Create intelligent spaces for diverse individuals to collaborate, innovate, and be at their best

 
 

What happens when a team trains their attention, curiosity, and reduces the waste of misunderstandings, assumptions, and biases?

You Make the Room Smarter

Just think, what impact would a smarter room have on your team, their work, your projects and outcomes? For most leaders, it is the difference between staggering to get stuff done, and a team that works at their best, together, with less confusion and more effectiveness. It means strengths are utilized and development is unfettered.

Pivoting Your Team means learning simple, replicable tools to:

  • supporting a group to become more attentive, get higher quality information, uncover biases, and better understand what people mean. All so you’re more effective at what you mean to do.

  • Rather than opinions, inference, or the impact it may or may not have had. This tools comes in seriously handy during conflict, to separate what folks did from what you took from it so there is more learning and less confusion.

  • Turn the misunderstandings of conflict into potent opportunities impactful conversations about what is important, what worked and didn’t, and more deliberate outcomes.

  • Get crystal clear about what people want to have happen, what is needed for that to happen, and how they/you will know when or if it has been done.

  • Part of a “change cycle", based on effective feedback, use Developmental Tasks to take real-life action and try out a new way of doing something. Create flexibility in your habits and learn from other ways of doing things.

  • A participant summary to keep with you, review, and turn to before meetings, during conflict, when things are confusing, or just to keep these tools alive in the culture for you and new folks.

What teams are saying about
Pivoting Your Team

“Blake is a thoughtful and skilled facilitator who is adept at quickly gaining a new team's respect and leading a group to learn new, effective communication skills. I have nothing but positive things to say about how Blake has helped our team and I hope to work with her again in the future. “

Holly, Executive Director, conservation non-profit

“I got a lot out of the sessions. Chiefly the importance of cultivating curiosity and asking questions that yield better responses and connection.

It worked well for me that you linked learning to real exercises. Not only did we learn more about strategies but we learned more about each other. It is interesting that even on innocuous subjects that you think we would have consensus on our own memories and experiences led us to such different outcomes. Who knew so much feeling and memory could be attached to 'lemon.' Well, you did of course! 

I also liked that you gave space and made sure that each of us had a chance to engage.”

Stacey, Program Manager, conservation non-profit 

Up-level collaboration, innovation and leadership…
turning "being at our best" into a
consistent and well understood super-power.

  • By making full use of the intelligence and experience of each person in the group

  • Wasting less time making assumptions and being in conflict

  • Spend more time in curiosity of the possibilities

  • Be interested in untapped resources that can make the team and their outcomes better

  • Better understand exactly what each person offers and adds

  • Form a network of attention to each other and make the room smarter

  • Shift the team in the ways it needs to be at its very best


  • AEI: Attention, Engagement, and Intelligence

    Pivot is profoundly committed to partnering with the team to create their ideal outcomes. We kick off by firing up their attention to themselves and each other.

    Trust and engagement is cultivated in the group as individuals are guided to thoroughly listen to themselves and each other through skills building that they can immediately practice and apply to real-life stuff.

    Then, the magic happens: ATTENTION.

    Pivot supports groups to create a network of attention, where individuals are more capable to hear, understand, and collaborate with their own and each other’s way of being and doing.  Fortunately, appreciation lends itself to less conflict, more whole-group intelligence, and more effective outcomes, start to finish.

    Which inevitably makes the room smarter.

    Teams and groups transfer this intelligence to their intended outcomes, projects, and purpose.

  • It’s a bottom-up, simple-to-complex process and iterative. We take the same basic tools and apply them to more complex experiences.

    • First, I’ll introduce a language of inquiry, so that we start noticing how quickly we make assumptions and what we can do about it.

    I’ll invite everyone to pay attention to their own patterns.

    Then, I’ll invite them to pay attention to other people’s patterns.

    • This process makes apparent everyone’s hidden architecture so the group knows how each person is when they’re working at their best / worst.

    Once people start noticing more and more what their patterns and other people’s patterns are like, this starts to create a network of attention.

    • And by creating this network, we raise group intelligence so that the group is better able to have and support shared outcomes.

    These skills create intrinsic motivation and people take charge of what they want to have happen because they can have an impact now, and the leader doesn’t need to work so hard to motivate them externally.

    • For example, the Clean Feedback model to feedback productively, clearly, and safely about what is going on by separating “what happened” from inference / impact.

    This process gets real and honest, clearing away a lot of “stuff” that muddies the water and exacerbates misunderstands.

    • It requires composure, courage, and curiosity. The more team leaders model these out, the more you’ll be creating space for everyone else to do the same.

    • Drama will occur when people get together. The question is how to unpack the drama so that the group can learn from it and become anti-fragile.

  • Better together: Individuals make fewer assumptions about each other and find small shifts that make huge impacts on working well together

    Advocates: Self-and-group awareness supports everyone in maintaining the most effective work and culture for everyone involved by advocating for their own and each others best practices

    Deep respect: Clearly see your own inner “rules” and paradigms. know that others operate uniquely, and that all are important to the whole

    Prevent drama and contempt: Get folks talking more effectively through issues with clear, simple, curious guidelines to move through the most dense of drama

    Crystal Clarity: See clearly what is happening, what you/they would like to have happen, and the steps necessary to get there

  • “We have shorter and more productive meetings.”

    “When we make a decision now, it sticks. We don’t have to go over it again.”

    "We get less emotional when we’re discussing conflicting ideas.”

    ”It’s like the metaphors (used in SM) put a distance between the ideas and each of us - we’re both talking about an idea, not criticizing one another.”

    A team looking for a common understanding of “who we are” and way to explain it to customers used these tools to, together, come up with a metaphor that was simple, clear, and better illuminated the important attributes.

  • I will guide you briefly through the technique I would eventually expand upon with your group. We would:

    • Clarify what you are seeing now

    • Confirm what you would like to have happen

    • You’ll get a feel for the tools I use

    • I will learn about you, your needs, and if/how I can support


Meet the Founder

Blake Cason can get you out of your climbing rut and into the next phase in your climbing routine.

Full of passion and curiosity, her approach to life and wellness is a balance of playfulness and grounding.  With a Master’s degree in Health Behavior and Education and years of hands-on experience working in mental health, health education, group facilitation, and the outdoors, Blake has a profound ability.  She meets people where they are in their process with equal support and challenge – the necessary components of sustainable change.