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.
Who We Serve
The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative has facilitated hundreds of capacity building sessions involving thousands of participants around the world in academic, non-profit, and private sectors. In addition to working with individual clients, federal agencies retain us to support the teams they fund. We maintain long-term relationships with National Science Foundation (NSF) programs such as the Convergence Accelerator and Growing Convergence Research programs that focus on one on NSFs 10 Big Ideas. We also continue to support their international partnership programs like Global Centers and Accelerating Research through International Network-to-Network Collaborations (AccelNet). TDI also supports crossdisciplinary collaboration for NASA’s DRIVE Science Centers. We partner with other organizations such as the European Commission, the Department of Energy, and the National Laboratories, and also work directly with academic, non-profit, and private sector organizations. TDI continues to work closely with hundreds of universities and maintains long-term partnerships with many of them as well. Recent clients include, University of Georgia, MIT, Harvard, Cornell, UMass Boston, University of Nebraska, University of Virginia.
