What We Do

Since 2004, Dendros Group has offered…

Strategic Planning & Facilitation

Participation is critical to the success of an innovative enterprise. Money, energy and time are wasted when planning processes do not engage the right stakeholders in the right ways. Furthermore, a deep cynicism or sense of helplessness can be the legacy of years of status quo thinking and behavior, thwarting countless attempts to do things differently or to implement a new plan.

Participation is not a magic bullet, but it is an often overlooked, key component of successful planning efforts. It takes forethought and skills to achieve the desired aims. Dendros designs participatory processes that pay attention to the context of the organization, the environment, the intended results, and the experience of participants. The outcomes of this approach are transformative: including increased buy-in, improved morale, better implementation, and results that matter for your customers. Dendros has years of experience in providing:

  • Strategic planning

  • Stakeholder engagement

  • Short and long term planning

  • Project retrospectives

  • Adaptive planning

  • Environmental scanning

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Business Strategy

Knowledge, desire and skills are required to lead change. And then whatever the change, it must be practiced and reinforced. Dendros offers comprehensive support to develop knowledge, desire, skills, and reinforcement in practice and implementation. 

 Dendros creates custom solutions designed to increase the capacity of its clients. Dendros recognizes the interconnected nature of social innovation and we offer connections, resources and ideas to help advance your organization’s goals and values. We bring our years of experience, our web of relationships and our expertise to the success of your project, whatever its size or complexity.

One of our primary beliefs is that experiential learning and dialogic reflection are some of the most powerful tools for people’s minds and hearts to continue opening and evolving. While there is a place for theory and cognitive exercises, the primary expansion of “heart and consciousness” are through lived experiences. 

In these times, everyone has a racialized experience. We believe that each person is “their own best curriculum,” and we create experiential processes that increase people’s capacity to reflect on their understanding and learn new ways of seeing and being. To that end Dendros uses the diverse body of work and practice of our team to customize approaches that bring people together for organizational and cultural change. In the area of racial equity and diversity work, our team’s experience on the ground in social movements from Standing Rock to South Africa, and in the lives of small and large organizations, brings a wealth of perspectives to the work that is required for sustained and durable change. 

We work from an appreciative stance. Too often shame and defensiveness drive conversations about race and racialised experience. When we encounter shame and defensiveness, they are possible doorways to greater healing and understanding as long as people have the will to explore the origins and dynamics of racialized experience and systems.  Our approach is most effective in environments where there is already a shared understanding of the need for change and a shared commitment to transforming business culture and practices. In cases of overt racism or other forms of discrimination, we recommend other tools and processes.

Employee Support

Affinity Resource Groups

Workplace Survey

Knowledge & Skills Development

IDI (Intercultural Development Inventory)

Building Racial Consciousness Workshops: Toward Shared Knowledge and Capacity

Webinars

1:1 & Group Coaching

Policy Leaders Training

Middle Zone Change Leadership for Supervisors

Systems Change Implementation

Facilitated Change Leadership Groups for Racial Equity

Pre/Post/Pulse Measurement

Internal Change Facilitation Teams

Equity & Strategy Development

Equity Strategy Systems Planning

Participatory Strategic Plan Implementation

Communication Access & Equity

Dendros understands equity and access as core business strategies. The team understands the power of creating participatory environments that welcome and learn from diverse perspectives. While thinking and acting within a systems-perspective, Dendros specializes in helping to build resilience during uncertain times.

Organizational Support: In addition to professional degrees, extensive training, and 70 years of professional interpreting experience, Dendros specializes in provision of interpreting services through various leadership roles and organizational structures. With over 60 years in leadership roles, our experience encompasses program development, community engagement, strategic planning for large systems change to address wicked problems, post-secondary education systems, mentoring and professional training programs, advocacy, legal and HR topics relating to employment, contracting, and day-to-day management as needed for any organization.

  • Program Development

  • Community Engagement

  • Employment

  • Contracting

  • Mentoring

  • Consulting

  • Professional Training

  • Policy Development & Implementation

Direct Services in American Sign Language/English Interpretation: Effective communication for persons who are Deaf, hard of hearing, or Deaf-Blind varies dependent on the individuals involved. Not only is the Deaf person’s language preference, signing style, and personal preference important, the setting and context for the interpreted event often requires specialized training and knowledge. Dendros provides skilled practitioners with strong ethical conduct.

