Many human development innovations work amazingly well—in small groups. But if you’re looking to maximize your impact, you need solutions that can scale. We’ve built projects and programs that serve tens of thousands of organizations and hundreds of millions of people worldwide. We understand how to bring your powerful, new solutions to everyone in your organization who needs them, efficiently and cost-effectively.

“In order to thrive, one must survive.” Getting the full ROI out of your human development investment takes time. Early, “quick wins” need to be followed by long periods where you continue to reap benefits from your initial investment. For this to happen, your project and its benefits need to be sustained over time. We understand sustainability deeply, and every engagement is built to ensure that your new capabilities keep serving you far into the future.

True capability building requires that your organization become self-sufficient, no longer needing our engagement. We’re committed to achieving that outcome. We build into every engagement Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) and Continuous Impact Improvement (CII) plans. These plans ensure that your organization’s ROI can continue and keep increasing long after we exit.

We work primarily in emerging and developing economies. Many of our engagements initially make use of outside (expatriate) experts and G7 collaboration partners, because local expertise is lacking. However, we believe as a matter of principle that every organization and every nation has the right and the duty to develop its own people according to its own values. Every engagement we deliver includes an indigenization plan in which we turn over all control and responsibility for the work to local citizen-employees, whom we develop. Those plans have clear, rapid deliverables, milestones, and exit criteria, ensuring that local citizens are doing as much of the work as possible as early as possible. 

What are the competencies that are required to prepare any person, in any society, for success in school, at work, and in life? After a decades-long review of the international literature on educational performance, we have identified five key, strategic domains or dimensions (the “D”s in fiveDlearning) of preparation for success in work and in life. Most learning programs address at most two of the five; ours address all five. In every engagement, we make sure that your people are fully prepared to succeed in every way that matters.  For more information, check out our blog.

A conceptual, strategic framework needs an operational implementation framework to make it real. Ours is called BASHH. BASHH makes sure that every project we design and deliver is carefully balanced in the five dimensions, aligned with our client’s mission and stakeholder needs, learner-centered, high-performance, and results-oriented. For more information, check out our blog.

For the best learner results, nothing is more powerful than experiential learning: learning by doing. Our innovative approach to experiential learning uses real-world issues faced by your organization to drive the results that your organization needs while also delivering quick wins and maximizing your ROI. We call these carefully crafted experiences “Practica.” For more information, check out our blog.

The greatest ROI comes from learners who keep learning. In every engagement, we work with your people to build a learning mentality based on a set of vital learning habits that ensure they will continue to increase your ROI long after our engagement completes. For more information, check out our blog.

A common mistake in human development is to have employees acquire new skills but then fail to build the organization’s capabilities to get the most ROI from those skills. As part of every engagement, we work with you to align your organization’s capabilities properly with the human development we’re delivering. We make recommendations and, if asked, we can redesign organizational structures, policies, procedures, practices, and/or staffing and training models to get the most out of your team’s new capabilities. We guide organizational realignment using our CriticalMASS implementation framework.  For more information, check out our blog.