Make sense of what is happening.
Bring relevant perspectives, evidence, experience, strengths, tensions, and emerging signals into view.
Confluence Network
Change is not a one-time event.
Organizations face a continuing stream of new technologies, leadership changes, shifting expectations, emerging opportunities, and unexpected disruptions.
The goal is not to predict every change. It is to become better at navigating change when it comes.
Start with the whole picture.
We use appreciative inquiry to understand what people value, what is already working, and the strengths the organization can build from. We also examine tensions, constraints, and what needs to change. The organization’s history, relationships, power, resources, and wider context shape both the questions we ask and the possibilities we explore.
Sensemaking, Coordinating, and Learning are complementary practices that inform one another throughout an engagement.
Get people and decisions moving together.
Clarify priorities, decision-making, ownership, dependencies, and resources so important work can move across boundaries.
Learn while you work.
Build reflection, feedback, and knowledge-sharing into the work so experience improves future decisions and practice.
What does it take to get better at change?
Through these practices, Confluence Network helps strengthen six organizational capacities that matter again and again:
Discover
Find the knowledge, perspectives, strengths, risks, and signals that matter.
Connect and Integrate
Bring together scattered knowledge and experience so the organization can see a fuller picture.
Design
Shape responses that fit the situation, the people involved, and the conditions around them.
Activate
Turn choices into coordinated action with clearer ownership, resources, and decision-making.
Sustain
Keep useful practices, relationships, and knowledge from disappearing when a project ends or people move on.
Adapt
Use feedback and changing conditions to adjust what the organization does next.
The model also asks whose knowledge counts, who can participate and influence decisions, how authority is distributed, what technology enables or gets in the way, and how the larger system shapes the work.
Assessment in development
We are developing the Confluence Capacity Assessment to help organizations see recurring strengths, uneven capacity, and differences in perspective. We are currently seeking a small number of higher education organizations and units interested in becoming early pilot partners.
Learn about the pilot opportunity →How we approach every engagement
We connect research, interpretation, action, and learning, adapting the method to the context. Interviews, surveys, document and data review, mapping, facilitated inquiry, and design sessions are selected around what your organization needs to understand, decide, change, or build. Findings become useful when people can interpret them together and use them to guide decisions and action.
Confluence brings research expertise, structure, facilitation, synthesis, and an outside perspective. Your organization brings the knowledge, context, authority, and relationships needed to interpret findings and act on them. Interpretation, decisions, action, and ownership remain with your organization.
See what an engagement can look like →Where is change testing your organization?
If the work is exposing gaps in shared understanding, decision-making, coordination, or learning, Confluence Network can help you see what is happening and decide where to begin.
Tell us what you are working through