“What does Collective Next do?” Since our early days, our response to this question has been: “We help people ‘come together, think better, and move forward.’” And in the simplest terms that is what we have always done (and still do). We utilize collaboration, creativity and the ‘art of facilitation’ to help our clients make meaningful change. However, as we have grown our team, our aspirations and ambitions have grown, and we are relentlessly seeking ways to deliver even more lasting value to our clients and communities. Through this journey, we repeatedly find ourselves revisiting fundamental questions around who we are, what we do, and how we do it.

Who We Are: Matt Saiia, our co-founder and CEO, began his journey with this work in art school; he saw an opportunity for a different and better way of engaging large groups of people in conversations about art and about themselves. Others in our company are poets, storytellers, actors, chefs, crafters, artisans, to name a few. Our unifying ethos is thus one of making, building, and creating. Such an ethos enhances our work as we create environments where our clients can embrace these qualities in themselves.

What We Do: We realized that our original tagline “come together, think better, move forward” was right, but it left out a vital element of our identity. We aren’t just about moving to the next step on the journey, we are about building the next step on the journey. We are about empowering our clients so that they are not at the mercy of a future that someone else designs. We empower our clients to create their own future; to Create What’s Next.

How We Do It: This is the question we get the most, and we have always had a good loooong answer. It goes something like “well, we do collaborative DESIGN work, which includes strategy workshops, client advisory boards, all hands meetings…but we also do ENGAGEMENT and STORYTELLING work through our creative team and LEARNING and DEVELOPMENT programs and GRAPHIC FACILITATION….” You get the idea. We have had a long list of capabilities, solutions and examples of infinite custom configurations, but no simple answer for “how do you do it?”

So, again, we took a step back and asked how do our solutions help our clients create what’s next?  We realized that, taken as a whole, our diverse and custom approaches to helping clients get unstuck are all a form of Creative Intervention.  A spark, an accelerant, a boost, a multiplier. And these Creative Interventions come in many sizes, serving a variety of objectives, but we direct them towards three primary goals: We Ignite Minds by catalyzing, creating, and inspiring; we Uncover Opportunities by mining, aligning and owning; and we Accelerate Impact by engaging, activating and empowering the teams we work with to build and realize what’s next —as quickly as possible.

We look forward to partnering with you on the next phase of our journey and yours.