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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.
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.
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.
How to make strategic planning stick: 3 tips for avoiding common pitfalls
How do you successfully shift from strategic planning into execution? In this article, I’ll cover the common blockers to a smooth transition and the solutions to the challenges that block execution so you can keep team momentum going long after the strategy has been set.
3 common reasons product teams get stuck (and how to get them unstuck)
Often, a team’s inability to work productively is due to a lack of focus, lack of support, and/or lack of alignment. In this article, you'll learn why your teams are probably getting stuck, along with a solution that I’ve seen work time and time again for getting them out of the weeds and back on track.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Take this quiz to get your business idea off the ground
Struggling to make progress, launch a new idea or hit business objectives? There’s usually a solution, and it often takes a workshop or planning session to lead you and your team to it. To get started, take this quiz to find out which workshop option is right for your business.