Our Approach

Working with GBN is a different experience, whether you are engaged with us in consulting, training, or collaborative learning programs. In every project, we follow several fundamental principles that shape and distinguish what we do and how we do it.

Outside-In Thinking. We always encourage — and enable — our clients to think from the outside-in, that is, to begin by exploring the important dynamics and factors beyond their industry first, before thinking about how the industry — and the company itself — might evolve.

Diversity of Perspective. We seek to integrate as broad a range of perspectives as possible. This includes involving many different parts of the client organization in the discovery process and bringing in customers, suppliers, and other key stakeholders, if appropriate. Critically, we also incorporate active input from visionary, relevant thought leaders outside of the client organization. Often drawn from GBN's own multi-disciplinary network, these provocateurs help challenge conventional wisdom and inspire new learning and inights.

Multiple Futures. We do not predict the future; rather, we help identify the most important uncertainties in order to create multiple scenarios of how the world and the industry might unfold. Scenarios are a well established, tested, and powerful tool for making decisions, generating ideas, framing research, crafting visions, and developing new directions and initiatives.

Collaboration. We work in close partnership with our client's core team with the explicit objective of co-designing the engagement to meet their needs and then sharing relevant design and process skills. This helps to ensure that our work together provides on-going value and impact by continuing to enrich the strategic conversation long after the project has been completed.

Learning through Co-Creation. We do not begin with answers. Rather we are in the business of discovering the answers, together with our clients. Co-creation not only liberates the collective intelligence, but it also produces deep, enduring learning among successful adults, enabling them to make wiser decisions about the future and act with greater confidence in the present.

World-class Experience and Facilitation. Every GBN practitioner is highly skilled at designing and facilitating collaborative learning processes that produce breakthrough ideas, insights, alignment, and action. We incorporate a wide range of experiential elements to deepen our engagements, including provocative panels and experts, war gaming, graphic recording and visual tools, exercises and improvisation, and learning journeys to the leading edge of change.