1.

Building Awareness and a Sense of Urgency

After an initial intake process to better understand your current state, needs, and goals, our partnership begins with a process to Build Awareness and a Sense of Urgency for equity and systems change. This includes developing a common language and frameworks that will allow your organization to engage in meaningful and productive conversations about equity issues both in the world and internally. This stage will also engage your team in a preliminary assessment of how equity and other key issues currently play out in their individual and collective work, current strengths that can be drawn upon to address these issues, and opportunities for learning and growth. This phase will help point us in directions for the on-going work.

2.

Building Trust, Relationships, and Readiness

As we develop a Sense of Awareness and Urgency, we will also attend to issues of relationship and trust within the organization. Discussing and addressing equity and organizational issues can be hard; it can be scary. Ensuring emotional and psychological safety is a critical step to individuals and organizations being ready to have open, honest, at times difficult, and productive conversations that lead to greater understanding, increased buy-in, strategic action, and deeper impact. That same level of trust is also vital to the collaboration necessary to address issues once they have been identified.

3.

Leadership Development

An external consultant can help organizations identify issues and develop the capacity to address them. But in order for change efforts to be successful, the organization must develop its internal capacity to sustain the equity and systems change work. This stage will focus on helping existing formal and informal leaders develop their equity lenses and key leadership and organizational change skills. It will also allow for new leaders to emerge. This stage of work can include workshops on specific issues, skill-building, and the personal work each of us needs to do in order to effectively work with and lead others.

4.

Planned Change

Developing a plan with goals, objectives, strategies, timelines, and responsibilities is a vital step in any organizational change initiative - and this stage will help our clients put together such a plan. But plans, in and of themselves, don’t produce change. According to Mckinsey & Company, “70% of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support.” Drawing upon William Bridges' Transitions Framework, this process helps organizations gain a deeper understanding of how human beings experience change and how to manage the human side of change efforts. It will also give organizational leaders (both formal and informal) concrete tools and well-tested strategies for navigating and helping others navigate the change process. Finally, it will culminate with the organization developing a Transition Plan that can be used in parallel with strategic plans and change plans in order to decrease resistance, increase buy-in, and facilitate successful change implementation.

5.

Implementation and Continuous Improvement

Authentic and lasting change doesn't come from a single workshop or program. Through on-going coaching and consultation, Equity Praxis Group can support your organization in mobilizing its human, intellectual, time, financial, and other resources in pursuit of implementing the changes identified in the prior phases of work. This stage is about recognizing that organizational and systems change work is an on-going process of continuous improvement. EPG will be available for meetings with individual team members, subgroups, or to the organization-as-a-whole. This could take the form of evaluation, listening sessions, serving as a sounding board, shared problem-solving, or providing training on specific issues or skills when a need is identified.