Services

We design and deliver conflict-management programmes for leaders, employees, educators, students, and teams. Programmes are designed around the context of the organisation and may include conflict diagnosis, communication, escalation, de-escalation, perspective-taking, negotiation, and resolution.

Within this work, we help people prepare for and conduct conversations in which the subject, relationship, or consequences make communication difficult:

• performance and feedback conversations
• disagreements between colleagues or teams
• conversations involving authority or hierarchy
• emotionally charged discussions
• conversations where trust has deteriorated
• conversations involving competing expectations, needs, or interests

Engagements can take the form of workshops, facilitated sessions, preparation for specific conversations, or programmes developed for a particular organisational context.

We facilitate difficult discussions and disagreements already under way between individuals, groups, or teams.

The first task is often to establish what the conflict is actually about. Our role is to help the parties establish greater clarity, understand the disagreement accurately, identify what can and cannot be resolved, and determine a constructive way forward.

We review environments in organisations, colleges, schools, and other institutions.

Depending on the engagement, this may include:

• assessment and appraisal practices
• incentives and rewards
• team, classroom, or programme structures
• the autonomy people are given
• feedback systems
• progression, promotion, and ranking
• organisational routines
• expectations placed on people at every level

The purpose is to identify where the design of the environment is reinforcing outcomes that differ from the institution’s stated goals, and what can be redesigned.

We work with leadership teams and organisations to improve how important decisions are made.

The focus is not simply on the final decision. We examine the process that produces it: how the problem is framed, what information enters the discussion, how alternatives are generated and tested, whose judgement is included, how disagreement is handled, and where hierarchy, incentives, uncertainty, or pressure may distort the process.

We can review an existing decision process or design one for a specific class of recurring or high-consequence decisions.

We design learning programmes, curricula, and learning systems for organisations, colleges, schools, and other institutions.

Not every engagement starts at design. We also investigate performance and capability gaps before training is commissioned, to establish what is causing the gap and whether learning is the right intervention at all. A performance problem may be caused by missing knowledge or skill. It may also come from poor processes, unclear responsibilities, inadequate tools, incentives, environmental constraints, or organisational conditions that training cannot solve.

Design can include:

• curriculum architecture and programme design
• learning pathways and course structures
• competency and capability frameworks
• assessment strategy
• instructional design
• scenario-based and experiential learning
• ILT and VILT programme design
• review and redesign of existing learning programmes

Our work begins with what learners need to be able to understand, judge, decide, or do at the end of the programme. Content, activities, assessment, and delivery are then designed around that outcome.

Not every problem arrives in the form of a predefined service.

Living Fabric Research also undertakes commissioned research and advisory work in areas that overlap with our research programme.

This may involve investigating a problem, reviewing existing evidence, conducting primary research, developing frameworks, studying a system or environment, or translating findings into recommendations, interventions, or design requirements.

If you have a defined requirement, tell us what you need.

If you have a problem but are not yet sure what the right intervention is, tell us what is happening.

We can discuss the requirement, determine whether it falls within our areas of work, and recommend an appropriate scope for the engagement.

Write to us: hello@livingfabric.io