What We Offer

How many times have you been to a conference and found that you get most value from the connections you make at the coffee hour? Would you be okay if you never had to sit through a panel of three Powerpoint presentations again? The design of traditional meetings and conference events often leaves little space for collaborative creating amongst participants.

New Directions Collaborative designs and facilitates events that are highly-interactive, inspiring, and enable deeper levels of interconnection, synergy, and learning amongst participants than traditional meeting formats. Our event design draws on innovative techniques from the fields of dialogue, organizational change, social networks, and sustainability. We can help your group use The World Cafe process, which combines small group conversations with large group collaboration to access the wisdom of the whole group and generate new ideas.

Our facilitation helps groups access the best ideas, gain clarity on goals and specific actions, learn and reflect on their previous experience, and have fun. Strategic questions are the heart of our approach, which are open questions that inspire movement, reflection, and lend themselves to situations where fresh thinking is needed. We offer tools to ensure that the follow up after the event captures the full benefits of the investment.

Whether you work within a business, government agency, foundation, or not-for-profit, we can help you achieve your organizations’ goals in a variety of meeting formats:

• Annual conferences and summits
• Networking meetings, seminars, and webinars
• Cross-sector dialogues
• Strategic planning and visioning workshops or retreats
• Innovation brainstorming sessions on sustainability/climate action strategies and plans
• Training and skill-building conferences for ‘change agents’
• Staff retreats

Our services can also help your event “walk the talk ‘’ and be a model of the green practices and social responsibility goals you are working towards – from delicious organic food to day lit healthy meeting space to the carbon footprint of participants’ travel.

Click here for case studies of some of our facilitation projects.

Or you can check out our blog posts on facilitation/event design and collaboration.