Strategic Planning

Participation is critical to the success of an innovative enterprise. Money, energy and time are wasted when planning processes do not engage the right stakeholders in the right ways. Furthermore, a deep cynicism or sense of helplessness can be the legacy of years of status quo thinking and behavior, thwarting countless attempts to do things differently or to implement a new plan.

Participation is not a magic bullet, but it is an often overlooked, key component of successful planning efforts. It takes forethought and skills to achieve the desired aims. Dendros designs participatory processes that pay attention to the context of the organization, the environment, the intended results, and the experience of participants. The outcomes of this approach are transformative: including increased buy-in, improved morale, better implementation, and results that matter for your customers. Dendros has years of experience in providing:

Communication Access & Equity

Dendros understands equity and access as core business strategies. The team understands the power of creating participatory environments that welcome and learn from diverse perspectives. While thinking and acting within a systems-perspective, Dendros specializes in helping to build resilience during uncertain times.

Organizational Support: In addition to professional degrees, extensive training, and 70 years of professional interpreting experience, Dendros specializes in provision of interpreting services through various leadership roles and organizational structures. With over 60 years in leadership roles, our experience encompasses program development, community engagement, strategic planning for large systems change to address wicked problems, post-secondary education systems, mentoring and professional training programs, advocacy, legal and HR topics relating to employment, contracting, and day-to-day management as needed for any organization.

Direct Services in American Sign Language/English Interpretation: Effective communication for persons who are Deaf, hard of hearing, or Deaf-Blind varies dependent on the individuals involved. Not only is the Deaf person’s language preference, signing style, and personal preference important, the setting and context for the interpreted event often requires specialized training and knowledge. Dendros provides skilled practitioners with strong ethical conduct.

Search & Talent Development

Your business runs because of the quality of its people. We can help find and onboard positions from individual contributors to senior leaders. Unlike a traditional search firm, we work with our networks and yours and you are actively engaged along the way. We develop innovative review and screening processes…no more cover letter critiques and lifeless interviews!

The first 90 days are a critical time for a new employee. We can help with all aspects of onboarding, coaching them to quickly get up to speed and into your culture and operations. We will help you think through the onboarding process and develop an understanding of critical knowledge areas so you can more effectively onboard.

Once you have your talent in place, we help develop strategies and capacity for retention and further development. We work with a variety of tools such as 360 reviews, leadership assessments, and appreciative performance reviews to help you build your team and your enterprise’s capacity.

Culture & Business Strategy

The news today is rife with stories of businesses being significantly impacted by their workplace culture. We regularly hear stories about companies whose dysfunctional culture costs them significantly in earnings, legal costs, staff retention, and brand. From cross-cultural insensitivity to unintentionally exclusive planning processes, the pitfalls leaders must navigate are significant.

With any shift in business strategy, the workplace culture has to evolve to support the new strategy. As management guru Peter Drucker has said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” To remain relevant in our increasingly complex and diverse world requires maximizing an organization’s human capacity and abilities to work together towards business goals. No matter how well-developed your business strategy is, your enterprise’s culture has the power to make or break its real-world application.

Working with key members of your team, we support the emergence of a culture that serves your goals. We bring assessment tools, surveys, and trainings to catalyse the development of the culture you need.

Our offerings include:

Facilitation

Time spent in unproductive meetings, retreats and workshops eats away at your bottom line. In a two-hour meeting of ten professionals, the cost of professional facilitation is insignificant compared to the salary costs of an unproductive meeting. Often, it is difficult to facilitate and participate at the same time; therefore, an external, neutral facilitator can help. When you have critical decisions to make, or difficult conversations to have, we can support you along the way.

Our team is highly experienced at facilitating in a variety of settings, including:

Interim Leadership

From crisis to stability – effective leadership transitions build on strengths, minimize distractions, and prepare organizations to thrive. Challenging times require a steady path. Loss of leadership or the need to restructure can be traumatic. The chaos that accompanies change may be an organization’s undoing – or it can lead to a renaissance.

Transitions cause confusion even in the most stable of organizations. A renewed sense of mission, strong staff morale, engaged stakeholders and a clear partnership between the board and leadership are important outcomes of a successful transition. Dendros can provide:

Coaching & Leadership Development

Your team’s skills and practice are critical to your success. Everyone could benefit from seeing themselves from a different perspective. Our beliefs, our blind-spots, and our self-imposed limitations are all too often barriers to becoming the most effective and most happy we can be. Happy, high-performing teams helps people execute and get their work done, maximizing creativity.

As coaches, we work one-on-one and with smaller teams to help work through sticky issues, improve communication and functioning, and to build trust. We do this work while honoring and respecting your culture and your business aims. Everyone needs a sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose, and we help your people find these and deliver results.

We can also work with you to build professional development plans for your teams and your leaders, finding cost-effective ways to assess and build critical skills. We offer a variety of workshops for communicating effectively, building resilience, improving work-life balance, and more.

SagisSense™ Knowledge Transfer

When key leaders and experts leave an organization, they often take years of wisdom and intelligence with them. Organizations risk significant disruption and failure as they try to replace this knowledge.

In partnership with Albert Linderman, PhD of Sagis Corporation, Dendros uses a proprietary, research-based knowledge transfer process, SagisSense™, to preserve and transfer critical knowledge in leadership transitions. In addition to documenting and transferring knowledge, this efficient and cost effective process produces lower on-boarding costs, faster startup time, less disruption and improved performance.

Many knowledge discovery methods do not dig deep enough to reach the most valuable knowledge. Asking a long-time executive to “write down” what they know generally yields only confusion. Consequently, leaders of organizations and communities make decisions or create collaborations using limited information. Drawing from the communication sciences, most notably Brenda Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology, Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy, and Peter Senge’s Systems Thinking, Sagis created proprietary methods that systematically surfaces people’s deep knowledge and mental models.

When this knowledge is articulated, it leads to a number of helpful outcomes. Related to leadership transitions, it allows this knowledge to be represented and transferred, both to the new leader as well as within the organization. These “deep smarts”, accumulated over years of work and typically embedded in the subconscious, are often the most valuable business knowledge and of tremendous competitive advantage. Remarkable insights are surfaced and articulated with this approach.

Use of the SagisSense™ process is beneficial in:

• Senior leadership transition
• Key personnel transitions, particularly when losing a person with specific expertise and/or technical knowledge
• Harvesting a founder’s wisdom and intelligence
• Eliciting deeper intelligence from a group
• Documenting insights in business strategy, program or policy design