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Our Work

We help your teams build collaborative capacity.

Organizations such as the National Science Foundation recognize that the grand challenges they are working to address through the scientific enterprise have grown increasingly complex, requiring crossdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaborations. This requires a reorganization regarding how collaborators communicate, integrate different knowledge sets, and ultimately make decisions under significant uncertainty. Dialogue is central to succeeding under this new way of working and that’s where we focus the majority of our efforts. We help teams build collaborative capacity by providing them with the dialogic tools and skill sets for gaining clarity on how they work together, communicate, and collectively make decisions.

We are driven by a need to understand.

As researchers, we are interested in the impact of structured dialogue on mutual understanding, team communication, and decision-making. Our primary aim is to better understand the nature of dialogue as a central component of the broader collaboration and communication practices teams engage in.

"The opportunity and invitation to explicitly speak about communication norms and the attributes of a strong collaboration was really helpful - being prompted to specifically address these issues is the only way the conversation could have taken place. Even in cases where everyone had already been on the same page, the act of voicing how people understand the criteria of trust and interdependency within networks was strengthening in itself."
Workshop Participant
“Our work with the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative is helping us advance our mission and we look forward to a growing partnership in the future.”
Dr. Douglas BuhlerAssociate Vice President for Research and Innovation, Michigan State University
"I strongly support the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative team and recommend them as wonderful partners in any interdisciplinary research enterprise.”
Dr. Erik GoodmanDirector, BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, Michigan State University
"The workshop affirmed and provided an example of how establishing connections, relationships and commonality across distant academic communities, that rarely work together, is generative and leads to new insights for all concerned. I was able to use phenomena from physics and biodiversity to illustrate and communicate new concepts in my field. "
Workshop Participant

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