Here are just a couple of recent success stories from participants in those workshops:

- One participant works with a local community arts organization. His organization brought in an expensive outside consultant to do some strategic planning and team-building work. After several months of working with them, he's decided the consultants were a complete failure -- definitely not the direct education approach (more like the old banking model). When he complained about it, his co-workers said, "Why don't you lead something?"
They set him up with only 1 hour for a staff meeting -- and squashed right after someone's birthday celebration that went late. Still, he led the Team Type activity after watching it at work in the "Strategy is Possible" workshop. It was a roaring success. People came out of it energized and excited, finally getting some of the internal dynamics that were holding them back -- and with some ideas how to move forward. They asked him: "Do you have more where that came from?" He said yes -- and he plans to lead more tools from the workshop. (Plus he's coaching others on how to use such tools!)

- Another who attended the Strategy is Possible workshop came out of it and led one of the vision tools in his group. The group was openly concerned about "taking time out of their meetings" to do this kind of work, but after going through the exercise people began to see how it helped them move forward. It didn't solve all their problems, but it did help the struggling group to take a solid step forward and build a base that they can grow from.

- Another who works for a homeless organization said she got concrete tools to get wisdom from the homeless folks she works with. She attended the Post-Election Strategy Workshop where we used the force field analysis tool (on the website as "Macro-Strategy Tug of War"). She used a variation of that analysis tool. Rather than relying only on a speaker's panel -- which reinforces the lessons of outside expertise -- she introduced new ways to elicit the wisdom of everyone involved to chart out new territory for the anti-poverty movement. And after using it, she reported that people were so in to it they didn't want to stop and referenced it as a highlight of the event!