Collaborate
Cultivating Spaces, Pathways, and Practices for Working Well with Complexity.
Whole Story supports people and organizations to move with integrity in complex conditions, where answers aren’t fully known in advance and progress depends on relationships, reflection, and adaptation. Together, we create spaces of trust where people can be heard, pathways for insight and ways that support adaptive movement, and shared practices that strengthen systems thinking, collective learning, and the ability to collaborate well in complexity.
We partner with organizations and networks who are working in environments where:
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The work is genuinely complex and multi-interest holder, and people are looking for approaches that support deeper connection, clarity, and collaboration.
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Trust, communication, and alignment matter deeply, and teams want to strengthen them across departments, sectors, and communities.
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Multiple ways of knowing need to be woven together, including community knowledge, lived experience, scientific evidence, professional expertise, and cultural perspectives.
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Past experiences and community relationships require care, and teams are committed to moving forward in ways that acknowledge history and build long-term trust.
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Different priorities, mandates, or timelines must co-exist, and people want support navigating these tensions without losing shared purpose.
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Urgency and pressure are part of the context, yet teams want to make thoughtful, ethical, and relational decisions, not reactive ones.
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Learning, reflection, and adaptive action are seen as essential to working well in complexity.
We most often work with social-sector organizations, municipalities, post-secondary institutions, public libraries, funders, health and environmental networks, and cross-sector coalitions — teams who want to move with complexity in a more relational, learning-oriented way.
Spaces:
Sense-making and Insight
Where collective clarity begins.
We design and facilitate multi-interest holder engagements, participatory research processes, and community-rooted dialogues that support collective sense-making in complex contexts. Designed with safety, dignity, and relational care, these spaces support teams and partners in building trust, repairing fragmentation, surfacing a diversity of knowledge, and moving from conversation to collaborative action. Some spaces are oriented toward learning and inquiry itself — holding dialogue around what it means to work in complex, adaptive systems, and how this understanding reshapes practice.
For example:
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Engagement processes that bring community, practitioners, and institutional leaders into dialogue
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Workshops that bridge perspectives across departments, disciplines, or generations
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​Learning dialogues and inquiry sessions on working in complexity and adaptive practice
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Community conversations about high-emotion topics such as land use, climate, or housing
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​Participatory research and values-mapping processes that surface diverse knowledge, priorities, and tensions
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Roundtables that convene cross-sector partners to explore emerging issues or collective responsibility
Pathways:
Strategy and Design
How groups work in complex, living systems and move forward together.
Pathways support groups to carry shared insight into action-in-practice within complex, adaptive contexts. They are living agreements about how work gets done — ethically, relationally, and in ways that can be sustained as conditions change. Rather than writing strategies on your behalf, Whole Story works with groups to design the conditions and processes that make action possible: shared meaning, relational accountability, distributed leadership, and the capacity to learn and adapt over time. Pathways help align how people decide, coordinate, and respond when outcomes can’t be fully predicted in advance.
For example:
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Co-created action plans grounded in shared responsibility rather than compliance
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​Prototype partnerships agreements or interdepartmental working models to reduce friction and build relational trust
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Cross-sector implementation pathways for climate adaptation, planning, or community wellbeing
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Monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems that function as adaptive learning loops rather than static reporting requirements
Practices
What sustains learning and change over time.
Complex challenges call for more than new plans they require new dispositions, shared literacies, and ways of working together. Practices help organizations embed collaboration, adaptive learning, and systems-based thinking into everyday work. Whole Story designs professional learning and practice-based experiences that strengthen the underlying capacities communities and institutions need to sit with complexity, navigate uncertainty, and act responsibly together. These practices support people to reflect on experience, learn from what emerges, and adjust how they work over time.
For example:
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Systems thinking and non-linear adaptive planning approaches
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Relational facilitation and process design grounded in care, respect and responsibility
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Reflective practice and collective learning processes embedded in ongoing work
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Approaches that respect and invite multiple ways of knowing