Our Exploration Journey
Project Brief
Project Scope | Assessment of Needs | Tools & Frameworks | Range of Stakeholder
Our Process
Over the course of nearly four months, our exploration into this case has evolved significantly. Driven by our shared, genuine interest in the topic and a curiosity to explore broader implications, our initial focus has shifted to one more personal, broader, and systemic.
Ironically, our journey has led us to end up with more questions than when we began with. Yet, we've grown comfortable with this ambiguity. We've come to understand that the journey lies not in steering ourselves toward a definitive solution but, rather, in navigating the process and the path within. Embracing the richness inherent in the unknown and undefined, we now find excitement in dreaming about the future.
Our Project Framing
Our exploration has been focused on three main sub-areas regarding client-consultancy relationships (assessment of needs)
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While Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity (DEI) practices are often successfully implemented within a company, with many consultancies making strides in inclusive hiring and fostering an inclusive culture, there's a notable challenge in extending these practices beyond the company's ‘four walls’.
Our focus today stands around the question of how consultancies can amplify their outreach and influence, making themselves more accessible to their intended audience while staying true to their system of values.
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As we pursue this line of exploration, our focus centers on understanding how these companies define growth and what growth truly means to them.
Our aim is to grasp how consultancies can grow, or rather, ‘progress'—choosing to rename it to better align with our vision—towards becoming genuinely purpose-driven entities.
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We seek to uncover and co-design structures and partnerships that enable consultancies to meaningfully broaden their outreach.
We see clients as collaborative partners and seek to envision the nature of such partnerships.
Our goal is to reimagine both tangible and intangible structures within consultancies, decolonizing existing frameworks, ensuring they are poised to enact meaningful progress.
Workshop Tools Shaping Our End Project Goal
Utilizing Speculative Design alongside tools from co-facilitated workshops sculpted our envisioned 'dream' goal
Our Dreamed Future
We envisioned our dreamed future in one short statement, highlighting our goal to humanize progress for consultancies
Our Magic ‘ConSOULtancy’ Toolbox
We co-designed this artifact showing how under this envisioned future, both hard skills and human skills should be weighed equally
Making the Intangible Tangible
Using storyboarding helped us in designing the space of our dreamed future, re-imagining structures of consultancies that will enable more human connections delivering more meaningful, sustainable solutions
Stakeholders to our Humanizing Progress Community
Who Are They?
The New School Collaborations
Learning Lessons and Acknowledging Tensions
The New School Community
Current Students and Alumni with Experience in Consulting
External Engagements
Organizations that have had the opportunity to engage in partnerships with high-quality offerings corporations
Experts in consultancy firms outside of The New School’s Ecosystem
Why Are They Important?
Learning from the Collaborations and Partnerships from Different Labs and Centers
We believe TNS enages in meaningful collaborations and partnerships throughout its multiple labs and centers, and even as part of the curriculum.
Although they might not mirror exactly a concultancy - client relationship, the basis of what make those partnerships thrive were an interesting area of exploration
Sharing and learning from others who have been part or are part of the ecosystem of consultancies on how we can leverage on our agency to design the change from within
Although our outreach at this scope has been more limited than desired, our aim was to reach out or engage with ‘the other side of the coin,’ i.e. those organizations that are socially impactful yet oftentimes left to the margin of high-quality services companies
We also reached out to professionals in the field of consultancy that have no connection to TNS, looking for fresh perspectives on how partnerships are built in the real-life of the consultancy sector