Leadership and Innovation | Partnerships For New Opportunities | Strategic Conversations | Institutional Formation

When a contentious issue or a complex problem arises on campus, the first response is often to locate an outside expert for a speech or a workshop. Too often the knowledge and insight of the faculty and staff - and yes, students, too - are ignored.

Suitable solutions are much more likely when the entire campus community comes together in collective reflection and collaborative inquiry:

• Building a shared understanding out of a breadth of viewpoints
• Establishing a database of shared experience in real time
• Acquiring new competencies for conversations of consequence
• Addressing important similarities and differences creatively
• Fostering new relationships that recognize that everyone's work is critical to the institution's success

Any topic has the power to be divisive or to be unifying. The critical difference is in how questions are asked and how groups are convened. We work with you to engage faculty, staff, and students around topics that demand exploration, authentic communication, and shared understanding.

Strategic Conversations serve colleges seeking to reclaim the hallmark of academic communities where meaningful dialogue about critical issues is a matter of course.

Campuses have used strategic conversations for exploring:

• Student decision-making about academic and career choices
• Civic engagement and the curriculum
• Authenticity in academic work lives
• Principles of a learning-centered college
• Institutional identity and purpose