How we work
We see the world getting more complex. We see that big problems require comprehensive, collaborative solutions.
At the base of our work is people. We work with individuals, organizations, and communities to understand how people can work more effectively in a complex environment and improve systemic health.
1. Methodology
CTLabs reverses the subject-matter-expert paradigm. Instead, you are the experts, and we provide support to design and deliver the collaborative processes that enable you to get to understand issues, explore potential, and develop pathways for innovation.
Our design methods, processes, and approaches are collaborative, engaging, and strategic. Since 1998, we have done extensive research and used our internal lab environment to translate findings into practical systems that are adaptive and individualized to our client’s values, vision, and needs.
If you’re curious to learn more about the specifics of our process, check out our case studies, read some of our blog posts or contact us. We would be happy to connect.
2. Philosophy
3. Design/Toolkit
At CTLabs, every client engagement requires a customized solution. We bring together the best of everything we know, and every tool we have available to us, to meet each unique requirement. Our relationships with clients can be anything from change management advisors over the entire life of an initiative to providing a single collaborative solution to a specific challenge. Thus, we need a variety of tools.
Currently, they include:
- 12 Windows. If you have a small (2-50) team, and you really don’t feel as though you’re all on the same page, we have an awesome tool called 12 Windows that gets rave reviews every time we use it. It’s like SWOT, but much, much better.
- Stakeholder Engagement. Retreats, strategic sessions, conferences, forums. We love getting a large group of people to work together. Meaningfully. We’re quite comfortable inviting 5, 50, or 3,500, of your best friends (and everyone else) together to help solve a problem.
- Prioritization. Selecting the next best thing from a sea of options. Prioritization can be a dicey, political minefield of an exercise (and usually is using traditional approaches). It doesn’t have to be. We have a comprehensive toolkit that renders it transparent, collaborative, meaningful, understandable and fair. No really – it’ll fundamentally change your yearly prioritization process. No more backroom politics, no more bun-fights. Just the quiet, blissful sound of broad stakeholder agreement.
- LEGO – Real-time Business Models. Seriously. We have more LEGO than your kids – and a way of playing with it to build real-time business models that are both highly insightful and a ton of fun. If you enjoyed LEGO as a kid (and even if you didn’t!), you will love Lego Serious Play as an adult. We use this tool because it allows for 100% participant engagement, the discovery of far more detail, and longer term retention of what is important by all those who helped build the models.