Consulting Tools

In his Harvard Business Review article, The Big Lie of Strategic Planning, Roger L. Martin points out that in most approaches, far too much effort is focused on the planning and less on the strategy. i4cl approaches strategic planning as an ongoing exercise in reflection, evaluation, and perspective shifting that opens the group to new understanding and strategies.

To effectively lead and support the process, leadership and key stakeholders must believe that shared understandings of the past and potentials are essential foundations for developing strategies. They also understand that day-to-day decisions are where strategy is enacted and where it shapes the organization.

i4cl has licensed practitioners who can administer and interpret this tool for individuals and teams. The Neethling Brain Instruments (NBI™) is a suite of assessments developed by Dr. Kobus Neethling, a pioneering figure in the field of creativity. The NBI has been taken by almost one million people worldwide. Dr. Neethling collaborated with Dr. Paul Torrance at the University of Georgia to develop these psychology and neuroscience-based psychometric assessments. The NBI™ is a measure of your thinking preferences—the degree to which you prefer some tasks more than others. Your unique combination of thinking preferences has important implications for how you lead, communicate, relate to others, and work in teams as well as for the choices you make in your career. The NBI™ tools can enhance social and emotional intelligence.

The Team Learning Survey was developed at Columbia University as a diagnostic tool for measuring team learning. It measures a team’s experience of eight key elements. It embraces the complexity and rate of change organizations require to move to flatter, more flexible, and agile structures. As a tool, the survey is based on the belief that teams -- not individuals -- are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. Unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn.

A data-driven process for decision-making, Result-Based Accountability (RBA™) helps organizations move from talking about problems to taking action to solve them. This common-sense framework is easy to understand and implement. RBA starts with the organization's goals, and the difference it is trying to make, then works backward to identify the means. It has been proven highly effective for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations.

The Johari window is a psychological tool created by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham. It’s a useful tool for understanding and promoting: self-awareness, personal development, improved communications, interpersonal relationships, group dynamics, team development, and intergroup relationships, which can be applied in various situations and environments.

As a qualitative research method, ethnography seeks to describe and understand another culture from the point of view of a member of the culture. i4cl uses this approach to understand an organization from the inside. This usually involves conducting observations, interviewing employees, taking notes, and collecting relevant materials and documents.

Feedback is essential for the learning of individuals and organizations. Inquiry-based Feedback is a set of tools used in a process that is both generative and collaborative.

This model is unlike traditional models, in which feedback is based on the opinions and judgments of the giver. This approach is not "done to" but "done with" the recipient through inquiry and has as its foundation authentic curiosity.