience in all aspects of organizational development, acquired over a twenty-year career in teaching and consulting.
A groundbreaker with a passion for nurturing collective conversations and engagement, Brenda has led a number of ambitious system-wide organizational renewal efforts with provincial governments and agencies, school boards, not for profits and private firms. When working with leadership teams, she combines strong theoretical knowledge with practical methodologies to ensure that the right people are engaged in the right conversations to design robust and workable strategies.
As a lead faculty member for Queen’s University IRC (Industrial Relations Centre programs), Brenda teaches several professional programs, including Building Smart Teams, Organization Development Foundations, Organizational Design and Organizational Decision Making. She has also been a keynote speaker for the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Conference Board of Canada, the Human Resources Planners Association of Ontario and the Canadian Institute for Health Research.
Brenda is an expert in whole systems meeting design and stakeholder engagement. Methods include, but are not limited to café conversations, open space, appreciative inquiry, and future search. She is also co-author of Building Smart Teams: A Roadmap to High Performance (Sage 2004)