From training to facilitation, strategic thinking is our strength and that’s what we do. We help individuals and organizations align their knowledge and values, and most importantly enable their success by helping them readjust their perceptions to match reality.

What4 and FrameStretching©

These interaction sessions help participants reorient perception, gain insights, and improve project, process and planning competency.

No one likes to get blindsided. Daily routines often stop us from seeing or hearing oncoming threats. The best defense is great offense, which is why we turn plans into success with active preparedness.

Checklists and/or simple Reminders

Risk Mitigation that’s simple and effective great but onely when people understand and use them consistently.  We not only identify the the critical steps, but assure people process information consistently.  The assembly process must match the execution. Everyone relates what they hear and see to representations of their own making. Our process assures the understanding is mutual, shared and connects to improvements that benefit the organization’s higher objectives too.  Our motto– forward, faster and more effectively.

What4 and FrameStretching©  activities pull indidviduals’ perceptions onto their toes and prepares them to face challenging situations with confidence. We push their frame of reference beyond everyday thinking, and help them apply insights gained in practicing extra sensory awareness. Fill in the details of what they think, by playing out the full interaction, we minimize the barriers that undermine their confidence and inspire them to success.

Contact Us to help your team:

1. Clarify perceptions of What is,
2. Expand visions of What if,
3. Color realizations of What wows, and
4. Achieve awesome, viable results–What works.

Why this works?

We believe what we see. The more recognizable a situation the more unlikely we are to notice what’s different.  Complex problems persist when we let our beliefs stop us from seeing what’s in plain sight. Our vision convinces us, confirms what we already know and unconsciously we reject opposing evidence when present.  Bias, the byproduct of  the brain’s efficiency, “fills-in” the blanks with expected associations.  Conscious processing only uses 1% of our brain, which means we rarely process all available information.  Our automatic responses and reflexes draw upon prior experience.  Any contradictions to  perception  work in much the same way that cultural norms make us turn a blind eye to behaviors and stifle our objections.  NET NET?  We hold back our potential for greater performance.

The power of A great story isn’t just in the telling.  The real or imagined experiences of individuals who face and then overcome their particular challenge  speaks to all of us.  FrameStretching© flips the inspiration and story around and encourages people to relive it. The process taps into our memory of a story common across cultures and activate the natural story process in the brain.  This process touches memory, perceptions, emotions and executive thinking to create an alternative, “playful” reality.  Inviting participants to recreate the story, creates a richer sensory experience and rapidly gets diverse perspectives communicating.  Great storytelling is not merely a boastful exercise, but one proven to re-awaken attention to detail and ignite our sense of the possible. An established story offers an alternative to our personal experiences and  adds color to our truths. The process delays the automatic, preset path that fills in the blanks, causing us to stretch in the process. The lens through which we now look at the problem widens   to include more of the information available.

FrameStretching©, a  group exercise, frees participants to stretch their prior experience to cross cultural gaps, negotiate common meaning and settle on useful metaphors while reconstructing a well-known fable, its characters, challenges  and actions. Equipped with clear contextual associations and shared language, participants openly apply their collective lens to search and explore their own problem sets. The new, shared frame turns participants  into discovery mode , willing to learn and listen and thus broaden individual participants’ perspectives. With open perceptions, suddenly their capability  to process more completely elements the unconscious lens of culture and experience often filter out.

Because behavior change requires repetition and practice, participants stay in their play frame and tackle a real strategic issue, quickly working through What4, the four stage design thinking process. Four What questions (IS, IF, WOWS and WORKS) uncovers new opportunities, principle criteria and action plans.

Gain insights for project, process competency

The What4 approach offers several benefits. Workshop* participants

• Share language, metaphors to describe their tasks and tell their own stories.
• Improve communications within and across their  team
• Increase planning, process improvement task effectiveness and efficiency
• Lay the foundation for resiliency in their organization
• Map their organization’s knowledge boundaries  and develop growth mindsets
• Understand the context of your project or problem and rapidly create plans for improvement

  Contact us via email, we will reply as quickly as possible.

**Note workshops can be customized to meet your needs. Begin as half day and can run longer depending on the needs and frame of reference needed.

WHERE WE’VE PRESENTED

February 2018, small interactive session on Branding presented to SCALE-UP , Entrepreneurial class at Womens Business Development Center (WBDC).

September 2012, a mini experience of FrameStretching© presented to the Chicago Booth Alumni Consulting Roundtable.  Check out the MP3 and hear Rachel in action, or read the blog post follow-up.

In June 2014, a condensed introduction to FrameStretching© and What4 was enthusiastically received at the Creative Problem Solving Institute, CPSI,  sponsored by the Creative Education Foundation.

February 2012,  we published an article entitled Culture is King in the Journal of Product Innovation and Management  (JPIM), use the link to the right.

In October 2011, the FrameStretching© workshop was initially tested, to great acclaim, at the Design Research Conference at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.