In times of crisis, organizations must tap all their people assets by Malaika Cheney-Coker Together She came to us with the confidence of the uninitiated, expecting that we, her higher ups would have a plan. It was 2020, the year pandemonium broke loose—the pandemic, then the racial reckoning in the U.S. after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Companies, already scrambling to adjust to work-from-home mandates and financial upheaval, now had to formulate long-overdue

By Malaika Cheney-Coker In times of great upheaval or uncertainty, say pandemics or life-altering presidential elections, an inevitable cliche rears its head. It goes something like this – that we can create something new and desirable out of the muck. We’ll put emphasis here on the word “create” and its implication that, rather than grit our teeth and endure till the good times eventually roll in, we can play a role in parting the gloom. We can craft, feather by feather, the

By Abbie Cohen You know the person I’m talking about–the one with the mental map of who’s connected to whom and who you should talk to for what. Chances are, someone like this exists in your area of interest, whether work or play–or maybe you are that person. For me, that person was Hilary King, my former professor and Director of Special Projects at Community Farmers Markets and Associate Director of the Masters in Development Practice program at Emory University. Her exten

By Darnesha Tabor and Malaika Cheney-Coker Is Gen AI a worthy brainstorming partner? For months we’ve been exploring this question through the development and launch of our Gen AI-aided ideation workshop , designed to help teams incorporate Gen AI into their creative problem-solving processes. So, naturally, we were intrigued by this Harvard Business Review article, Don’t Let Gen AI Limit Your Team’s Creativity , on the same topic. Kian Gohar and his co-researcher, Jeremy Ut

By Malaika Cheney-Coker You know the exercise, the one that elicits some internal eyerolls – “If your team/division/organization were an animal, what kind of animal would it be?” Most everyone that has taken part to any meaningful degree in organizational life has undertaken this exercise. But beyond injecting some levity, or goofiness in some eyes, into otherwise staid conversations, what if this exercise and the metaphoric thinking it stands for, could have far more powerfu

By Jay Black Here’s a statistic that should take root in our brains: “Up to 56% of nonprofit followers take action, such as donating or volunteering, after seeing a compelling story from a nonprofit they follow on social media.” This is a fruit-bearing idea if we grasp it. So we must learn to tell stories. Stories about our vision, about how we have brought about change, stories that spark people to action. The best, most pithy way to get your stories in front of the people