Whole-Scale® is an approach to organization and community change that maintains a systems focus regardless of the scale of the change needed.
The consultants of
DTA have successfully applied the Whole-Scale™ approach to
change in strategy development and deployment, work design,
mergers and acquisitions, culture change, and community
organizing in diverse settings around the world.
The robust
processes of the Whole-Scale™ approach are adaptable to any
organization and any situation. Services offered by the consultants of DTA include:
Leader Development and Coaching Developing great leaders is a key to organizational success. We help leaders at all levels gain competencies they need to be ready for the challenges that face them. We use a conceptual framework for individual and team leader development and coaching that includes self-assessment, action learning and peer-to-peer leadership challenges in dealing with real organizational issues, and building support systems to sustain learning.
Strategy Development and Deployment
Good strategic planning builds on good strategic thinking that engages the whole system in strategic action. DTA consultants facilitate organizational alignment by engaging organizational members or community stakeholders in the strategic planning process, designing a roadmap for strategic change, navigating the change process, and ensuring responsiveness to feedback throughout the change journey.
Strategic Thinking and Scenario Planning
To meet today’s increasingly complex strategic issues, organizations must be able to uncover and combine knowledge that is distributed across organizational levels and boundaries. DTA consultants help organizations or communities tap their collective wisdom to create a shared reality for strategic planning. We facilitate the engagement of the system to make decisions about the best strategic direction for the organization based on environmental scanning, capability assessment, and the probing of alternative scenarios.
Change Management Managing change has become a near constant in organizations with multiple initiatives competing for time and attention. The challenge is how to consider simultaneously every element of the organization’s strategic environment while maintaining the flexibility to respond to emergent issues along the way. Our Whole-Scale® approach allows clients to address the conflicting needs of key stakeholders while achieving desired business results.
Customized Training
DTA consultants provide our clients with two kinds of training support. We regularly design and help facilitate the rapid deployment of organizational training that needs to reach large numbers of people quickly. We design and facilitate customized workshops utilizing our highly participative processes of engagement in areas such as professional and skill development, human resource management, quality improvement, capacity building, and anti-racism initiatives. We transfer our methodology quickly to build internal capacity so that our clients are designing and leading these workshops. In addition to helping you accelerate your training, we can customize and deliver in-house workshops on the Whole-Scale® Change methodology.
Meeting Design and Facilitation
Effective meetings don’t just happen. Whether a small group of eight or a large-scale meeting of several hundred people, experienced DTA consultants can partner with you to achieve your meeting outcomes. Working with a planning team of participant representatives, we design meetings to ensure the right people have the right conversations at the right time. You provide the content; we design and facilitate a highly engaging, dynamic process that is driven by purpose and builds commitment to action.
Process and Organization Redesign How do you rapidly redesign work processes and organizational structures so they drive rather than hinder results? Our approach allows our clients to quickly identify possibilities and make holistic choices about redesigning both processes and structure to enhance performance. We do this by tapping the wisdom of microcosm teams from the organization in redesigning their own work processes, thereby ensuring commitment to successful implementation.
Team Development Team performance plays a key role in ensuring success as organizations and communities continuously redesign themselves to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Seasoned DTA consultants guide teams in developing and committing to a team charter that aligns members around their purpose, roles, boundaries, and deliverables. We work with members of work teams, task teams, and leadership teams to help them achieve the critical components necessary to maximize team synergy and achieve performance excellence.
Nonprofit Capacity Building
The primary focus of the nonprofit sector historically has been on delivering programs and services to people who need them. Capacity building is now receiving greater attention and financial support due to increased awareness of the benefits of investing in the people, systems, and infrastructure of the organizations themselves. DTA consultants help nonprofits optimize their impact and performance through organizational assessment, program evaluation, strategic planning and implementation, leadership and board development.
Collaboration and Strategic Alliances
DTA consultants can help multiple organizations partner to undertake complex mega projects, or to leverage their diverse strengths for a broader market share. We can work with your project team to incorporate our proven methods in writing proposals and developing processes for unifying the team and managing all components of the work. We have extensive experience helping technical organizations bring together a variety of partners for government multi-contractor projects.
Community Change Initiatives
DTA is skilled at engaging individuals, families and other key stakeholders in community-based initiatives that seek improved outcomes for themselves and their neighborhoods. Our process enables people to explore the issues that impact their lives, e.g., education, racism, health, and crime prevention. Shared understanding of these issues leads to more holistic strategies and solutions to address these challenges.
Culture Change
An organization’s culture is shaped and defined by its collective history—conscious and unconscious attitudes, values, customs, and behavioral norms. Differences in assumptions and beliefs can result in a less than optimal environment hindering a community or organization’s ability to realize its full potential. DTA helps to redefine culture in ways that enable people to understand their differences, leverage their diversity and create a climate of trust and inclusion.
Labor/Management Partnerships
DTA consultants have worked for years in organized environments to help leaders from union and management work to build working partnerships on practical issues in a way that does not interfere with the collective bargaining process. We support collaborative approaches to resolve conflicts and establish ways to help build trust and positive relationships. Our methods support the joint development and implementation of initiatives that management and union can live with and support.
Merger and Acquisition Integration
Business research shows that more than half of all mergers and acquisitions fail. When they do succeed, it is because there are integrated social and technical systems that support the new organizational mission. DTA’s approach helps people build one new organization and culture has proved effective in realizing the benefits of these combinations. We can help you with rapid integration of organizational cultures that results in a new and shared organizational identity focused on higher performance.
