Toolbox Sessions
We Focus on the Differences That Connect
Advancing positive social change increasingly involves teams from various disciplines and professions. Team members may struggle to communicate with one another because they are trained to understand problems differently. To effectively work together, it can help to make these implicit differences explicit so that crossdisciplinary teams can identify, discuss, and leverage those differences through our capacity-building Toolbox sessions.
By uncovering beliefs and values that influence team interaction and collaborative decision-making, your team can better coordinate activities and achieve project objectives. Your team will receive a tailored Toolbox session or set of sessions over the life of your project, offered virtually or in-person. Pricing is based on the number of sessions, size of the group and any additional services.
Through our customized dialogue and associated co-creation activities, our Toolbox sessions can help you surface conflicting assumptions, understand how others think, identify personal worldviews and foster mutual understanding.
After Your Toolbox Session
The Toolbox session is the cornerstone of our process for helping teams build collaborative capacity. However, teams may need more assistance implementing the communication and collaboration strategies they discussed in their session. We offer additional check-in sessions to provide more collaboration and communication scaffolding where needed and we help you troubleshoot specific challenges that may have arisen since your initial session.
The Process
All workshops involve preparatory work with partners and follow-up from TDI.
Initial Consultation
Select a suitable facilitation style and design of the instrument used to structure dialogue
Collaborative Design
Develop the workshop elements iteratively with you
Workshop Delivery
Deliver a workshop with tailored structured dialogue and co-creation activities
Your Results
Prepare a report that contains observations of the workshop elements and recommendations for you
Next Steps
Meet with you to discuss the report and identify next steps for implementing recommendations
Evidence of Effectiveness
In 2017, TDI workshop programming was evaluated by the Western Michigan Evaluation Center, yielding a report represented by these infographics. You can download the report here or view it below.
