Consultancy
We are committed to co-production and working together with you to design and deliver impactful changes through simple, sustainable solutions.
Developing, changing and innovating requires humble vulnerability. We need to be open to emphathetic understanding, open to being wrong, and open to messy collaboration. From the outset we must all be humbly vulnerable to the biases that influence our opinions and the possibility that our interpretations are incorrect.
For us, consultancy without context is meaningless; theory and lived experience all have equal value and this is reflected in the way we deliver our services
We can support you across all four phases or on a specific phase, for example facilitating co-design sessions with marginalised children during the discover phase or evaluating impact of a solution at the deliver phase.
Recent case studies
Building Belonging. For this project, we worked with the client to understand the specific needs of their workforce across multiple countries to understand common challenges. We next combined this with desktop research on best practice within their sector, as well as more broadly, to develop a draft framework. We then sought feedback from staff within the organisation to refine the framework and followed this iterative process until we had consensus and a final solution.
Hear my voice. We worked with the client to develop more inclusive interview schedules for understanding children and young people’s support needs. We recruited a co-production team of children and young people with diverse needs who worked with us to shape the direction of the project and the design of the materials that would be used in the interviews. The final solution enabled the client to record the views and opinions of a much wider and more diverse group of children than they had ever managed before.
We follow a design thinking approach, to join the dots and make connections and we work with our clients across four phases:
Together we discover needs, requirements and assets; this could involve desk-based research, data analysis, participatory research, mapping assets and community knowledge or exploring user journeys.
We define contextually specific goals in collaboration with relevant community groups.
We build on these definitions to develop a solution in partnership, drawing on the discovery phase as well as existing knowledge and understanding.
We deliver our solutions and evaluate their impact but this phase is not the end of the process. We embrace the messiness of real people and the real world and therefore expect to test and improve through feedback loops that will incorporate participatory methods to understand the lived experience of implementation.
Reading between the lines. This project involved working with one of the big five publishers on a series of books around diversity ensuring that the text was accessible and also authentic in its representation of different types of need, the tone of voice (TOV). We drew upon our network of diverse perspectives to ensure multiple viewpoints were included in its depiction of different types of need. This helped move the text from being ‘text book accurate’ to more representative of real life and therefore more engaging for their intended audience.
Wellbeing in the international school workplace. This project was commissioned to gain an understanding of well-being across all staff members in a school. A co-constructed questionnaire was developed based on well-being research with reference to the context and clients of this school. The collated findings were shared in a meeting with all staff. A collective road map to improving teacher well-being both individually and systemically was developed by staff members. A review is pending.
“the information that was provided was new and catalytic in the decision making process we had. This crafted our product development process and the business strategy we have for the product.”
“We must really commend your entire team and the organisation of that workshop. Everyone was so helpful and understanding. It was an absolute pleasure to be involved. If anything, that was the gold standard in being mindful of neurodivergent children”
“the support has had a lifetime impact - I will never revert from inclusive design after seeing the impact it is having”