Online & On Land
Resources, Courses and Direct Engagements
What's offered is an experience, of noticing how it feels, of reading the room, of revealing things known but unspoken, of choosing good questions, of holding complex dynamics, of creating time and space for your insight and wisdom to see what skillful collaboration looks like, moment by moment.
Do you need this? It depends. When is basic knowledge, learning well established practices and models, not enough? When is pumping out a policy, a protocol, an agenda not going to cut it? Here are a few contexts. When people don't feel comfortable questioning things. When complex things are being approached as straightforward. When conflict is entrenched. When conditions or dynamics are having an impact but no one is talking about it.
These are the situations in which we really make a difference. How do we do it? We're coming from somatics, systems thinking, complexity, mindfulness, and a deep grounding in power and equity. These are ways we pay attention, in the moment, with you. It means we notice what the room is feeling along with what it's saying. It means we trust that what’s needed is already here, and the right conditions will bring it forth. We sense interconnection in ways that might be unexpected. This might mean we slow the pace, or that we try to name something that’s in the air. We hold the complexity long enough for something real to emerge, from your own insight.
What is it, in your work, that this kind of experience would really help? The requests we get most commonly are below. You might see yourself there, or you may have something different for us to dig into with you.
Why not start with some free resources?
Your meetings are trying to tell you something. This guide helps you read the signals, structural and relational, and build a meeting ecology that actually fits your culture.
This simple checklist and short video can help you to feel more emotionally prepared for a courageous conversation that is stretching your capacity as a leader.
Is your leadership model working for your culture? A reflection guide and self-assessment to help organizations read their own terrain and find the leadership their culture is already calling for.
Generative Conflict, now in multiple formats
The popular 8-week cohort training, now available in a convenient self-paced format.
Eight-week live leadership training for people who want to understand conflict as a tool for transformation and new possibilities.
The popular self-paced Generative Conflict training, now updated for staff and teams.
Find the support you've been thinking of, in the options below, or contact us to design custom for your needs.
What forms of leadership are truly aligned with your culture? Discover how leadership could look in your organization. Big Waves support can look like a workshop, coaching, a change project, or other custom engagements.
Does your group revisit decisions? It's easy to think a decision has been made, when in fact, there wasn't full buy-in. Discover how to design decision processes to seek and gain buy-in, and practice with our support. Protect your plan's progress!
Tangible strategies that leaders can use to expand their capacity to respond to interpersonal stress with dignity, curiosity, and respect.
Schedule this training to understand the phases of conflict, and how to intervene. Understand some of the costs of letting conflict escalate and the benefits of early intervention.
Learn how to effectively coach members of your team to further develop their skills and interests, and expand the potential of what your team can achieve together.
To innovate and adapt to complex situations, we have to be willing to experiment and fail. This requires that a team feels safe enough to take interpersonal risks. Learn basic principles for supporting equity-focused psychological safety on your team
The way that input has happened traditionally is not often what’s needed in today's organizational realities. Consider your current approach to input, learn and practices alternatives, and start a plan to bring these practices into your work.
Giving feedback is one of the most important elements of collaboration on a team. Learn a simple framework for giving clear and kind feedback that invites collaborative solutions and encourages people to learn and develop in their work.
Find out about learning organizations and identify ways you can support your workplace to integrate learning and growth as just a natural part of “how we do things here.”
This training helps you map the systems your work connects with, identify the parts that you can influence, and see how to collaborate with others who can impact other parts, so that you can effect larger scale change.
Move beyond busywork tracking. Distinguish signal from noise, outputs from outcomes, and build measurement systems that inform decisions, including individual progress gauges and organizational dashboards.
This training focuses on negotiation skills for meetings with individual partners such as government, funders, and other key contributors.
Is there a difficult or uncomfortable conversation you wish you didn’t have to have? You have the ability to create a better outcome, and this training helps you prepare to make it go better.
In this training, we explore a framework for integrating more nurturing and restorative ways of addressing power in our everyday lives and workplaces. The Reimagining Power Framework was created by Brook Thorndycraft and Louise Pitre over many years.
Escalating urgency, fuelled by everything from funding shifts to AI, is driving organizations' strategic decisions, and this won't end well. Discover how to spy where it's living in your organization, and embed strategic protection for your mission.
This webinar is for leaders, both established and emerging, who want to understand the complexities of power, and explore strategies to use their power for positive change.
Build team trust and reliability by setting clear, doable, values-aligned expectations. Give your team tools to reduce friction and create shared agreements that support smoother collaboration.
Learn how to use Big Waves’ Conflict Aperture tool to get the full picture of a workplace conflict, and an understanding of intervention tools that match the diagnosis. Developed over 10 years supporting organizations with workplace conflict.
We're also goofy, curious, surprising people, who, on a break, may share with you tales from a camping adventure with dogs, of an uncanny tarot spread, of the feeling of taking the mic at a large demonstration, or of bringing a record into a mix that brings everyone onto the floor.