What I do
Consulting
Looking for breakthroughs in your work or team? Need to rekindle shared vision? Do you sense possibilities that are not being realized?
I facilitate transformative processes for individuals, companies, communities, and organizations. These include turning point conversations, perspective retooling, social innovation initiatives and community building projects.
I see myself as part of an emerging global network of “people artists” – practitioners who work in the creative medium of meetings and initiatives — designing, framing, and convening with purpose, passion and a commitment to truth.
Like Inuit carvers seeking to liberate the sculpture hidden in a lump of soapstone, I support people to listen for “what wants to come through” in the contexts where I work. My goal is always to serve the highest, to invite making the most of the time and possibilities, and to leave a system more self-aware and resilient than when I arrived.
See Past Projects for a sample of previous work. It is all custom designed – nothing off the shelf – and falls broadly into the categories of leadership development, community development, organizational change and systems change.
I work collaboratively, and bring an appreciative, asset-based perspective. I work with world cafe, open space, appreciative inquiry and dialogue. I also use inner work approaches — based in intuition, perception, intention and consciousness. For more on where I am coming from, please see How I Work, and Frameworks.
As another option:
If you have a systemic change strategic challenge or opportunity consider a SupraTank session, an offering I co-created with my four collaborators in EmergeCollab.
Kate Sutherland is a searcher for truths. Whether it is personal truths, community truths or organizational truths, she searches for the highest order of integrity to be found. In these search journeys, Kate uses both sides of her brain, pushing the thinking, the methods and the margins. Kate’s work is an example of the kind of integrity one expects of an original: finding the simple truths underlying complexity and confusion of personal, collective and community change.
Kate Sutherland organized Our Stories, Demonstrating Change through Storytelling, a conference for Vancouver Coastal Health’s SMART Fund. Kate had an amazing knack for bringing together artists, bureaucrats and community developers to orchestrate a conference that honoured the depth and insights of traditional Aboriginal, mainstream and contemporary storytelling. The two day event started on a high note, and just kept getting better. She created an environment of collective learning, validating storytelling as a way to express change that happens to an individual or community over time.
I believe that there is a renaissance unfolding around the world in understanding and leading systemic change, change at a scale commensurate with the deep problems we face. By its nature, such a renaissance is all but completely invisible – it is hard to imagine residents of 15th century Florence speaking in such terms of what was in their midst. Grasping for more tangible ways to express this awareness, I often point to the extraordinary array of relevant practical tools and processes that have emerged over the past few decades, starting with ways to cultivate a space for deeper conversation and building teams and groups who can work together on truly complex problems. I salute Kate Sutherland’s wonderful book for two reasons: for its wonderful synthesis of useful tools for just this and for offering one more piece of evidence that the renaissance is indeed unfolding, hidden in plain sight.