Direct Services in American Sign Language/English Interpretation

  • Medical

  • Mental Health

  • Legal

  • Performance Arts

  • Government

  • Social Services

  • Post-Secondary Education

  • Board, Committee, Community, Stakeholder Groups

Culture & Business Strategy

The news today is rife with stories of businesses being significantly impacted by their workplace culture. We regularly hear stories about companies whose dysfunctional culture costs them significantly in earnings, legal costs, staff retention, and brand. From cross-cultural insensitivity to unintentionally exclusive planning processes, the pitfalls leaders must navigate are significant.

With any shift in business strategy, the workplace culture has to evolve to support the new strategy. As management guru Peter Drucker has said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” To remain relevant in our increasingly complex and diverse world requires maximizing an organization’s human capacity and abilities to work together towards business goals. No matter how well-developed your business strategy is, your enterprise’s culture has the power to make or break its real-world application.

Working with key members of your team, we support the emergence of a culture that serves your goals. We bring assessment tools, surveys, and trainings to catalyse the development of the culture you need.

Our offerings include:

  • Team building

  • Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI)

  • Intercultural Conflict Style (ICS)

  • Workplace climate surveys

  • Participatory culture change and business strategies

  • Participatory Team Development Plans

  • 360 Leadership Evaluation

  • Equity policy evaluation

  • Training opportunities

  • Communicating in multicultural environments

  • Building a workplace culture of participation and inclusion

  • Building a business-smart culture of work-life balance and well-being

  • Linking self-care and team innovation

  • Giving and receiving respectful feedback

Facilitation

Time spent in unproductive meetings, retreats and workshops eats away at your bottom line. In a two-hour meeting of ten professionals, the cost of professional facilitation is insignificant compared to the salary costs of an unproductive meeting. Often, it is difficult to facilitate and participate at the same time; therefore, an external, neutral facilitator can help. When you have critical decisions to make, or difficult conversations to have, we can support you along the way.

Our team is highly experienced at facilitating in a variety of settings, including:

  • Retreats and critical meetings

  • User-focused design meetings

  • Stakeholder engagement

  • Board meetings and retreats

  • Learning labs

Coaching & Leadership Development

Your team’s skills and practice are critical to your success. Everyone could benefit from seeing themselves from a different perspective. Our beliefs, our blind-spots, and our self-imposed limitations are all too often barriers to becoming the most effective and most happy we can be. Happy, high-performing teams helps people execute and get their work done, maximizing creativity.

As coaches, we work one-on-one and with smaller teams to help work through sticky issues, improve communication and functioning, and to build trust. We do this work while honoring and respecting your culture and your business aims. Everyone needs a sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose, and we help your people find these and deliver results.

We can also work with you to build professional development plans for your teams and your leaders, finding cost-effective ways to assess and build critical skills. We offer a variety of workshops for communicating effectively, building resilience, improving work-life balance, and more.

  • The art of effective communication

  • Designing effective alliances

  • Having difficult conversations

  • Intercultural communication

  • Team style work

  • Historic retrospectives

  • Team building, exploration

  • Problem solving

SagisSense™ Knowledge Transfer

When key leaders and experts leave an organization, they often take years of wisdom and intelligence with them. Organizations risk significant disruption and failure as they try to replace this knowledge.

In partnership with Albert Linderman, PhD of Sagis Corporation, Dendros uses a proprietary, research-based knowledge transfer process, SagisSense™, to preserve and transfer critical knowledge in leadership transitions. In addition to documenting and transferring knowledge, this efficient and cost effective process produces lower on-boarding costs, faster startup time, less disruption and improved performance.

Many knowledge discovery methods do not dig deep enough to reach the most valuable knowledge. Asking a long-time executive to “write down” what they know generally yields only confusion. Consequently, leaders of organizations and communities make decisions or create collaborations using limited information. Drawing from the communication sciences, most notably Brenda Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology, Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy, and Peter Senge’s Systems Thinking, Sagis created proprietary methods that systematically surfaces people’s deep knowledge and mental models.

When this knowledge is articulated, it leads to a number of helpful outcomes. Related to leadership transitions, it allows this knowledge to be represented and transferred, both to the new leader as well as within the organization. These “deep smarts”, accumulated over years of work and typically embedded in the subconscious, are often the most valuable business knowledge and of tremendous competitive advantage. Remarkable insights are surfaced and articulated with this approach.

Use of the SagisSense™ process is beneficial in:

  • Senior leadership transition

  • Key personnel transitions, particularly when losing a person with specific expertise and/or technical knowledge

  • Harvesting a founder’s wisdom and intelligence

  • Eliciting deeper intelligence from a group

  • Documenting insights in business strategy, program or policy design