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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.
Why Curious People Get Unstuck
What I learned about curiosity, adaptability, and moving through the hard things. Curiosity. It might just be the antidote you need right now, especially if you’re spinning and stuck.
Browse First: How Curiosity Unlocks Ideas You Can't Plan For
Browsing takes intention. And intentional time set aside. It means holding a question open longer than is comfortable and looking down paths you haven’t been down before.
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.
3 Conversations Every Leadership Team Should Have Before Their Next Strategic Planning Offsite
When we hear the word planning, we usually think of solutions, timelines, and next steps. But what about the pre-work? If you want to build a foundation for real change, I recommend having three important conversations at the leadership level before your full-team gathering. Learn about them here, and get access to a list of questions you can borrow for your own conversations.
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.
Transform teams and boost your EQ with this invisible leadership skill
What does “holding space” really mean with regard to leading? And what impact can you expect to see when you embody it? Here, I cover 3 practical ways you can improve your ability to hold space in your leadership role, with actionable “homework” assignments to help you build muscle memory around this skill.
Leading with curiosity: How questions, not answers, define great leaders
The best leaders are more focused on asking questions than leading with answers. In this article, I’ll share some researched-backed evidence for this mindset, along with practical, facilitator-approved advice for asking better questions and leading with inquiry.
5 superpowers every facilitator needs
Whether you’ve been facilitating for a while, or are just dipping your toe in, these 5 superpowers will help elevate your ability to successfully guide people through the winding road of decision making, ideation, and problem solving, all in the spirit of helping them do their best work.
Unlock your most important leadership superpower
Empowered teams consistently outperform their counterparts—and an empowered team is only possible with the right leadership behaviors. In this article, my goal is to help you unlock the superpower that will help you cultivate more empowered teams. This advice is rooted in my work as a facilitator and the observations I’ve made working with teams of all types and sizes, as well as their leaders.
How to cultivate workshop culture for better innovation
What does it take to stitch an innovation mindset into the very way teams operate? This article is about shifting our perspective on when to workshop and makes the case for cultivating a workshop practice within organizational culture as a necessary stepping stone to building a culture of innovation.
The secret to getting the most out of your small or fractional team
Small and fractional teams need to collaborate differently than their counterparts in order to be effective. In this article, I share the secret to setting your teams up to do their best work and build momentum, along with an exercise you can replicate with your own team to unify the group.
5 tips for leaders who want to get more out of team collaboration
If you’re a leader kicking off a new project with your team, or ideating on a new product your company could launch, it’s essential to be intentional about how you plan for and guide collaborative sessions to make them a success. Apply these five facilitation learnings to your work to ramp up the effectiveness of your collaborative sessions, and have a more powerful impact on the teams you lead.