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Whether you're facilitating workshops, leading teams, or navigating complex decisions, here you'll find practical tools, frameworks, and lessons drawn from my real-world work with leadership teams and organizations.

I'm Jackie Colburn. Strategist, facilitator, human.
For nearly two decades, I've partnered with teams across industries to navigate complexity, unlock possibilities, and design a better way forward.

How to Make Progress Without Consensus: Guiding People Through Misalignment

One of the biggest leadership traps is believing that progress requires consensus. But the challenge isn't getting everyone to think alike. It's learning how to communicate, make decisions, and build momentum when they don't. Here are three mindsets that will help you approach this conundrum with more ease and success.

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The Secret to Building a Roadmap That Endures

A roadmap brings direction, helps align the team, and keeps everyone moving toward shared goals. But here's the thing: The strength of your roadmap is only as good as the foundation it's built on. Here are three foundational pillars you should address before building a roadmap, along with practical to-dos that will help you fortify your baseline.

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How to Align Your Team Before Year-End: 5 Leadership Moves to Make in October

Between holidays, vacations, and general year-end fatigue, the window between Thanksgiving and New Year’s can turn into a murky holding pattern. But it’s only October, which means there’s time to get ahead of this potential pitfall! Here are 5 leadership moves you can make right now to align your team before the end of the year.

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A workshop guide to define a more purposeful return-to-office protocol for your team

The return-to-office conversation has been top of mind for many as more and more companies call employees back to work in person. Rather than simply telling people to return to the office without any structure or intention, let’s instead think about the best way to accomplish the work to be done. Here’s a workshop format for team leaders and managers who want to handle this next chapter with intention.

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3 facilitation techniques for effective group decision making

Helping teams make decisions can be a complex process when there are various group dynamics, cultural quirks, and political intricacies at play. But it doesn't have to be. Let’s explore a few essential facilitation techniques that empower groups to harness their collective wisdom, navigate challenges, and arrive at well-informed decisions.

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Playing Field: My go-to method for defining success

When facilitating teams embarking upon strategic work, one of the most important alignment exercises you can cover is defining what success looks like. My go-to is the playing field method, where success is defined by the participants in terms of good, better and best. Those milestones can refer to interim goals that happen en route to a home run, or different versions of success that range from most realistic to most ambitious. Here’s how to do it.

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Decision Making & Team Alignment Jackie Colburn Decision Making & Team Alignment Jackie Colburn

Assets & Liabilities: My go-to method for taking inventory with teams

Assets and liabilities is an exercise I often facilitate with teams to take an inventory and drive a shared understanding of what’s working for and against the team. It’s super straightforward and something you can include in many endeavors, from strategic planning workshops and idea-generation sessions, to prototyping workshops.

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Decision Making & Team Alignment Jackie Colburn Decision Making & Team Alignment Jackie Colburn

How to move your team from dysfunction to action

The most fruitful teams know their purpose, what their responsibilities are, and have a sense of camaraderie with their colleagues. When these dimensions align, people perform better (which is good for both them and the company alike). But how do we get teams to get along? Cooperation doesn’t come at the snap of a finger — it’s cultivated with intention and is the precursor to everything else.

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The key to accelerating a project or idea when your team is stuck

When teams are stuck in the weeds it’s usually not because any one person failed to do their job, or because the group isn’t capable. It’s simply because the team doesn’t have the right tools to unlock the answers. This is why it’s so critical to bring in reinforcements when you’re having trouble accelerating a project or idea.

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