5 W’s (and an H!)
While admittedly no investigative journalists have been knocking at my door, I do believe it's helpful for me to provide some insights into my business, C Pierce Consulting. Consequently, I'm using this blog to answer the 5Ws: Who am I, and who do I work with? What exactly do I do, where do I work, and when? How is this work actually completed? And, perhaps most importantly, why do I do it?
Read on to discover the answers to these questions:
Who are you, and who do you work with?
My name is Christine Pierce. I'm a former educator turned dialogue scholar and practitioner, with 15+ years in facilitation, teaching, and leadership development. After spending seven years overseas, I returned to my home state of Montana and began a Doctoral Program in Leadership Studies at Gonzaga, with an emphasis in dialogue and polarization. This is where my research and work now lie.
I work with educational institutions, international schools, nonprofit organizations, healthcare providers, and government and civic groups - basically anywhere people have to work together amid us-them tensions.
What do you do?
I run facilitated discussions and workshops by bringing groups who have been talking past each other into the same room. I use research-based facilitation methods and dialogue frameworks to slow conversations down so that people actually hear each other and can move forward from debate to dialogue.
Where do you facilitate?
While I'm based in Bozeman, Montana, United States, I offer services all across Montana, the US, and internationally. My background in international schools particularly supports my work within educational and multicultural contexts.
When can you provide services?
Several weeks is required in lead time prior to holding a facilitation. This allows for discovery calls, internal organizational research and assessment, and facilitation design.
How do you actually do this work?
I pull from a variety of research-based frameworks and methodologies, including Gracious Space, Intergroup Dialogue, appreciative inquiry, systems thinking, and the Zurich Approach to transdisciplinarity.
Why dialogue?
Because I believe democracy dies without it. At the heart of my work lie fervent beliefs in A: the good of people and, B: the necessity of engagement in public life for thriving democracies to be sustained. I believe that people are inherently good, and because of this, we need to keep talking and listening to each other, even when topics are heated.
At the risk of sounding too Pollyanna, I believe it's possible for us to have better conversations that lead to deeper understandings, stronger relationships, and more stable societies. It all starts with dialogue.
