Our Approach

What We Bring To The Table

High engagement capacity building, leadership development, strategic planning, coaching and change leadership in healthcare and higher education across Canada is our core work.  We are experienced designers and facilitators of strategy processes, committed educators and certified coaches.

Over the past 20 years, The Potential Group has designed and led more than 300 strategy initiatives in academic and community healthcare and closely related entities.  Over that time, we have evolved best practices related to appreciative inquiry and generative framing, complex adaptive systems, developmental evaluation and collaborative change leadership into a hybrid proprietary approach to planning that is organically suited to the needs of healthcare and academic settings in Canada.

Our approach to strategy and change is rooted in high engagement, which means that as we are supporting a system to develop a plan, we are building capacity among the people who are accountable for and instrumental in making that strategy happen.  One of our basic principles is that change in complex systems requires everyone to see their own work in the intended future, and to innovate from their own spheres.  Over the past ten years we have built a set of learning models, tools and coaching programs that support leaders to build their strength and capacity to lead socially accountable change across our systems.

Accessing Your Potential

Achieving exceptional results does not begin with having the right answers — it’s fueled by incisive and evocative questions. At The Potential Group, we work with our clients to rethink and reframe the challenges in front of them, which creates more “generative” pathways for action. When we locate the right questions to ask, thought processes and emotions/moods shift, new possibilities emerge and individuals and stakeholders align themselves behind common goals in powerful ways that create action and results.

Our Generative Approach

A word you hear us use a lot is “generative.” Generative simply means “work that creates more of what you want." We help clients engage in generative conversations, which create an environment where powerful possibilities are developed, relationships among all participants grow stronger, and people become better at adapting. This means that the change we create is sustainable and the people involved improve the ways they work together.

No matter what the presenting question is, all of our work involves change or learning of some kind. In complex environments, change is continual – so our work is about helping people become better at and more comfortable with noticing what’s changing around them and then adapting to it.

Using the principles of Appreciative Inquiry, we engage people across organizations, networks and systems in articulating their strengths and what they already have learned from experience and using that knowledge to create sustainable, inspiring future directions. From these explorations, new ideas and actions that feel most meaningful to the people they matter to most are created.

Coaching that connects you to purpose

Our health and higher education systems consist of human beings. Our strategy work is balanced by our diverse coaching and learning programs, which simultaneously help people build their capacity for leading in complex systems while getting the support they need to stay well and be at their best.

Cate and Danny are both certified as co-active coaches, and are deeply committed to working one on one on the “human side” of the workforce. Through coaching, our clients are able to fully articulate the values that motivate them, locate purpose, explore their use of self, and make choices about work that allows them to balance their desired impact and their own wellbeing and sense of meaning.